Christmas Wishes!

Merry Christmas from our little helpers to yours!

These Santa shirts were just too cute not to make Christmas cards with. I LOVE this one of Mr. Grant! Love my little sleigh my mom talked me in to buying last year. What a sweet girl Kiersten is. She is busy with school and many after school activities. She is a straight A student and always has been! She loves being in company dance. She takes four dance classes...........jazz, tap, ballet and hip hop. She loves all the extra practices and performances that being in company requires. She just loves to dance and we always have people tell us that she is an "eye catcher" on the stage! And we agree! This year she started taking gymnastics on top of her dance classes. She wants to become one of the dancers that get to do all the flips and stuff in the dance routines. She amazes me with me with her dedication and drive for everything she is involved in. She loves playing the piano and violin. She exceeds at both and recently got 1st place at the fair talent competition for playing her violin! She is a wonderful help to me and has recently started babysitting for short periods and has been so responsible with that job. She loves being on the swim team each summer and does really well at it! She loves her friends and cousins a lot! She has a fun personality and is just a wonderful person! I love you Kiersten! I feel so blessed to have Kiersten as my only daughter. She is more then I ever dreamed a daughter would be! Hunter is just a sweet heart! He has a funny personality and always makes us laugh! He can sometimes be too funny but is always quick to apologize if he gets out of line and I just admire that about him. He is always sincere when he apologizes and I think that's a quality we all could improve on. He loves playing the violin and tolerates the piano! He does love his piano teacher, Tracy Brown, so that helps a lot! He loves school and is a straight A student and always has been. He just loves Math and his teacher Mrs. Moore tells me all the time that he is constantly asking her for harder math problems. She tells me often what a great helper he is and that while she was on maternity leave Hunter and one other girl were the two kids she told the substitute to ask to help her if she had a question. Hunter recently became interested in horses, roping and rodeo stuff. A couple of months ago he was in his first rodeo and got to ride a sheep. He just loved it and had a great time! He loves riding quads and the dirt bikes. Of course his continued love is LEGOS and he just loves his lego bedroom!

Hunter is going to be a wonderful man one day and I am blessed to be his mother!

I love it when he gets in his "chatty moods"......it really is like talking to another adult. He is way beyond his age! I have a really good friend who has told me several times that, "Hunter is an old spirit in a young body!" And I agree he isn't the average 8 year old when you really get to know him.

I love you Hunter!

Logan is just a performer at heart. He loves to make people laugh and loves to be the center of attention. His true love is dancing..........hip hop that is! He just loves dancing in front of a crowd and especially loves getting to perform on the big stage! He is loving Kindergarten and is doing wonderful at school! It is wonderful to see him reading little books all on his own.....he is so excited to be able to read like Kiersten and Hunter!

He loves going to gymnastics and is pretty impressive with his head stand! He loves riding quads and being outside. His newest comment, and one of my favorites, is when I ask anything of him 90 % of the time he says happily, "YES MAM, NO PROBLEM!" Thank you Mrs. Willis for the "yes mam" part.

Logan is just a character! He loves people and every one that knows Logan loves him as well!

It is such fun to be his mom. He constantly gives me hugs and kisses and is a very loving boy!

What a great kid!

I love you Logan!

Looks who's gettin' nothin' for Christmas!

Mr. Grant has definitely hit the terrible twos! I have to say I am impressed with the fits he can throw :)

I do adore this little guy and that keeps him from getting beat....ha, ha!

He can be sweet as candy! He gives great loves. His little guy is a talker! He talks really well for his age and I constantly have people tell me what a good talker he is. He is so much fun. He loves, loves his sister and brothers! He isn't quite as happy when they are all at school. His favorite game lately is getting the toy guns and having mom help him go through the house shooting "monsters." He just gets so excited to play this game and we have a fun time together playing it! I have to say Mr. Grant is the messiest toddler I have ever had. He throws food, dumps cups of water, colors on things and just generally makes a mess. It often drives me crazy.........but it does often make for some good stories!

He was really in to the hiding pose during this shoot!

But he is still cute when he did it so I had to post them!

He is still way better then most two year olds, or even three year olds for that matter, when it comes to taking pictures!

I love this picture and I LOVE my Mr. Grant!

I love the message on the back of Mr. Grant's shirt..............."When I grow up I will be....jolly"

My hope is that we all can "grow up and be jolly!"

I hope this Christmas post finds you and yours healthy and happy. We are especially thankful this time of year, for the birth of our Savior, Jesus Christ. We are grateful for this holiday season that reminds us of Him, His life and the Atonement. We feel so blessed to have the gospel of Jesus Christ in our lives and to be members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. We are grateful to know of our Heavenly Father's Plan for us. To know where we came from and to know the purpose of this life. We are blessed to have wonderful families and friends that make our lives so rich each and every day!

Justin and I are grateful for our marriage and for the love and kindness we show each other. It really is a dream come true to be married to my high school sweet heart! I am thankful for his example of serving a mission, honoring his priesthood and respecting his family and wife. Even with all the trials we have had and the challenges life has thrown us this year..........we are blessed beyond what we deserve.

We hope you all know how much you mean to us and the difference you have made in our lives!

We love you!

Have a Blessed Merry CHRISTmas!

One last picture of our baby that's not a baby any more!

Hail Storm

So today I took a personal day.....ha, ha kind of funny. But no seriously, I took a personal day from my job as mom. Well for about 8 hours anyway!

I decided Sunday night that I have been feeling overwhelmed for several weeks now and I needed a few hours off. Even if it just meant more work and less time to do it in when I got home. I was at the point that I didn't care much about the repercussions of me taking a personal day. Between photo shoots, Thanksgiving which was my family at our house this year, Decorating for Christmas, getting ready for the staff Christmas party that the PTO is in charge of, gifts for all the teachers and staff that once again the PTO is in charge of, building the play house (yeah that is a whole other blog entry to come), running kids to their activities, the DPA orchestra's light parade float, editing pictures, PTO breakfast with Santa coming up, the PTO Santa's workshop coming up this week, my kids being super energetic because of the holidays and all the extra activities taking place and they are driving me crazy, my church calling, extra dance practices for Kiersten which means extra running, Crossfit workouts daily, me yelling too much at my kids lately, Mr. Grant being a messy two year old, Kiersten dancing at the light parade, on top of keeping the house clean and picked up, laundry, meals, editing more pictures, grocery shopping, doing fun things to make this time of year memorable and centered around Christ for my family,...............the list really could go on and on but we all get the point. I was feeling overwhelmed......

I just keep wishing I didn't need sleep because think of what I could accomplish if I had the whole 24 hours to work on things! Actually I've been loosing sleep............editing pictures until late. Sometimes waking up at 4 a.m. or earlier because my mind is thinking of all the responsibilities I have and the deadlines coming quickly.

So I needed a few things for the PTO staff dinner and instead of making due with what Walmart had to offer I decided to make a day trip. So I asked my wonderful sister-in-law Gloria to watch Mr. Grant for me and I made a short trip to Tucson. I left as soon as I took the kids to school..............and was back by 4:00 to start running Kiersten to gymnastics and dance.

I drove for two hours with no one yelling, "mom." No one asking me to turn the radio to Radio Disney. No one drinking my water from my Sonic cup. No one arguing with each other in the car. I jammed out to Hilary Weeks all the way.........her and I have been through a lot together. It was just what I needed. I got the things I needed for the PTO stuff and I got a few little things I needed to finish off my Christmas shopping. I got to eat at Sweet Tomato............Justin doesn't feel that is a "real" restaurant because they don't serve steak. So I only eat there when he's not with me......and I really enjoyed every minute of it!

It was a short trip but just nice to have some quiet time to myself. And I really tried to not think of all the things that weren't getting done because I left town.

On my drive home, as I hit Texas Canyon it began to snow. Not just a few little flakes either............it was a blizzard. Everyone was driving super slow, visibility was low and it was beautiful. That's a rare occurrence for me to drive through a snow storm. I just soaked up the beauty of it and I thought of my kids. I thought of how ecstatic they would be to see the snow! In that moment I realized, I am a good mom. When I saw those snow flakes falling, my first thoughts were about my kids. Even if I have been yelling too much at them lately, I am still a good mom. I just need to try harder, in fact we all do!

Then as I was exiting Texas Canyon there was a hail storm. As I drove through the hail storm I gained some insight. Have you drove through a hail storm? And if you have, did you see just millions of ice pellets coming your way? Or did you take the time to focus and to see the individual ice pellets?

Well I think I have seen both over the course of my life while driving through a hail storm but for the first time it was more then hail, it was more then just a storm, it was more then just a reason to turn on my windshield wipers..........it meant something more.

I had the thought that this hail storm is exactly like life, my life and especially my super busy life this time of year. I am living in a hail storm, we all are in fact. It's easy to feel overwhelmed. It's easy to feel like there it so much to do and never enough time to do it. It's easy to feel like you aren't enough or you aren't "doing" enough. We are constantly being hit with ice pellets just like a hail storm. And it is overwhelming, but I don't think it is intended to be that way. I don't think our Heavenly Father wants us to feel overwhelmed.

And as I kept driving and periodically focused on the individual ice pellets it became very clear to me. I need to stop looking at the hail storm in it's entirety because that is overwhelming! Seeing all the many things being thrown at me, and you, at such a consistant rate, just like the ice pellets in the hail storm.............it's almost impossible to feel a sense of peace. All that hail coming at us is often more then we can handle. But we aren't meant to handle it on our own and I needed to be reminded of that. I know that the Savior, Jesus Christ will magnify us. Often we don't have enough talent or enough energy or enough patience for the tasks we've been given. But with Jesus Christ, He makes it enough............He makes us enough!

When driving in the hail storm as I focused on the individual ice pellets I could still see the millions more coming straight for me and I could see the road ahead. But they weren't as important or they weren't as overwhelming. They weren't what I was focused on and therefore I gained a different perspective of the hail storm all together. It was much more manageable, just like my life can become........ more manageable.

I know that I can do a better job of focusing on the individual ice pellets. Focusing on individual jobs that must be done and not looking at my whole To Do List. And I know that if I focus on the essential things that should be done, that the peace will come. If I focus on the things that matter most this Christmas Season and throughout all the year, my family and I will be blessed. So the teacher's gifts from the PTO might not have the cutest bow on the top, or their Christmas dinner might be more simple, the students might not get their pictures with Santa from breakfast with Santa back until after the break and we might not get treats made and taken around to everyone on our list.

But what we do accomplish will be enough!

So let the hail continue to come, let those ice pellets continue to hit.......................with the Savior by my side I will get through the storm and who knows I might actually be grateful for the hail!

I am very grateful for a loving Heavenly Father that taught me a sweet lesson .......through a hail storm!!