BethAnne's 10th Birthday!

It's hard to believe that I have a ten-year-old.  It's been a busy ten years.  We're so grateful that we have our beautiful BethAnne.  She is such a light in our lives.  I'm amazed at how strong and kind and faithful and helpful she is.   We are so blessed to have her in our family.


We had a friend party for the first time in many years and the kids had a great time. 

Here is the table all set up for our origami activity.  BethAnne really enjoys origami so she showed her friends how to make some things.

The girls loved playing our X-box Kinect at the party.  They played the game Kinect Party, which is a super fun game and lots of people can participate at once.  It was hard to get some of the girls to go home after the party because they were having so much fun playing :)

Pretty Birthday Girl.

We had a chocolate fountain at her friend party and at the family party the next day.  Thank you Aunt Chrissy for letting us borrow the fountain.  It was a hit!

Here's BethAnne's birthday cake for her family birthday party (for the friend party, we just put some candles in the pound cake that was used for the chocolate fountain).  This is one of my favorite cakes that I've made. 

This was at the family party.  It's so much fun to have so much extended family in town.  It was a wonderful party.  Happy Birthday sweet BethAnne!

At the Zoo in February

We took advantage of an unusually warm day a couple weeks ago and we went to the Zoo.  We got some cute pictures and had a great time. 

 

 

 

 

 

Have a great weekend!  Love you all!

I updated my blog!

Check it out!  The first of many catch-up posts!  Love you all!

My Funny Valentine

Joy was so cute this evening, walking around with her Valentine's gift bag on her head.  She was marching like a soldier.  We had a great Valentine's Day.  Mark brought me some chocolate covered strawberries and a sweet card.  I got the girls and Mark some See's candies and I made them all cards.  Then tonight we went out to dinner at Chilis and the girls were great and it was fun and yummy.  Earlier today I had an ultrasound, everything looks good and they confirmed that the baby is a boy.  I'm almost 18 weeks and it was an emotional time at the doctor, I don't feel my babies very well so I was concerned.  I lost our last baby at 20 weeks, but they said she stopped growing at about 18 1/2 weeks.  The doctor today was kind and said I can come in anytime for a heartbeat check if I'm concerned.  We are hopeful and happy.  I hope you all had a great day and are doing well.
Love, Aubrey

McCall Winter Carnival!

One of my goals this new year was to do more fun family activities.  So today we headed to the McCall Winter Carnival.  Earlier this week, we felt like it would be too hard on me physically to go, but then this morning I felt impressed that we should go and we ended up having a wonderful time, with minimal walking.  It was like the angels orchestrated a lovely outing for us.


I haven't been to the McCall Winter Carnival since I was a kid, so we didn't know what to expect, but there were lots of fun things for the kids.  The drive up to McCall was beautiful also. 

 

 

The slide in the first three pictures was actually a part of this amazing scultpure.  A lot of the scultpures had melted at least a bit (it was a beautful sunny day), but some of the sculptures were amazing still.

This  picture shows how big it is. (Sorry the pictures aren't great.  I forgot my camera so they were taken on my iphone).

Pretty Joy!

This was a fun sculpture that was very large.  There was a large cave inside that you could walk around in and it was lit by Christmas lights that were encased in ice.  It was very cool.

The first sculpture we came to was a sledding playground.  There were big tracks on one side but we stuck with the small tracks.  They were small but slick and so they were still fast and thrilling for the girls.  We forgot our sled, but it was okay because this sculpture was in a large grocery store parking lot and Mark found some great sleds at the store.

Pretty BethAnne.  She went down the big track once, but she loved the little track too.

Joy loves to stick out her tongue when I say "Smile"

This is how Joy went down the track most times.  Luckily she didn't need to steer and she loved it.

Beautiful Grace! 

We ended the evening parked at a great parking spot by the lake which was right by a lovely Italian Restaurant.  We had a great meal and then we were able to watch some amazing fireworks over the lake right from the restaurant terrace.  It was a spectucular show and the fireworks were so close I thought we might get some sparks on us.  The kids (and parents) were amazed.  My pregnancy may be getting a bit complicated already, and I may need to take it easy soon, so we are really grateful that we could have this fun outing today.   We hope you are all doing well. 
Love,
Aubrey