Basketball Games

Travis and Jay D. had games against Juneau. We had wonderful housing boys. It was a great weekend and tons of fun.

Ari's LCH has relapsed

Ari is back at Primary Children's Hospital. She will be there for 2-3 months. She's been receiving chemo treatments and blood transfusions every 3 weeks since she left the hospital. Doctors said that her cancer is worse than the first time she came in. They have only one resort left to try. She will receive the highest dose of chemo that can be given for 5 days in a row. Then she will remain in the hospital for 3 weeks to recover from the chemo because it is so gruesome. Then the process will start over...5 days chemo, 3 weeks recovery. It can be done 3 times. The Doctors told them she has about a 20% chance of survival. Please keep Travis and Haley in your prayers.

Jay D's Birthday

My nephew Jay D. has been living with us for this past school year. He is Dona's second child. Him and Travis are only 3 weeks apart. They have always been really close cousins. When we were visiting family this past summer they (Travis and Jay D.) talked Dona and Corey into letting Jay D. come up here for one school year. Corey wasn't super thrilled, but he gave in. We've enjoyed having him with us. You haven't seen him in very many pictures because he is usually taking the pictures for us.

Happy 16th birthday Jay D.

Problem Solving

Now this story is hilarious. Here is how it goes....Brent and Jake have (had) a bad  habit of sleeping in the living room. One night Brent woke up in the middle of the night. He went down into the garage to get his blanket out of the dryer. The one he wanted to sleep with was still drying when he went to bed. Well, when he came back up the stairs the door was locked. Some of my door knobs are so annoying because from the inside you don't notice that they are locked because they still turn. It was 3:00 am, everyone was sleeping. He screamed for somebody to come open the door for him, but nobody heard him.  

He found a piece of paper, wrote a note and slipped it under the door. The note read: Brent is stuck down here (with an arrow pointing down.) Nobody woke up and noticed:) 

So next, he got a hammer and made a hole in the door. He figured that a hole would allow him to scream louder. Surely, we would hear him now! Nope, everyone was still snoozing.

So he created a bigger hole by the door knob. This time he was able to slip his hand through the hole to unlock the door.

We have a huge storage room connected to the garage. Inside of it is a twin mattress. Travis gave Brent a hard time and said, "Why would you go through all of that? I would have just slept on the bed in the storage room." I told Travis that Brent was thinking outside the box and that he was a problem solver:) Good thing I plan on getting rid of those ugly brown doors. 

Christmas Day

Santa's Elf Distracted

Travis who was suppose to be helping us on Christmas Eve. Instead he decided to give himself a "baller" haircut for the basketball tournament that was going to be taking place. I told him my clippers were broken so he couldn't do it right then (and I needed his help with other things). Well, he still doesn't take no for an answer. When he wasn't helping and I hadn't seen him in a while this is what I found. He was trying to shave his head with Ron's electric razor. I couldn't even get mad.... I just laughed, shook my head, and said, you get what you deserve. It took him about an hour or more to get it all off. He recruited Jay D. to help him.

Christmas Eve

On Christmas Eve we have the typical pajama tradition. We all open our pajamas, put them on and then have a spiritual evening watching Christmas stories about the birth of Christ. This year we had the missionaries over for Christmas Eve. They too got a matching pair of pajamas. It was really fun.

This was everyone getting ready to open the pajamas.

This is why I suppose the missionaries love it over here. It's always wild and crazy. Yes, we replaced our mexican plants (tomato topsy turveys) with a pull up bar. When the missionaries got to our house the kids had music pumping and they were having pull up contests. As you can see my nephew Jay D. wins the contest. He can do 10 pull ups with his legs held out at 90 degrees.

Blog Book

For those of you that have google reader......I apologize ahead of time for the overflow of posts. I am so far behind and I want to get my 2009 book printed. This is my blog book from 2008. I did it at blurb.com. The quality is awesome if you haven't already done it. It is so worth it. I remember I upgraded the paper quality. I don't remember it being too much more. The pages are thick. It surpassed my expectations. I will say though that it was a pain in the butt. I cursed it the whole time I was doing it. I swore that I wasn't going to use them again. I can't remember what I didn't like, but something about it I wasn't going to do it again. Then it came.....and yep I will do it every year. So here come the catch up posts.

Farewell to Elder Bailey

Elder Bailey was transferred three days before Thanksgiving. We were so bummed and so was he. He was certain that he would get to stay through the Holidays. This was the night before he left. We started taking pictures and I guess it turned into a muscle contest with the boys. And my friend Lupe called our tomato plants our mexican plants. She made fun of them all the time. We took them down when we put up our Christmas tree.