I love my life!  I love my two very, energetic busy children that make me simultaneously want to smile and pull my hair out at the same time! Is that possible?!   Those moments are priceless to me and I always am so grateful for their birthmoms in those moments.  Being a mother is HARD work, but the rewards come in hugs and kisses, those “I just love you mom!” from Josey or the “i heart Mom” written is Spencer’s hand.  Little gifts that make the hard times seem not so hard! 

Spencer has accomplished so much in the past two months.  We went skiing at Snowbird again, just the two of us and had a ball.  In fact he informed me that he wants a helmet, goggles and skiis for his Christmas present this year!  We got to go to Joe’s Valley for Easter weekend and he had so much fun coloring Easter eggs with the cousins and hunting for them on Easter morning.  He had his first gymnastics showcase–he is really good at it, and is starting the boys’ preteam group in a week!  He also graduated from Preschool yesterday!  I look at my little man and wonder how the almost 6 years has flown by and cry knowing that he is starting kindergarten in the fall and wondering if I have prepared him enough so that he will choose the right, love learning and be kind to everyone around him.  His exuberance for life makes me laugh on a daily basis!  He is so silly and loves his daddy so much.  Wow!

Josey.  My little angel girl!  She is a princess, a DIVA, sassy to the core and amazingly sweet!  She takes no guff from anyone, especially Spencer.  These past few months she has accomplished a lot!  She potty trained herself (with a little, and I mean a little, help from me).  She LOVES to dance.  Every day she asks if it is dance class today.  She gets her groove thing on whenever any good dancing music comes on.  She loves Cinderella and The Princess and the Frog and whenever she has a pretty dress on she has to dance.  My neighbor brought over clothes the other day and there was this beautiful pink frilly dress in the pile.  When she saw it she said, “That’s a beautiful dress Mom!”  We then put it on her, she did a twirl in it and then said to Chris, “Daddy, dance with me!”  They danced around the kitchen floor as she sang “La, la, laaaa.  La, la, laaaa.”  It was so sweet.  She also LOVES to sing.  We did a Kindermusik class this Spring and she has an uncanny ability to memorize songs.  She sings all day long.  The sweetest is when she sings with me at night while I sing “I Am a Child of God” or “I Love to See the Temple” for bedtime.  Her little voice is so pure and sweet and makes my heart rejoice!!

My hunk of burnin’ love of 13 years is incredible!  We celebrated our 13th anniversary in Seattle, Washington for 3 days.  It was a blast!  We stayed up late, slept in, ate amazing seafood, enjoyed all the sights and sounds the city had to offer, and had a chance to talk a lot and reconnect!  What a joy!  I am ever in awe of how hard of a worker Chris is for our family!  He is fabulous and amazing and I am so lucky he has put up with me!  Here is to another 13 crazy, busy, magical years!  By then Spencer will be graduating from High School and going on a mission!!  That’s crazy to think about!

My blog has taken a back seat for a while and I apologize to those of you that care about our day to day activities and want to see new pictures of the kids….well it is now relatively current.  Pictures are posted of the the goings on at the Powell house for the past two months.  Enjoy!

So exactly 15 hours after returning from our night at Snowbird and all day skiing, I repacked our clothes, food and snow gear and hit the road by myself with both of my children to go to Joe’s Valley for the long President’s Day weekend with Grandma & Grandpa Teeter and my sister and her kids. 3 hours later we pulled into the cabin and unloaded all of our stuff via a sled that my nephew, Austin, and I pulled by hand because the snowmobiles decided at that moment to be finicky! After truly exhausting myself from trudging through a foot of snow we had everything unloaded.

What a FUN weekend. We ate too much good food; played lots of games; watched movies; went sledding; went snowmobiling; cousins had a blast playing with each other; and enjoyed just being together and making memories! My sister’s and my parent’s cabins are at the top of this steep hill. They have runner sleds so we decided to check out the hill and see if it was any good for sledding (because they say that sometimes it is and sometimes it isn’t), well it was perfect! They kids, Josey included…which SHOCKED me!…raced down the hill and by the second time trudging back up it they shed their hats and coats because they were sweltering. My sister, Heather, handed me a runner sled and said, “Your turn!” I sat on that sled and took off and a multitude of childhood memories washed over me as I raced down that hill! You see, we lived on top of a very long, steep hill in NH where I spent my early childhood and every winter we would race down our hill on runner sleds! What memories! Needless to say I went many more times down the hill with and without my children and had a BLAST!!!

As long as the drive was and doing it by myself was not so fun, the end result was worth it!

We have a condo up at Midway, UT and decided to get away for a couple of days to spend time together as a family.  We went up Thursday after work and spent two nights there.  We went swimming, watched a movie and totally relaxed.  We had a lazy morning enjoy the fact that we had no schedule and nothing that we HAD to do.  We walked down the road to see the “Ice Castle” at the Zermott Resort, but we could only look from the gate since they didn’t open until after 3 pm.  The Lawsons came up Friday at lunch time.  We tried to go tubing at Soldier Hollow but with 40 degree weather (even though with the wind chill it felt like it was 20) the snow turned slushy and made it hard to slide down.  After 2 attempts we went to the lodge to get a certificate to come back another day.  On our way back to the condo we saw the Soldier Hollow train station with access to the frozen Deek Creek lake.  We were already dressed in our snow gear so we decided to go adventuring.  We crossed the train tracks and treked out into the almost prestine snow.  It was so peaceful and gave a beautiful view of Provo Canyon.  When we came back to the station there was a man there having his break and so we convinced him to take a picture of us laying on the train track.  Spencer wouldn’t do it..”NO WAY!” he said.  Five minutes after we climbed back up onto the train platform the Heber Creeper came rumbling around the corner and blew its whistled and scared the kids half to death!  We spent the afternoon at the pool and then had dinner, After dinner we walked down to the Ice Castle again which was now all lit up with lights.  It was really cool to see and we even had a chance to thank the artist for sculpting this really cool thing out of ice!  Amazing!  We went back and watched movies and played games until the wee hours of the night. (I was 3 for 3!  Poor Greg.)  So glad to have good friends to make memories with and that there are these beautiful places within a short drive from our house.  Thank goodness for rejuvenation!

Chris spoiled me and got me a new Nikon D-5000 DSLR camera…can’t wait to bust into that and start figuring out all that it can do!  Baby steps!  Spencer also got a “kid” digital camera from both sets of grandparents and used it ALL day long today!  He loves it and will hopefully leave my camera alone now.  (Crossing my fingers!)  Chris got a new golf bag along with golf lessons in the Spring and Josey got a little kitchen, that Mrs. Claus put together all my herself, and stuff to go in it and already loves it! 

TRADITIONS that I love:  making Gram’s cookies with my dad and sister before Christmas (marshmallow rolls, snowballs, skillet cookies, pepperkaukers, sugar cookies, birds’ nests, and whoopie pies), BINGO on Christmas EVE along with the yummy dinner, going to see a movie as a family on Christmas day (Princess and the Frog), playing games with my siblings on Christmas day (two new ones that are great: Ticket to Ride Europe and Killer Bunnies), a quarter in the bottom of our stockings, reading Santa Mouse on Christmas Eve.

I LOVE that we spend ALL month focusing on the birth of Jesus Christ.  His humble birth and all that surrounds it!  I love that Josey knows who baby Jesus is and that his mommy was Mary and his daddy was Joseph! I love the music that helps me feel the spirit and draw closer to my Heavenly Father!  MERRY CHRISTMAS all!

Halloween was fun again this year!  Josey was our inspiration for our costumes.  I found hers first and then Spencer decided he wanted to be a spider.  I was a bumblebee and Chris wounldn’t decide on a bug so I started naming bugs…cockroach (he wasn’t too keen on that one), grasshopper (he didn’t want to have a thorax), then I told him he should be a stink bug because he was being a stinker…we settled on a Bug Catcher!  He was super cute! 

Here are a bunch of activities that we did to count down to Halloween and then to celebrate it:  we made spiders out of pipecleaners, made popcorn pumpkin balls, carved pumpkins, made roasted pumpkin seeds, decorated sugar cookies and went to HeeHaws Halloween afternoon.  What a beautiful day Halloween turned out to be.  Trick or Treating was a treat and Josey had it all figured out after the third house!  Happy Halloween everyone!

We went on an adults only 5 hour ride up to the ridge and the wildflowers were all abloom and breathtaking!  We stayed up totally late talking and playing cards (had to teach my siblings how to play Canasta and Back Alley) while the kids played themselves ragged, hence the picture of Spencer totally DONE and crashed amidst the Legos.  It was great being with my family and just relaxing and having fun! 

So we spent the early morning hours going to the Freedom Fesitval Hot Air Balloons with my good friend, Racquel and her girls (Kira and Olivia) while the dads golfed.  They loved it.  It was a crisp cool morning the blue of the sky contrasting beautifully with the bright colors of the balloons.  Josey kept pointing and saying “bawoons mama, bawoons!”  We had a great bbq with our neighbors, and finished the day off with Fireworks are Racquel’s mom’s house.  It was a relaxing fun day!

Mema & Papa Powell came out and we all drove to Cali in our new minivan (it had to be long road tested right?!?) with no incident.  We stayed at our Condo in Anaheim and had 3 gloriously busy days at Disneyland.  It was slightly overcast which made standing in lines bearable for us and the kids.  We also were told about a website called RideMax which was worth the $15 bucks it cost to stand in the minimal amounts of lines possible, it is very cool!  Monday was great (magical to see Spencer and Josey’s, as well as Mema’s & Papa’s, reactions for their first ever visit).  Tuesday was extremely busy (Senior Day) so we left at noon and relaxed and then came back at 4 and met up with Kim Haddock and the kids in California Adventure then stayed for the fireworks!  Wednesday was heavenly (10 major rides accomplished in the first 2 hours of being at the park!) 

Spencer’s favorites: Buzz Lightyear (we went on this several times back to back), The Matterhorn, Big Thunder Mountain, and Star Tours.  When he got off Star Tours he said to me, “Mom did you see me take off and go into outer space?” I told him I thought I saw something take off and he turned to Chris and said, “She saw us go into space!  IT was awesome!”  Rides he didn’t like so much: Tower of Terror and Splash Mountain…when asked if he wanted to go on these again he would quickly say no! 

Josey loved the rides!  She kept pointing to the rides and would say “RIDES!” over and over again.  She loved the “neigh neighs” of the Merry-go-round and Dumbo.  She went on the Tea Cups with Mema and even had to spin the cups much to Mema’s dismay.  She loved the Tiki Room birds and flowers and anything Pooh Bear!

We did a character breakfast on Tuesday morning with Minnie Mouse and friends and we got to be up close and personal with about 10 of the characters.  Spencer got their signatures which he thought was cool.  Josey was doing alright with them until Tigger touch her cheek with his nose.  After that she would scoot as far back onto Chris’ lap whenever they would come to our table! Josey loved Goofy the best and didn’t want to leave him in Toon Town.

My most magical moment was the fireworks Tuesday night.  As we were standing underneath the fireworks and the music is playing a song about “believing” and a real life Tinkerbell is flying through the air I watch my kids standing around me and throught back to six year ago when Chris and I were standing in Disneyland childless and wishing and hoping that someday we could bring our children here and that moment it had all come full circle!  I had a good cry through most of the fireworks so grateful for my little family and my blessings!

One of Chris’ favorite moments was taking his mom and dad on the Indiana Jones ride.  His mom is claustrophobic, and almost didn’t make it on the ride, but talked herself into it.  Chris said that when the boulder came crashing down at the end his mom almost had a heart attack!  Then she couldn’t get her buckle off fast enough and shot out of the car like a bolt and Chris and his dad couldn’t even catch up to her in the tunnel to get out.  Chris kept telling her that she needed to do one thing every day that scared her…she said that that was more than she needed! 

Legoland was fun…although the lines were very long to ride the tinyroller coasters, but it was nice to have a more relaxing less hurried day than doing things in Disneyland.  Spencer loved riding the cars, helicopters and airplanes, and especially loved The Dragon roller coaster.  He and Chris went on it back to back!  I was amazed at all the things that they built full sized out of Lego’s!  I loved the city skylines that they had in miniature with real working subways, boats and lights.  It brought me back to my childhood and playing Lego’s with my brothers!

Our last day was in Sea World.  It was overcast and mist/drizzled rain for most of the morning, but was so amazing for the kids.  They LOVED all the different animals, and really loved the shows!  Again we had a more relaxing day here.  Spencer had to do the Shark exhibit twice.  We couldn’t leave until we saw the penguins, the polar bears, and the turtles!  I loved being able to touch the bat rays with Spencer.  He wasn’t too sure at first, but really thought it was cool after a little warming up.  He was bummed he couldn’t ride any of the rides there (1 in too short), but was super excited when he got to build his own Shamu stuffed animal as his souvenir. 

I am so glad we decided to do this vacation this year!  Our kids were at a really great age for the the magical parts of it.  Everything to them was real and so amazing!  It was so fun to have Mema and Papa Powell with us and for them to experience Disney for the first time as well!  We walked everybodies’ legs off and tired everyone out, but it was a great way to do it!  Can’t wait to go again!