I have no business blogging...

Had to pop in to wish you all a very Merry Christmas! I honestly have no time to be blogging, but guilt has set in, so I thought I better post. Everything is great here...just clearly not enough hours in the day. I've even cut back on sleep and I still can't get it all done. Crazy!We had our ward Christmas party on Saturday night. Mark is high counselor over the 7th ward and they asked him to be there Santa. Actually our ward asked him too, but their party was the same night and he already told them yes. We did skip out of our ward party early to go help him get suited up and so the boys could make fun of him, as teenage+ boys like to do. I know you probobably noticed a blonde haired Cole in the picture. While I was in the shower, Chad was highlighting his hair and Cole decided to use the rest of the bottle on his whole head. I hate it. He loves it...of course!I even got to sit on Santa's lap. He said I could have anything I want. Isn't that nice?! :o)Yesterday I baked 21 dozen pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and cutely packaged them up with some little candy canes on top. It's a tradition that where ever we live we deliver treats to all the houses on our street. We know loads of people in Maricopa but we still don't know hardly anyone on our street. Hopefully our neighbors will become a little more social. My not so little elves getting ready to go deliver.
Our good friend Jimmy had a birthday and they happen to be moving this weekend, so I got him a gift. He works at the dairy and knows more about cows than anyone I know. When he moves to snowflake he is going to teach agriculture at the high school, so I thought the cute farm animal stack was a perfect gift. The quote on it says The sky is the limit when your heart is in it. I also liked the letter blocks and thought his sweet wife would like their last name spelled out. (and she did) We had their family and our other home teachers family over for dinner on Sunday night. It was so much fun visiting with all of them. We are sure going to miss the Crosby's.

I've really gotta run now. Mark just called wondering why I'm still in Maricopa and not in town getting my errands done before the whole family come over here for the party tonight....So much to do...so little time!

insomnia...

I finally got my wallet sized pictures in the mail for my Christmas cards! Yippee!

What??? You ask if I've even got my cards done yet? ummmm....well no!

I've been running ragged for far too many days in a row and sheer exhaustion got the best of me. At least everything I've been up to has been way fun and totally worth it. I haven't even been home long enough to do any of my chores. Do you think that ANY of the boys have done their chores either? and big NO on that one too! The house is starting to suffer from neglect, so someone had better step up the the plate around here.

Got cramps...took midol...midol has caffeine...who knew?...not me! Should read the labels first.

Wide awake emailing, blogging, printing pictures, writing a letter from Santa to my nephews, looking for girls camp craft ideas, etc. Everything but sleeping at 1:42 a.m and we have an 8:00 a.m meeting at the school. I'm a lucky girl, I tell ya! Off to bed to stare into darkness in hopes I fall asleep soon.

For the love of family...pictures...

John and Mark...so darn cute, but far too young to even fathom cooperation for pictures. They were running all over the place and rolling/falling down hills. How could they possible sit still when they were green hills to conquer?! Let me just say, that the big boys were NO BETTER!! I'm not exaggerating when I say that they were goofing off in 97% of the pictures. I'll only share a few of them.
Mark

John-the tree hugger

Brittany

Brek

Cody Chad
HunterCole
Kyle-yes, this is what I got out of Kyle.

and this...

and this...and this...until I got this! The apple sure doesn't fall far from the tree, huh?!

Jolene (me) and Mark

Didn't you know nice boys fondle each other? Sick sick children. :o)

In this pose Kyle would move to a different position for every shot and the other boys would pull faces. Cole is doing his Doctor Evil pose. This is one of the best. We're also not centered, but beggars can't be choosers.

This one the babies actually smiled. I love this picture! This is the one I chose for our Christmas cards. I did print some goofy ones for the wall too, only because that is mostly what I got, and lets face it...that's who they are.

Cookie exchange...

Saturday morning I hosted a cookie exchange at my house. We had 2 dozen girls with 6 dozen cookies each adding up to a whopping 144 dozen cookies! So many tasty treats to be shared. Many girls were up baking till the wee hours of the night. All for the love of cookies and friendship. :o) Mark and I cooked everyone a great big breakfast. We all got to visit while we ate, then everyone got to go around the table to get a sampling of everyone's yummy cookies to take home. I ate my fair share of them later that day and now I'm really feeling the need to go to aerobics. I missed all last week because of this darn cold. It will feel like starting over. I will be made to suffer.

I want to thank all my sweet and beautiful friends and sisters for coming over to share some laughter, friendship, food, Christmas spirit and cookies! I sure do love and appreciate you girls!
Next post will be a "peek" at our family Christmas card pictures that we took today. I don't really think we got even one good one, but we did get plenty of goofy boy pictures. You know...standard George boys type photos.

Thanksgiving stuff...

This year we had Thanksgiving up in Payson at Mark's brother Rodney and his wife Cam's house. They have a beautiful home with a gorgeous view. It rained pretty much all day. I loved every minute of it.
I think we had 32 people there total. This is only some of us. Even with that many people we still had loads of leftovers. I made 5 very yummy pies and other people brought pies, cakes and mini cheesecakes, so there was no shortage of desserts to eat after the feast. Why do I always forget to wear stretchy pants on Thanksgiving? Plus we ate Thanksgiving with our friends the Koozer's on Wednesday night. I'm totally afraid to get on the scale, so I'm choosing not to until I have at least a week of aerobics under my belt. By the way, the Koozer's oldest son, Charl got his mission call. He's going to Rome, Italy!!! How neat to get to learn Italian and share the gospel in Italy for 2 years. It will be an amazing experience for him. We are so excited for him!Me and my hubbyOne of the funniest moments was after we had been there for over 2 1/2 hours, Cole says out loud..."Hey mom, there are 2 Cam's!" LOL! We all laughed so hard. I had no idea he didn't know she had a twin sister. And how did he manage to go that long without seeing them together. It was just too funny!
We were suppose to do the turkey trot on Thanksgiving morning, but I haven't been sleeping so I was too tired to get up and do that and still be able to function the rest of the day. I was really looking forward to it. Me, Mark, Chad and Hunter ventured out for some black Friday shopping after a very hearty breakfast at Bill Johnson's to keep us going all day. I got my Christmas tree up and decorated, but none of the other decorations yet.
We had family home evening last night about free agency and choice and accountability and also discussed household chores and responsibilities. Everyone was assigned new chores, so I'll be less stressed trying to do too much around here by myself. We even assigned dish nights, and since there are 7 people living here I only have to do dishes on Monday's. I'm so dang excited!
So how was your Thanksgiving? Are you busy getting ready for Christmas? I finally gave in to the Christmas music. I refuse to listen to it until after Thanksgiving.

I woke up with a cold this morning. I feel ick! I ran up to the store to get some zicam in hopes to knock it down speedy quick. There's NO time to get sick.

I have a strong testimony of tithing. We pay our tithing faithfully. I write a check every Sunday whether there is money in the account or not. I have faith that by the time the check clears, I will have money in the bank to cover it and I always do. Not paying it just isn't an option in my head. It's been a tough year financially for us due to some properties that choose not to pay us the MANY thousands of dollars they owe us. Plus we were suppose to get a $3,000 tax refund in October, but the IRS decided that instead, we owe them like $5,000. How could that be??? So we've been fighting them on it because we knew that we were honest in our dealings with them. So, today in the mail I get a check from them for over $4,000!!! How cool is that?! and who EVER win arguments with the IRS? I actually cried as I sat there at the mailbox because I knew we were going to be able to get all of our bills paid. I know you receive blessings when you do things that require faith, but I surely didn't expect this. I am deeply grateful to my Heavenly Father for watching over my family and blessing us for being faithful when it was so hard to do. Oh happy day!

FYI...when a boy leaves a pen in his pocket and runs it through the laundry, it tends to explode in the dryer resulting in ink stained clothes and ink stained dryer drum. Magic eraser with nail polish remover does a semi-okay job, but the fumes may very well kill ya.