A Fun Game Night

When the Owens came over the other night, we had so much fun having dinner and playing games together. The kids enjoyed the night too.

Camden and Jessica reading books together:

The boys watching a movie after Isaac and Jessica fell asleep:

Christmas Eve

Here are some pictures from our Christmas Eve. We enjoyed acting out the nativity while Michael read the story of Christ’s birth from the scriptures (although for some reason I’m having trouble getting the video of this to upload from the camera, so we’ll see if I can get that to work and post it later on). Then we read our two special Christmas Eve pop-up books, “The Night Before Christmas” and “The First Christmas.” Then, after driving around town to look at Christmas lights (and putting Isaac and Eli to bed after they each fell asleep in the car), we opened the gift from Santa, a fun puzzle, and put it together. Then we let Camden and Kolby put their Christmas gifts for the family under the tree – I thought it was so cute that Kolby was asking all day about when he got to do this (and I love the photo of Kolby and Camden helping to carry one of the gifts as they put it under the tree). Then, after we got them in bed, we brought out the rest of the gifts and stuffed the stockings. I was thinking that it will be fun someday (I’m sure it will be someday far in the future) when we can place the gifts under the tree earlier than Christmas Eve night without worrying about them being opened early – it looked so much more cheery with all the gifts laid out under the tree.

Online Archive of Digitized Genealogical Books

So, I am still on the e-mail list for the family history department at BYU and I get e-mails from them every once in a while, usually job offers for genealogy majors. But today I got an e-mail telling about the progress that has been made in digitizing the genealogy books in the collection from the Family History Library in Salt Lake, along with several other genealogical collections. The link to the database is, www.lib.byu.edu/fhc, if you’re interested in taking a look. I haven’t had a chance yet to see if I could find any new info about my ancestors in this archive, but I did type my name into the “author” field real quick, just to see if anything would turn up. It was fun to see the paper that I wrote about my great grandmother, Nettie Dorothy Graham Spohr, and her ancestors while I was studying genealogy at BYU – I had given a copy of my final paper to the FHL in Salt Lake when I finished it, so I knew they had it in their library, but it was fun to see that it has been totally digitized – photos, genealogical charts, maps, and all, so that it can be easily shared with any interested relatives. Kind of fun. (If you are one of my relatives and are interested in looking at that paper on Nettie, here is the link).

Easter

We had a fun little Easter egg hunt in our living room on Sunday. The boys got new books and some bouncy balls that light up in their Easter baskets this year. In the boys’ preschool class at the YMCA they had talked about the Easter bunny and made fun little Easter basket and bunny art projects. So, on Easter morning Michael took the boys in their room to play with them while I put out their baskets and hid the eggs. After we took some pictures of them all in their white shirts and ties (of course, we had to take a lot of pictures to get a few that were good of all four boys, but I think we got some pretty cute ones), they came out and were excited about the toys and the eggs. Kolby then asked me when the Easter bunny was coming. I told him that the Easter bunny must have already come and left all the eggs, so then Kolby asked if we could call the Easter bunny. I told him that we didn’t have his phone number. Apparently I should have taken the boys to see the Easter bunny at the mall, because Kolby was expecting to see the Easter bunny at our house that morning. (Actually, the boys are lucky that they got what they did for Easter this year. Although we definitely knew that Easter was coming up, Michael and I have been so focused on Match Day last week that we didn’t even think of getting candy and other things for the baskets until a couple of days before Easter). [Oh, and thanks, Mom, for the Elmo Easter baskets – they were a big hit with the boys!]

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