Girls Day

My sis-in-law had a baby girl in January who they named Britnee. They also have a little girl named Kinsie. We hadn't had a chance to go up and see them since they had Britnee, but she came down here this week and we got all the girls together. It was pretty funny to have all of us hanging out, there is all of the sudden an awful lot of girls in our family. It will be so fun for them as they are growing up to have cousins so close in age. I can't wait for them to get bigger so they can play together.

Addi's First Day Home

Addison Emma Merrill

Born March 1st
7 lbs 6 oz, 20 in long

Family Night at the Dell

My parents reserved this cabin place up AF Canyon and invited all my siblings up for sledding and dinner for a family night. It was a lot of fun. It's perfect to have the sled hills so close to a warm cabin with little kids. Then the kids all played games. They made up their own version of twister where they had to put their ear or their knee, etc instead of just their hand or foot. It was so funny to watch them, especially when they had to put their ear down.

Black Eye

Haylie has this adorable little friend who is almost like a brother because they see each other so much. So their relationship is very love/hate just like siblings. He loves to push her buttons. But the other night we were all hanging out and all the sudden I saw Sander look at Haylie and then swing the toy he had right at her. It was one of those slow motion moments where you know it's going to end badly but being as 8 months pregnant at the time I couldn't move fast enough to intervene. Needless to say the toy smacked Haylie right in the eye. This picture just doesn't do the black eye justice. The toy sliced her so her eye bled for quite a while, I have to say it's one of the worst black eyes I'd ever seen.

Baby Names?????

I don't know why we have such a hard time naming our kids. One of my favorite shows ever is the Friends episode where Ross and Rachel are trying to come up with a name for their baby. They decide they can veto names they don't like and finally after a whole episode of "veto" Phoebe says "is it just me or is Veto starting to sound like a good name" I feel like that is us with our kids. So Kalun and I will occasionally throw out a name and most of the time the other will say "veto". Well all the kids got really mad the other day because they thought we had decided to name our kid veto and they thought that was a horrible name. So then we had to explain what veto meant. Now not only do Kalun and I veto each other the kids veto us. So if anyone has any name ideas they want to throw out to us please do....

Other Updates...

We had a lot of fun on New Year's Eve. We invited a few friends over with their kids. I think we had 12 kids total and all but 2 stayed up until midnight with us. We played games all night and had a lot of fun. Then this last weekend my brother was able to bless their daughter. Kalun had a free hotel stay saved up from all of his traveling so we decided to make a mini vacation out of it. We left Saturday and used a gift card to go out to eat with the kids then we went to the hotel. The kids had a blast jumping on the beds. Then we went down to the pool. It was an indoor pool but the water was not very warm. The kids still had a blast though. Then we went to the blessing the next morning and spent a good chunk of the day with family. It was a fun mini vacation and a good way to end the break.

Snow Days

We spent a couple days playing in the snow over the break. One of the days we went sledding, and my brother took the kids on little rides on the snowmobile. Kalun was able to go on a snowmobile adventure with my dad and two of my brothers, he had a lot of fun. I kept telling him he was lucky I am pregnant or I would have gone and made him stay home.

Christmas 2009

We had a lot of fun this Christmas. It was so nice to have our family all back together. Having Kyli back in our home is an amazing blessing that we are very grateful for. We spent Christmas eve gonig to see the Chipmunk Squeakquel which we all loved! Then we went to my mom's for the annual huge dinner and nativity with all my mom's side of the family. The kids all got to open their new PJ's that night. Christmas morning was lot's of fun. The kids all slept in. We thought that maybe Kyli would wake up early, but no one did. I had been waking up off and on all night I was so excited, I started to get so antsy when the kids weren't getting up. Finally at 8 we went and woke the kids up because we had invited a family in our ward over for Christmas breakfast at 9:30 and I wanted time to open all the presents. Needless to say we barely got them open and had started to clean up a little when the other family arrived. So breakfast was a little late and crazy, but it was still fun. We tried really hard this season to open our home to families that we prayed about and felt needed a little extra cheer this season. We ended up having quite a few different people over during the break. It was really fun to get to know these families better. I felt very very blessed this holiday season!!!

Santa

My good friend Vennessa just happens to know Santa, so we were able to have him come to her house for just our two families. It was really cute, Haylie wasn't quite sure about him, I had to kneel right by her the whole time and she always kept her hand on me. Santa grilled Kyli, it was pretty funny. He told her to study hard and to make sure she did her chores without being asked. Tate has really started to get into it this year so that's been really fun. He got to meet Mrs. Claus even at his speech class and thought that was cool. Santa even made Kalun and I sit on his lap, I thought we were going to break poor Santa.