Family Pictures

My parents

My good looking brother

All of us

This Fall we finally got our family pictures taken.  It's been a very long time since the last time we had family pictures taken.  I dare say you'd be surprised.  The last family pictures we had taken Kaylie and Rylie were 9 months old.  Yes!! We were way overdue!!  My amazing friend Sherri Nelson and her brother in law took our family pictures.  In total they took almost 700 pictures.  And we had a huge group.  20+ people and several different groups and 5 separate families.  They did an awesome job!! Thanks you two.  They are amazing!!  I did not however get pictures of my kids that night.  Wyatt was tired of posing and smiling his cute smile.  After a while he'd had it.  Sooo, a few weeks ago on a warm Fall morning I dressed up the kids.  Curled the girls hair and got everyone looking nice.  We jumped in the car and headed to Salem ponds.  The pictures of my kids I took myself.  I was quite impressed considering I have no knowledge of photography.  But how can you not take a great photo when you have such cute kids to take pictures of?  And hopefully we don't wait another 9 years before our next family photo shoot.  :P

Happy Halloween

Make a slideshow design

Happy Halloween!! It sure seemed different having McKenzie in Jr. High.  She wasn't allowed to dress up and Halloween for her was just a normal school day.  And since she's getting older and couldn't dress up at school we also decided that this was the last year that she could trick or treat.  Kaylie and Rylie got to dress up and do all the fun Halloween festivities including the school parade.  McKenzie did dress up Halloween night as a witch, Kaylie was a spider princess, Rylie was a bat princess and Wyatt was a cowboy.  

We did our traditional routine again this year.  After school was out we headed to the cemetery to put Coltons pumpkin on his grave.  Can't forget about my special boy!  Then we headed to Grandma and Grandpa Godfreys for a quick bowl of soup and visiting.  Stopped at Grandpa Connellys and Great Grandma Connellys.  The only difference this  year was that our ward hosted a trunk or treat.  Boy!! I sure liked that better.  Each auxillary was in charge of a game and all the trick or treating was done in one hour and the kids scored more candy than they'll ever be able to eat in a lifetime.  We were home by 7:30 and in bed at normal time for school the next day.  But dang,  it seemed to be such a busy day that I forgot to take pictures.  I need to be better making sure that I get some good pictures.  I almost made the kids dress up again the next day just so I could get some good pictures of all of them together.   :)

Happy 3rd Birthday Wyatt

We had a nice soup lunch to celebrate Wyatts birthday.  He is trying to lick the bubbles from the dry ice.

Cars Birthday cake.

"Lightning Queen" cupcakes

Where in the world has the time gone and when did my baby grow up so fast?  I can't believe my little Wyatt is already 3 years old. He was so excited for his birthday.  We had soup and salad for lunch and homemade rootbeer to drink.  I found this cute cake on the web and tried my best to make it look like the one  I saw.  It wasn't super cute but cute enough for me and Wyatt loved it.  We were glad to have the whole family join us in celebrating Wyatt's birthday.  I wish I could have gotten more pictres but dang! My camera died just as we started opening presents.  Shoot!!  Wyatt had a great day though.  Thanks to all the family who helped us celebrate such a sweet little boy!!

Wyatts Trip to Cabelas

Love his face.  He's concentrating so hard on those fish

Two cute girls

What a dozer.  LOL!!

 

So we had to do a little bribing in order for Wyatt to start using the potty.  He would go pee on the potty fine but refused to go #2.  For the longest time Rich bribed Wyatt and told him that if he would go on the potty and not have any accidents for 3 days he would take him to Cabelas to see the animals and buy him a bb gun.  Wyatt was great.  He pretty much potty trained himself in less than a week.  And sure enough, Rich kept his promise and off we went to buy him a bb gun.  We have yet to put any bb's in it but he loves to play with it.  Doesn't matter if it shoots bb's or not.

Happy 14th Birthday Colton

Writing letters to Colton

Daddy helping Wyatt write a letter to his brother.

 

Happy 14th Birthday Colton!!

I can't believe how much my life has changed in the last 14 years since Colton came to our family.  This year I wanted to do something different for his birthday.  I bought a bunch of balloons to leave at his grave and I bought a balloon for each of us family members.  We sat down and wrote Colton a little note and tied it to the balloons and let them go.  I wish I could have gotten pictures of our balloon launch.  It ended up that our notes were a little heavy and weighed the balloons down plus it was windy and raining and the balloons didn't fly as well.  We ended up taking the notes off but by the time I was able to take a picture most of the balloons had floated away.  Good thing to remember for next year...write smaller notes.  

I didn't really think that writing notes to Colton would have been so emotional for the girls.  Even though he was born and died before any of them were born they still feel the effects of him not being with us and miss him immensely.  We definitely feel the void of him not being here. 

Last trip to the Cabin 2011

 

Here are a few pictures from our last trip to the cabin this year.  Wyatt had a ball playing with his little cousin Ryan.  They walked hand in hand everywhere they went.  When it was time to go neither one of them wanted to leave each other.  I think they loved having someone their own age to play with and really enjoyed each others company.  What cute kids!!