Kelli's House at Thanksgiving

We had a fun trip at Thanksgiving. I posted about the friends we were able to visit. I'm a little bit late, but here are some pictures of our time at Kelli's house.
McKenna's making a face. I'm sure one of my kids got this picture of her and she's being silly. McKenna turned 10 on January 5th and is getting very grown up.

Here are Kelli's other three girls. Avorie is on the left. She is very loud, but very loving and really enjoys life. Brielle, in the middle, is going to be a year on March 7th. She's getting around everywhere and has to be watched a lot. I heard she's walking a few steps at a time already. Marlena, on the right, turned 7 on November 15th. She waited for us to come so she could celebrate her birthday with her cousins around. I thought that was super nice to wait 10 days to celebrate. She and Sarah actually had a joint birthday party.

Here they both are just after blowing out the candles on their cake. I wonder what they wished for, they sure are smiling big.

Lance loves his baby. He's a great dad.

Avorie's waiting for something exciting to happen.

Marlena's contemplating something.

Like I said, we had a great time visiting with family. We played a lot of games and ate a lot of good food. The kids played in the snow and down in the basement for hours and hours. We love Kelli and her family!

Visiting Wisconsin

This post will highlight the part of our trip where we visited lots of friends from Madison. Another post is forthcoming about our visit with Kelli and her family.

We were able to eat lunch with my friend Cindy and her family. They are so nice and Cindy sure knows how to cook! She made the best rolls and sent two dozen with us on our trip. It's been a long time since I've had rolls that good. They are a great family and we had a nice visit.
Nicole is good friends with Sarah. They keep in touch on email and on Sarah's blog. I'm so glad they were able to spend a few hours together.
I was able to visit an old college roommate and her family. They were so nice to have us stay overnight at their place. We weren't able to spend much time visiting on the first weekend, but we stopped for a few hours and visited the next weekend. She made a delicious homemade salsa and we played Phase 10 and bowling on the Wii. It was a fun visit. It was fun to see her family and how well they're doing.
It snowed while we were in Wisconsin. We haven't seen much snow for a few years and the kids were so excited to play in it even though we didn't bring all of our snow gear. Sarah was so happy with the snowman that Riley helped her finish. She named him Bob.
We visited with some of our old neighbors and the kids had a lot of fun playing with their friends again. Two of the families who lived behind us shared yards with us. The kids would take turns going from playset to playset. Both families were able to spend a few hours with us and it was so fun to see how all the kids have grown and changed. Here's Nicole with Willie and Leah. Willie looks tough, but he's a big teddy bear and the kids all love him. He works as a security guard for the school district and the schools fight over him.
We ate lunch with the Oliphant family. Paul (center in the back) was our bishop before we moved. They have a big family and Mie (mint green shirt) made it look easy to feed 20 people. She's currently the Relief Society president and he teaches Seminary. The kids had a blast playing hide and seek in the basement. I miss having a basement.
Some other friends who used to live in Madison happened to be visiting the same day we were and the Oliphants invited them to eat over as well. They moved to England in August and it was a great surprise to see them on our visit. Here is a picture of Sarka and I. She's originally from the Czech Republic.
Sarka's oldest daughter, Misha, is good friends with Nicole. It was so good to see them again. They seem to be enjoying England and Bruce really loves his new job. He's a pilot for a large international airline. I can't remember the name right now, but he flies all over the world. It's been his dream for a long time.
For some reason we didn't get any pictures with the Kienitz family. They also had us stay overnight with them on the first weekend. We had so much fun visiting and catching up with them. We used to get together often and play games with them. We were able to visit again on our way home and we played some more games and had a Smarties war. Imagine flicking Smarties across the table at anyone who dared be there. It was crazy and fun.

As you can see, we were able to visit with so many people on this trip. We just showed up on the doorstep of some other neighbors who happened to be home and had a nice visit. We also went to church and saw so many people there and also noticed how much the ward had changed. We felt very welcome even though we've been gone for 4 1/2 years. We were sad that we didn't have time to visit with everyone and could only spend a few hours everywhere we went. We're so grateful to know such great people and that they're a part of our lives.

Just a Note

For all of my avid blog readers out there, I have just updated my blog. I know with me it isn't a steady stream of blogs, but I did try to catch up here. So read on down and you'll get filled in on what's happened the last few weeks. By the way, the gas prices are around $1.68 and the temperature's supposed to be about 45 today, so those things have changed as well.

We're going to Neenah, Wisconsin to spend Thanksgiving with Robert's sister Kelli. We're leaving tomorrow morning around 4:00. We're stopping in Madison to visit a lot of friends from when we lived there. We're really looking forward to the trip and I'll fill you in. You might get lucky and I'll blog about it while we're gone, but no promises. I hope all of you have a wonderful Thanksgiving and thanks for reading!

A New Blog is Born

I have asked Laura to post this, simply to let people know I am starting a different blog. I will gear it towards my spiritual beliefs. I simply can't talk about what I feel most passionately about in Sunday School. It just isn't the right setting, but there is sooo much I want to share. A good portion of this is simply for my own benefit. It is a way for me to sort out what I believe. So if you are interested, then take a peek. If it is not funny enough, too long winded or preachy, has bad spelling and grammar, then tough... get over it... (insert a tune in the background...) "It's my blog and I can write what I waaant to... ". http://lightsandperfections.blogspot.com.

Someone Turned 40!

Hmmmm....I wonder who that could be. Well maybe this picture will give it away.

It's sometimes difficult to get older, and I think 40 can be a tough birthday. Robert's had a kind of mid-life crisis. He felt the need to buy a good gun. That qualifies as a crisis to me, but he's having a lot of fun with it. We had a surprise birthday party for him with a lot of our friends. Thanks guys for coming and helping so much! He also got to have a homemade Olive Garden meal, which was by his special request. The food turned out really good. I hope he enjoyed his birthday, and doesn't feel too bad about his age. Everyone still loves him anyway!

Riley's Last Soccer Game

Riley plays soccer and really enjoys it. He does well at soccer and it's fun to watch him play. Here are some pictures of him just after his last game of the season. I couldn't get any good ones of him actually playing because it was pretty dark. The game was played at 6:30 pm on Monday, November 10th. It was a make up game and it was very cold and rained a little during the game. It had rained all day and we thought they might cancel, but there wasn't any lightning, so it was on!

I was glad they played anyway since they probably wouldn't reschedule the game again. Riley's team had a rough season. It started out with them getting beat pretty badly the first several games. I mean like 10-0. In soccer that's a huge score for the other team. They did have a few games in the middle of the season that they won, which was encouraging. Then they started losing pretty bad again. So they had this game and I was hopeful that they could finish the season with a win.

Riley usually plays center or midfield. It requires a lot of running, which he doesn't do much unless he's in a soccer game. There were only 11 boys at this game and that's how many play on the field at a time, so there were no subs. It was a long game, about 1 hour and 15 minutes. Riley hadn't had a chance to score all season. The kids played their hearts out and pulled it off! They won 2-1! But this is the best part. Riley scored both of the goals! I was so happy and so was he. It was a perfect way to end a difficult season.

Halloween

Here are some pictures of the kids at Halloween, finally.
Jared is a Jedi (not sure which one). Sarah is a bat, who apparently likes to curtsy for pictures.

Riley is a hippie. I love the wig! It makes the whole outfit.

Nicole is also a hippie. Her hair just naturally fits.

The kids each wore their costumes three or four times. I like it when they use their costumes more than once. Thank goodness there wasn't any makeup involved.