A Thanksgiving to Remember!

This last week we were able to travel to Dallas and spend Thanksgiving with our friends. We had a great time and made lots of fun memories. We were able to reflect on the past year and count our many blessings. We're grateful to the Ashton's for hosting Thanksgiving again this year and and all the good times that were had!

Our good friend Dave Allen always tells us every time we go somewhere we need to accomplish the "4 F's". I think we were able to that this trip.

FUN We had a lot of fun, the boys all had a Thanksgiving day football game, basketball game. We went to movies, pedicures, did some 4 a.m. shopping, water park fun and just hung out and enjoyed each others company. Oh yeah did I mention we went shopping?

FOOD We had plenty of food we all appreaciated Gillians yummy made from scratch home cooking. It was so good it inspired Timari and I to each buy a new kitchenaid mixer on "Black Friday". ( Which by the way we stood in line for over an hour to purchase - what we won't do for a good deal!!!)

FRIENDS We had a lot of good time with friends! We were even able to have an adult night out for dinner at Cheescake factory and movie. The Dad's and kids went and stayed a night at the great wolf lodge so the moms could shop and recover from shopping.

I can't remember the 4th one. HUMM!!

Happy 16 Birthday Ryan!!!

Ryan started out the day with a couple dozen Krispie Kream donuts. After church dad made one of his favorites "poor boys chili". He couldn't wait any longer to open his gifts which he was very happy with. Later tonight we will have German chocolate cake with cookie dough ice cream. And his favorite dish "lemon pepper chicken" for dinner.

Tomorrow we'll head off to the DMV and work on obtaining a drivers licence - watch out everyone! And soon after that he'll probably want to be going out on a date- IKES!!!

Were proud of you Ryan for all you have done so far to reach this milestone birthday.

Happy Birthday Ryan!!!

All through the years!!!

Christmas open House

The past couple of weeks I have been getting ready for my 2ND annual Christmas open house. The big day was this last Friday it was a big success. I coordinated the whole thing which was actually a bigger job than I thought. Last year I had my friend Gillian help with the planning - Missed you Gillian.

We had 11 booths and we did it at the clubhouse. It was a long week but it was a lot of fun and well worth it. I got a lot of new contacts and orders for my business.

Meet The Runnin Rebels!!!

Ryan is so excited that he made his High School basketball team. Here he is at "Meet the Rebels" right when they called his name my camera was all jacked up so I didn't get a good picture of him being introduced. More photos to come I promise!! Go Runnin Rebels!!!

Trick - R - Treat!

Black Spiderman or shall we call him Peter Parker??

Little Marine Boy. Brandon had a hard time getting excited about any of the costumes this year. He searched the Internet for hours and finally just decided to dress in camo's.

Apparently in High School you can wear your costume to school - mask and all. So Ryan sported this around all day at school.

I tryed to paint Brandon's face with camo paint and a Marine hat but he wasn't into it. What a Halloween pooper!

Well I actually had plans for some fun costumes for Randy and I this year but as you can see I ran out of time. Randy is his usually Bronco fan, I just decided to go for the Orange and Black look. Next year were gonna have some awesome costumes.

Here is our last minute attempt to create a pumpkin. So what else would we do but Mickey Mouse.

TOFW -Time out for Women

This past weekend I made my way to the big "D". That's short for Dallas if you don't live in Texas. My friends and I decided to have a fun trip and meet up at Gillian's. Although a couple of friends were unable to attend at the last minute the fun had to go on. We were definitely able to make time out for ourselves.

No trip would be complete without a lot of shopping and I mean A LOT of shopping. We hit all of our favorite stores Black and white store, Coach, several shoe stores and of course a outlet mall. The only thing missing was Tami and Timari. Gillian drove us across Dallas and back um several times, thank goodness for the invention of GPS.

We did a lot of eating at good restaurants. And of course a honorary trip to the cheesecake factory. And saw a movie or 2, we did a lot of laughing of course.

We also made time for the ward trick R treat where I met up with my BFF Claire. Isn't she so cute???

Campout and Hike at Guadaloupe moutains

Well Randy and the boys went on a camp out this weekend where they were told to take a lot of pictures. And this is what I got. That's right not one picture so you don't get to see all the fun they had. Brandon however did bring me home a souvenir. It was a bathroom bag. Which is basically a plastic bag the forest rangers gave them if they needed to go to the bathroom. It was still in the package thank goodness. He said I might need it If I ever make it on the amazing race. Let me say if I do I won't be going to the bathroom in a bag!!!

Our Favorite day..... Castaway Cay

Our favorite day of the cruise is when we stop at Disney's private island.. Castaway Cay. The Island is in the Bahama's somewhere. They serve a delicious BBQ lunch and have the very best chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. They have snorkeling where you can see Mickey under the sea. And a lot of other fun things you can do there. Ryan also had fun on the private teen beach which actually isn't so private. We also saw Casper the Ghost on the island. I hope to post a picture of her later! Disney has the Flying Dutchman from Pirates of the Carribbean docked here also. This was once again the best day of the week!!!

A night out at Palos!

Palos is a special restaurant on the ship that you have to make reservations for. We were able to get our group in together this year. So we sent all the kids in to eat at the regular restaurant and we had a fun night at Palos. Poor waiters I hope we tipped them enough!!!

Fun Times with our Disney Friends!

Dinners with Friends

We had a lot of fun at dinner times. There were 4 couples for a adult table of 8 and a kid table of 14. Our poor servers had there work cut for them!