Christmas 2010

Every year the Johnson family gets together on Christmas Eve. Grandpa Johnson reads the nativity story out of the Bible while the kids and whoever else wants to act it out. The kids always wear old robes and old dance costumes that belonged to all Grandma's kids. The kids LOVE it and we all love watching them.
This year we had LOTS of beautiful angles, one shepherd, baby Maylee was our "elf" baby Jesus and Rod was the donkey.
Bryce was the lone king and even came with real gifts. Tre and Maddie had to check those out :)
Hadley wasn't too interested in taking part. She was too busy crawling all over the floor being goofy.
After we were done at Grandma and Grandpa Johnson's house we went over to Steve's parents house to open our Christmas Eve presents. This year Sherisse had made all the kids pj bottoms, they were SOOO cute, even the babies got some.
Austin looked SUPER cute with his BIG smiles. This was the best smile I could get from Hadley, she's sooo funny.
Here are the kids on Christmas morning. They had just read their letter from Santa and were waiting to find all their presents downstairs. Austin was still asleep at this point. We normally video the kids opening their presents every year but this year I didn't press record after getting it all set up, whoops! I realised half way through so at least we got some of it. We didn't get any pictures either, whoops again :( The kids had a FANTASTIC Christmas and once again got WAY too many presents. One thing we did this year though was go through all the kids toys and had them take out a bunch of them to give away. We wanted to give them away before Christmas but we never got round to it. I think this will become a tradition now because our kids have SOOO much and I think knowing their toys were going to go to someone who didn't have any made them happy and more willing to give them away. We really tried to remind our kids this year why we have Christmas and kept trying to remind them throughout the whole day. We spent the whole day with Steve's family and had a WONDERFUL time. I do miss my Mom's Christmas dinner but spending the day with Steve's family is great and we always try and add some of my families traditions like prawn cocktail and crackers.
Christmas is such an AMAZING time of the year. I'm so thankful we get to celebrate our Saviour's birth and remember how LUCKY we are to have the gospel in our lives.

Old school

Each one of my kids have used this SUPER COOL jumper (I think that's what you call it). Grandma Johnson used this with her kids and now we all use it whenever we go to Steve's Mom's house. This was Austin's first time using it, he didn't really jump around too much but he did love just hanging there. We'll have to try it out again soon :)

9 going on 16, she thinks :)

Maddie turned 9 in December. It's crazy to think it's actually been that long since we had her. Maddie is a great daughter and helps me out a lot with all the other kids. She's also a little monkey as well but all those things make her who she is. Here's a little of what she's like and the things she likes these days.....

She freaks out A LOT when Steve or I leave.
She HATES sleeping downstairs on her own but won't trade rooms because she loves having her own room.
She wears lots of silly bands and other bracelets.
She loves ear rings and ALWAYS wants me to buy her new ones.
She loves funny books like Diary of a Wimpy Kid and Captain Underpants.
She likes to think she's one of the grown ups and always tries to be part of everything we're doing.
She loves to hold Austin and help out with him.
She has some great friends which I'm VERY thankful for.
She likes to collect all the princess barbies even though she doesn't really play with them.
She plays the piano and seems to be a natural.
She bares her testimony EVERY month at church.

All in all she's a great girl who is just a normal 9 year old. I'm grateful that she's part of our family. The only thing that worried me about Maddie is that she's getting too big. It makes me scared to think of her being a teenager. I just hope she keeps the same great friends and the same testimony that she has now and I won't be too worried. WE LOVE YOU MADDIE!


She got a BYU sweatshirt, ear rings and camera for her birthday, she was sooo happy. We went out to eat at Chuckarama's for her birthday dinner with Steve's parents.
Here she is getting her birthday spankings from Steve's Dad :)

Catching up ... AGAIN!

I don't know if I'll ever not be catching up but here we go again :) First of all here's a few cute pictures of the kids.

Halloween

Now don't get too scared ;) This Halloween was a lot less stressful for me than last year because I wasn't putting together the school carnival. It was nice to have a break and just do the normal things. The teachers put together the school carnival which was lots of fun, well everything apart from waiting in line for an hour so my kids could climb up the climbing wall. It's a good job I love my kids because I stayed in line while they went and played.



The next day we went to Albion with our GREAT friends the Layton's and the Staker's. Jaren's boss owns the haunted houses in Albion so we went to go through them and stay the night in this cool converted hotel. Before it actually started we took our kids through the 3 haunted houses and even without people being in them to scare you it was scary! I didn't make it through the 3rd one, Spencer and Maddie were not liking it at all and truthfully neither was I. Syd went through with Steve though. We had a yummy dinner together and then the boys and Kristy went though the haunted houses again while they were running. I'm a total chicken so there was no way I was going in. When they all got back we played games and had a great time together. I should have taken more photo's, it was a cool place. The only pictures we got were of our kids sleeping. It was pretty cool seeing the old buildings, one was a gym that had a track above the bleachers. Another one had a theatre in it but when we went through there something caught on fire so Jaren helped put it out. In the morning we went through the girls dorms, they don't have anything in there but they want to convert it some day. It would be great if it was closer to Idaho Falls, I think people would love it.

We drove home the next day so we could go trick or treating with Steve's family and have our annual get together at my house with everyone. It was a great weekend but also long so this is what our living room looked like at the end of the day :)

Goofballs

For achievement days they had a Daddy/Daughter night where they had to dress up as nerds. Maddie and Steve had fun getting ready and they ended up looking great.


Then about a week later it was crazy hair day at school so I gave Maddie and Sydney some crazy hair doo's, FUN TIMES :)

My Cuties

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME!

This year I turned 30!!! I think for some people turning 30 is hard but for me it was no big deal at all. I really don't care how old I am, age doesn't mean anything to me. Anyway it was a fun day and Steve surprised me with a GREAT gift. So, I opened a gift bag and saw this lovely? wallet, hahaha! My first thought was, wow, I hope he doesn't think I will want to use this. Of course I didn't say anything because I didn't want to hurt his feelings. Thank goodness he finally told me he got it from DI and it was just for fun :) Everything inside was the real gift. He had got me a bunch of different gift cards, $30 in cash, some checks he had made and some white gold ear rings in the purse part. It was such a clever idea, I LOVED IT! Steve also took me out on a date to Johnny Carino's, my favourite and then we went to a corn maze which I had never done before, it was lots of fun. I loved spending my birthday with my wonderful kids and husband so THANKS!

Utah Trip

So once again I'm TERRIBLE and I need to catch up yet again! A couple months ago we went down to Utah for a long weekend. We had been wanting to go down there all summer but because of my largeness it never happened ;) We had a great time, we went to the zoo, Chuckie Cheese, the farm at Thanksgiving Point, Build a Bear, a BYU game with Rod and Mollie and Temple Square. It was so much fun to cram it all in and just spend time together as a family doing whatever we wanted. We took TONS of pictures so I need to make a slide show but for now I'll add a great picture Mollie took of us at the BYU game, which BYU won, GO COUGARS :)