Lots of lovin' epistle 1

After a lot of technical difficulties I am thrilled to say we have bought a new and super speedy computer which only means that I can once again retreat to my corner and work on blogging, scrapbooking, e-mailing, facebooking, journaling, Internet surfing and ignore all the duties of motherhood and family life. Seriously, I could keep myself busy all day long doing worthwhile things on the computer... but like I told Jeff now that we have a new computer that is way fast I can accomplish so much more, so really it's a blessing and he should be grateful. I'm not really obsessed with all those things it just cracks me up how many things there are to sign up for on the computer these days as a means of "keeping in touch."

Anyhoo... I will proceed to write up our Christmas/New Year's experiences in Utah and hopefully get all caught up. Just now as I am going through the pictures we saved on a disk from my mom's camera, Marianne's camera and my camera we are kind of picture-taker-aholics. We had 600 pictures between the 3 of us from 2 weeks. Holy Hannah! So, in my attempt to be brief and cut out lots of unnecessary pictures I still will probably drone on with an excess amount of photos. Bear with me...

We had the pleasure of seeing lots of cousins and friends this visit. Because of it being the holidays lots of people were in town and available.
The day after Christmas the Johnsons family came over. Jeremy and Erin (who I happened to have taught in Young Women's in Naperville, IL) live in IL still and we don't get to see them too often. It was fun to see them and their 2 kids. Heather and her family, Rachel and Tyce and Taylor were there.

Emmy and Ellie had so much fun together.
Jeremy, Erin, Zach and Ava

Richard trying out some nasty thing that separates the egg white from the yoke. The gross thing is that it's coming out from the nose.
We also spent the evening with Uncle Wes, Aunt Lois and their kids. The in-law cousins didn't want to feel left out getting their attention.

Here's all the cousins together. We couldn't remember the last time we all were together...

Emmy best friends with Aubrey.
We spent a Sunday at Todd and Jolynn Skousens house with Ami and Tim Cragun. They are the greatest friends! We all lived in Naperville together... now with the Skousens in Draper and the Craguns have moved all over the planet but currently in San Antonio. This was a super special and super fun visit! We had the secret recipe "Jule's Spaghetti" and played a new game Werewolf (we played that for 5 hours.) and ate and laughed together.

Here's all the little girls. Our Adyson got her name from the Cragun's Addison who's sitting next to Emmy.

Maryn, Kenley and Maddie are all the same age. They had so much fun together that they convince the parents to let them have a sleep over. I wish I would have gotten pictures of the boys. I was Craig and Kade's first piano teacher. Oh, they are so old now and such good piano players too. We actually got our name for Kaden from Kade. Awesome kids!

Here we all are trying to capture the joy. We cried at seeing each other because it had been so long and we had missed each other so much... only hoping that it wouldn't be so long until our next party.

The guys had so many inside jokes... some appropriate and some not so much. They were giggly and silly the whole night.

We just couldn't stop taking pictures of ourselves.

We met the next day and had lunch together... we had to get some more pictures in.

A long standing tradition we have had on New Year's Day is to get together with the Andersons. They have been awesome friends since I was 13 years old. We met in Canada when our Dad's were speaking for the Church's Know Your Religion. We played together when our dad's were speaking and we traveled around the whole 2 weeks together in Canada. The funny thing is is Scott was always Marty and my favorite youth speaker at BYU Education Week so we couldn't even believe it when we were traveling around with him. He still is a popular youth speaker for the church.

Scott and Angelle with Mom and Dad

Jana and I have been best friends ever since our trip. We dreamed of our weddings and families and futures together. We've had so many adventures together. Here we are with our youngests. Jana has 6 kiddos.

We even both married Jeffs.

more to come...