Earlier in September Nathan and I went to visit my sister and her family. Their family has expanded and they now have little Erik, their 4th boy. Nathan and I live about 12 hours away and decided to take a trip to visit while my mother was there too. It was a lot of fun to see family and the time went by too quickly before it was time for us to leave. Below are pictures of our trip and I had to start it off with Owen's story telling. He loves to tell stories and gets so animated and it is so funny. The story is broken up in 4 clips. Hope you all get a kick out of it like we did.

We went to a petting zoo and one of the activities was to go fishing. Nathan got the lucky job of putting live worms on the hooks. Glad he was there!
Looks like fishing paid off. Dallin caught a fish!

This looks familiar!

I remembered there was another picture similar to this one taken a couple years ago.......how funny!

Mandy and her family

Grandma with her grandsons

Grandmother and Grandson

Mother and son

Aunt with nephew

I had to hand off Erik to Nathan to go do something. It was sweet to come back and see this.

Isn't Nathan so cute with my nephew Erik.:)

Camping at Garner State Park

To celebrate both Nathan and my birthday we decided to go camping at Garner State Park. This was the first time taking the dogs camping. Buddy did not sleep a wink at all the first night. It was a different environment and so many little sounds through out the night. Most of the time he would sit and just look out the tent, I think at one point I found him laying down but his eyes were wide open. Needless to say, we didn't get much sleep either. Sometimes it is really like our dogs are our children. The next day we went hiking which I failed to bring the camera with us and missed a lot of great pictures............, guess we'll have to go back.:) Afterwards we went kayaking on the Frio river, the dogs too. Everyone kept saying "Oh, look at those cute dogs!" I had the life jacket around Zoey, it was cute. Wish I took a picture but that is hard to do on a kayak.:) When we were done kayaking we decided to see how the dogs would like the water.....ha, ha, ha. I think they thought we were trying to drown them! They were paddling for dear life! At one point Zoey started hyperventilating. The moment we put them in the water they tried swimming back onto shore. If we tried blocking them, they would try to climb on you frantically. Poor things! So that adventure didn't last long but not before we got a pretty funny video clip of Zoey, it reminded me of something shown on funniest home videos. LOL!! The second night after all those adventures and having no sleep the previous night, Buddy slept like a log!:)

I really wasn't eating that entire bag of Cheetos!

Sorry that this is flipped weird. I couldn't fix it afterwards or else I would have had to start all over again putting all these pictures in....oh well.

After being at the river we found this squirrel at our camp site and we were wondering why it was walking funny............then we found that it had eaten both bowels of dog food. LOL!

This was pretty much Buddy's position the first night, Zoey's too sometimes.

Buddy has some determination to make sure he sees what is going on!

People are always surprised that I like camping......Nathan says it is because I am high maintenance. I'll admit that to a certain extent that I am, you should have seen me constantly looking at the ground to make sure I wasn't stepping in an ant pile. But really, as long as there is a bathroom near by and a water spout like this, I can handle it.:)

Sassy Red Head!!

So I decided to make a major change with my hair.......I cut it and now I'm a red head!
It took me a couple days to get used to both the color and cut.
I am finding it fun and that's what I was looking for.....something different and fun.
Nathan likes the color and the cut but of course he likes it longer.

This was our first painting adventure about a year and a half ago, now we made changes...............

This is the new paint color.......it lightens up the room but I kind of miss the blue.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! There is much to be thankful for.

I was supposed to work on Christmas and we were going to drive out on the 26th to see my family for New Years but thank you to my boss:) she told me a couple days earlier that I could have it off. That was sooooo nice of her.:) We decided to make it a surprise for my family. We drove 19 hours straight with an hour and a half nap and made it on Christmas day around 6:30pm. It was definitely a surprise to everyone:)

Buddy and Zoey were very good putting up with us wanting to take pictures of them with the Christmas tree. Zoey looks like she doesn't want to move because she doesn't know what is on her neck.:)

It sure doesn't look like it's Christmas time does it?

This day we were going to the beach and while there going to fish. So we stopped here to catch little bait fish.

It was a perfect day to go to the beach. Not too hot and not too cold.:)

This is Ethan, the oldest of my sister Mandy's 3 sons. He didn't know I was going to take his picture.:) It's still cute:)

This is Owen, the youngest. He was so fascinated by the fish being caught.

This is Dallin, the 2ND oldest. This is such a cute picture.

I think he was checking out a big bird that was over to the side.

This is Nathan's favorite past time. We are so sad that church volleyball season is over.

He got to play around at the beach and then later that night my sisters Stephanie and Bethanie took us with them to play volleyball with some of their friends.

Doesn't he look so cute, I love watching him play.:)

My Dad got a motorcycle for his birthday. What a present!

He says it was to help with gas....LOL. I'm sure it was, but it is also for pleasure.:)

I went for a ride with him and at the beginning I just kept saying little prayers that we would be safe. When you haven't been on one for over 10 years, you feel so exposed to everything when you are riding on it. On the ride home though, I was getting used to it and felt safer.:) My Dad said that he felt that way too the first week he got the bike and if he didn't stop feeling that way he was going to return it. But as you can see, he got over it.:)

This is the first time that we have all been brunettes at the same time. We had a hair color party and of course had to take a picture of the outcome.

It's not very often that we get to have pictures taken of all of us. It's usually one of us in the picture. So we took as many opportunities as we could.:)

This was taken in my parents back yard. The bird to the right had an injured leg and stayed in that spot for a very long time, so his friends stayed close too.














This is such a good picture of Buddy.

When you say"do you want a treat?" this is the reaction you get from him. Zoey knows what that means too but she just perks up her ears as you see.

Here I am with some of my siblings, Stephanie, Klinton, and me.:)

We set our cameras on timers and took some pictures of everyone. I think this one was the best of us all being silly.:)

Thank you to Nathan's brother who works for Disney, he sent us some passes to Disney World. We started off at Hollywood Studios........

Here we are on the boat to take us over to Epcot.......

We did a trade with another family and took pictures for each other

Right as we got to the Magic Kingdom, we got to take a picture with Pluto.:) We were the big kids at heart.

Can you tell what ride we went on?

(Pirates)

GRRRRRRRRRR!!!!

Scary! LOL!:)

At the end of our day doing a fast track version of visiting the Disney parks, we met up with my parents for dinner in Orlando. We had all you can eat snow crab......YUMMY!

It was a great way to end the day....great company and great food.:)