Christmas Memories 2009

I hope everyone had a most wonderful Christmas! Here is a run down of our Christmas activities. We had a great holiday and enjoyed time with all of our family!

The holiday started off with Christmas Eve dinner at our house! Yes we had our first major family event at our home and everything went really well thankfully:)

A few days before the festivities began Jenn and I started making the preperations. I was so thankful that Jenn was willing to come help me out since I had to work all week as well. Here we are making rolls. I must say they are getting better each time I make them!

Christmas Eve Grandma Alta, me and Jenn getting the finishing touches ready.

Here is the whole gang! I think this is the first picture we have all together on Shaye's Mom's side of the family. We loved having everyone there!

Here's Branson excited about a gift, I think it is actually popcorn:)

My exciting new gift! Shaye got me a new camera!! You will now all enjoy clearer pictures, I'm so excited!

Christmas morning Shaye and I enjoyed the task of putting out the stockings under the tree. I just love Christmas!

Then it was off to Kanab where we spent Christmas Day at Shaye's Dad's house. We enjoyed a great dinner and more gift opening. Here is Jenn, Kelly and Larry making the dinner preparations.

We eventually made our way to my parents house to enjoy more holiday fun. Here is Brandon holding sweet little baby Tavin, he is a proud uncle.

Brandon and Shaye had fun playing, or teasing little Trajen. Traj was having fun too so everyone was happy:) I hope all of you had a most wonderful Christmas holiday and I hope you have an even better new year!!

Babysitting and New Baby

As many of you know my sister Mikkel had her sweet new baby boy this past week. It has been so exciting and we have enjoyed every minute with this new addition. Shaye and I were also lucky that we got to help out with our little nephew Trajen for a couple days. Here are some pictures of all our fun times this weekend.

Luckily Traj was actually excited and happy to stay at our house. He's always happy as long as he has three things, Lightening McQueen, Best Buddy and Lovie.

Here we are trying to make crazy faces at the camera. Traj is much better at it than I am. This kid knows just how to melt my heart, and he knows it! I love it when he calls me Ash! He helped me wrap presents and fold laundry and when I would do something that he thought was cool he would say, "Good job Ash!" He is just the sweetest. At one point her cleared out a dresser drawer in my room and told me he wanted to put his clothes in there. You can some stay any time Traj:)

We enjoyed some good dinners together. He was a great helper when making dinner and he was a great eater too!

This is probably Trajen's favorite thing, hanging out with Shaye. Here they are probably watching some football and just living the good life:)

Last but not least me and my new precious little nephew! I can't tell you how much I love this little guy already. I love to just sit and look at his perfect little face, he is so sweet! He and Mikkel have quite the story to tell about his exciting delivery. We are so happy that Mikkel and the new baby are doing so well and we just love them both!! So glad that we live close so we were able to help out at this very exciting time.

Tis' the Season

Tis' the season for parties! You gotta love Christmas time and all the festive parties. This past week we have had our share of parties. We had my work party, our own party and the wolfpack Christmas party. It's been fun but by the end of the week I was tired and ready to just stay home and do nothing one night. That's what I'm doing tonight and it's great!

Here are some pictures from our annual Jackson Christmas party. For the past 3 years we have hosted a Christmas party and we hope to keep it as a tradition each year.

Here's everyone gathered around for our white elephant gift exchange. It is always fun to see what gems people give away.

Rachelle is so happy to have acquired this nice item, Toby's really excited!

Here's the gang showing off their fabulous gifts! We have Zach & Kenzie, Lauren & Rob, Brooke & Mace, Rachelle & Toby, Danny & Cassie and Shaye (I'm taking the picture:)

Toby enjoying some treats and sporting his new gifts, he's such a funny guy. We had some great treats and enjoyed seeing everyone. We played lots of fun games and a good time was had by all.

I hope you all are having a wonderful Christmas season, it is the most wonderful time of the year!

Everything is Merry and Bright

I love Christmas time and I have been enjoying decorating my house very much!! Here are a few pictures to show how we are getting into the holiday season:)

I'm so happy to have a tree...shortly after this picture was taken I sat down and was enjoying the glow of the pretty lights. Slowly, without warning our beautiful tree fell to the ground right in front of me. It was actually quite funny, so we picked it up, secured it a little better and I put the decorations on again. I actually think it looked better the second time around, so maybe it was mint to be?!:)

I love my pretty nativity I got from my Mom a couple years ago.

This is what Shaye was doing while I was decorating, watching t.v....he seemed to be enjoying himself as well:)

Shaye had already done his hard work. He hung Christmas lights outside on the house. This picture doesn't do them justice. I love them they twinkle and are so pretty. He did a great job!

Hopefully Santa will find our stockings:)

I don't think I ever posted pictures of the inside of our house so here are a few.

I hope everyone has a wonderful Christmas Season!! It is the most wonderful time of the year!

A Thankful Weekend

I can't believe it has been so long since I last made an update. What is my problem?! Seriously I have been so behind on blogging so here comes the catch up....We had a most wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. We were so blessed to have the chance to be in Kanab with the whole Brown family!! We had a great weekend with TONS of great food and fun! Here are a few pictures to document the good times.

First of all I had a great time preparing my contributions for the big feast. For some reason I decided I would volunteer to bring rolls. I'd never made rolls but thought it would be a good thing to learn. So I did a trial run that didn't turn out amazing but my second try was a great success:)

Emily was a great help to me, we were so proud of our great work. These are some of our rolls ready to rise.

Here are some of the delicious finished product. I need to work on making them all the same size. Most importantly they tasted very good, I must say I was so proud:)

The big feast begins! We had so so much good food, the whole Brown family was there so we had about 55 people in all.

Here's Shaye enjoying dinner with Emily and Aunt Kristi. Good times were had by all:)

Shaye enjoyed playing basketball afterwards to work off a little bit of that pie!

All of us girls had a fun time later doing some crafts at my Mom's. Here is Aunt Tye, McKenzie and Aunt Kanani making some cute necklaces.

I was the happiest to see my best friend cousin, Brittany and her sweet little boy Blake.

Thanksgiving day was so wonderful to be with our family but it was also a very heartbreaking day when we found out that are good friend John Jones had past away trapped in the Nutty Putty Caves. We had the privilege of knowing John and his sweet wife Emily when we lived in Virginia Beach 2 summers ago. John worked with Shaye selling alarms. Emily was such a good and kind friend to me that summer and we thought so much of her and John. Many of you have probably heard about his heartbreaking story and I just wanted to pay tribute to such a wonderful person. John and his wife are honestly two of the nicest people I have ever met. They did so much good for others just by being who they are. John was going to medical school and I know would have done so many wonderful things in his life. You just don't find many people like him, he was the kind of person we would all aspire to be. My heart goes out to Emily and her daughter Lizzie. I know as does Emily that she will be with John again someday and I am so grateful for her strength, she is an inspiration.

I love you Em and I'm continually praying for you.

On a lighter note we were able to celebrate my birthday a little early while we were home with my family. We had a great dinner at Grandma's and then had a few presents to open. Nate was also excited about the gifts as you can see, he's such a good helper:)

Nate thought that my face was a good place for the bow:)

My mom got me some fun new jewelry and a cute new purse, I was so excited!

This is a gift from Shaye. It is an awesome photo album book he made on I-photo. I LOVE IT! The pictures are such great quality and it's fun to have our first two years together organized so nicely.

Thanks Shaye, I love it! You are the best!!

Bryce Canyon

It seems that each time I blog lately I am playing catch up. These events all happened last week. To start things off we had a very busy week last week with lots of visitors and fun! First off Grandma Alta and her good friend Glenda came up to visit us for a couple days. We had such a fun time but sadly didn't get any pictures of them. We hope they will come again soon.

Next up Shaye was going to go hunting with his family so I tagged along on a fun trip with my family. We went to Bryce Canyon to do some hiking and the next day headed up to Snow for Brandon's football game. Bryce was so fun and it was SO beautiful! I hadn't ever really been to Bryce and I very much enjoyed it. Here are a bunch of pictures of our most adventurous hike:)

Me and Em's enjoying the awesome scenery.

Nate loves it when we do little family outings.

Here is just some of the great scenery. It really is such a beautiful area, amazing how it ended up like that.

Mikkel and Traj found a little cave in the rocks to take a little rest.

Nate and Traj were getting to far ahead of us so we talked them into sitting down on this log and taking of few snap shots. Nate is always up for a photo shoot.

The boys posing with Grammy J:)

Dad was loving the hike too, love the balance beam skills. Very nice!

Too cute...

We had a great weekend with lots and lots of great family fun!