Christmas 2010

The Brenchley Family Christmas party started off with an excellent rendition of the nativity, Lance being so willing to play the part of the donkey!  Grandma Brenchley made all the grand kids adorable stick horses which they loved. It is definitely one of their favorite gifts this year !  Brody called his horse "Blue" (every horse of his is black and named Blue)!  Grandma Brenchley makes each grandchild a stocking when they are born and stuffs them full for the kids to open at the Christmas party!  She also had all sorts of crazy games for us to play, one was a gum-ball game. You had to roll 4 gum-balls across the table and get them to stick on a line of tape.  You had only 30 seconds to do it!  Another game Grandma placed 4 candy canes across the edge of the table or chair and then you had to bite a stick which was attached to a 5th candy cane and without any hands you had to get all 4 candy canes onto the candy cane hanging from your mouth!  The kids made out like bandits in the money roll game!  So did Dan and I, the Banham's cheated like always of course!!

The Thatcher Family party started off with the nativity as well, and shortly after Santa strolled in.  He seems to always make for the the Thatcher Christmas party!  The first thing Brody said to Dan after getting off Santa's knee was..."It's just Reed dressed up dad, it's not the real Santa." I can't believe he knew, especially when every other year before it's been Berry, maybe that is why... he was expecting the Berry-Santa! 

For our ward Christmas party, we did a live nativity, with a real camel!  Brody was an angel, along with all the other sunbeams!!  They sang "Christmas Bells are Ringing" and shook bells!

Christmas morning was awesome as always, Grandma and Grandpa Thatcher made it right in time for Dan's traditional pancake, eggs, sausage, hash brown breakfast!!

Emmy's 3rd Birthday!

This year Brodyn and Emmy's Birthday's fell on Sunday. We held off till Sunday evening to celebrate and open presents for Emmy and it was so hard for her to wait that long!! We had to pick the cake and balloons up Saturday...and just wait. For future Sunday birthdays we will have to celebrate on Saturday.

I have such bad luck with Emmy's Birthdays.  I wanted her Birthday to turn out perfect. This year everything was going great we got the cake we wanted, the balloons, ice cream, presents all wrapped we were ready to go!! We decided to wait until Sunday evening to celebrate at Grandma Brenchley's so everyone could be there, which was fine, but when I turned on my video camera it was completely dead... no problem I thought our camera has video we are good to go. My next mistake was giving Dan the responsibility of using the video and taking pictures. I got an amazing .5 seconds of my mom's ceiling and that is all the video we came home with. Here's a lovely picture of our already half eaten cake!!   Emmy had it in her mind to have a Pooh birthday cake months before her birthday and never changed her mind...it turned out so cute and yummy! She was spoiled for her Birthday, she had two birthday cakes! Grandma Brenchley made her a cute pink Kitty cake...(that Dan didn't get a picture of).   I feel so terrible we didn't get the pictures or video that I wanted for memory sake.  I did learn a valuable lesson.  Never put Dan in charge of video or pictures!  Grandma Brenchley turned her into a cute little princess with crown and all after she'd gotten out of the tub!

Pheasant Hunting with Dad!

Dan came home from work early about 4:00 p.m. before darkness started to fall, and picked Brody up He saw two roosters out at the farm the day before and wanted to take Brody out shooting. They stopped to gather up Goose and sure enough they shot a pheasant.  Every day when Dan is at work Brody asks me what time he'll be home so he can go with him to shoot birds!  Brodyn's carried a BB gun...with no ammo!  Emmy and I tagged along behind to watch the event!  I had to carry her through the field in front of the office it was so marshy and muddy we had to watch our footing!  We didn't have any luck! The only pheasant we scared up was a female. But we did happen onto an abandoned pheasant nest...too bad the eggs didn't hatch, we may have had better luck!  Brodyn just loves his dad. He's definitely his little shadow!

Halloween and Trunk or Treat!

Trunk or Treat was fun this year, we were lucky to have Camille tag along!  Isn't this a HUGE pumpkin...how do people grow these? Emmy and Brody are sucking on our sweet little old LaRay Olsen's home-made suckers, which she makes every year...they are amazing...and every Halloween her house is a must stop!! Camille and Brody pretended to have a 'comic-book' fight! "WHACK...CLASH...THWACK...BANG!!"  Emmy walked along picking her treats, but she would  think...think...think...which one looked best to choose before she finally made her pick!  Such hard decision to make when your not quite 3yrs old!

Kaden's Halloween Party!

Kaden invited us over for a "ghoulish" Halloween party.  The main course was... "barbecued worms, which did not look appealing! Emmy said to me..."They aren't snakes, they're hot dogs!"  MaRea had  little t-shirts and Halloween iron-on's for each kid to create their own Halloween t-shirt, it was such a cute idea and Emmy absolutely loved it!