Matt and his letters

Matthew has recently learned all his letters and sounds, and now his new thing is to write them! I didn't teach him how to do this, he just likes to draw so he picked it up on his own. Here's a picture of a paper with letters he was drawing last Sunday. This is what he does when he says he's "writing letters to grandma and grandpa."

You can see he actually wrote the letters H, C, N, Q, P, and others. On the back side of this page he drew an S, and although I think that was on accident, he was very excited when he did it.

Here's a video I took tonight of him writing his letters. He's actually ambidextrous, so this video shows him writing with both hands, holding the crayon absolutely perfect.

I have another video showing him writing other letters besides H, but for some reason it was not uploading into my blog. But this one is still cute. He's so talented!

December Fun

Tonight for Family Home Evening we decided to make a Nativity Set out of Legos. Not the perfect little scene you'd expect, but we still had a lot of fun!

I think the wise men look a little frightening! And the flash of the camera really makes the angel glow.

Matt loves to give hugs to Alex.

I was playing with Alex after FHE and got some great smiles out of him. He is so cute!

Here's a cute little picture of Matt.

Chris had a blast lighting the house for Christmas this year. It's the first house we've owned and he went crazy! He built the star above the garage and wrapped lights around it. I think it looks beautiful.

Decorations in the house...
We recently had some family pictures taken. I took my camera there as well and these are some of the shots I got.

This picture shows my handsome little dude...and the next absolutely cracks me up. Check out the expression on his face! With one eyebrow raised and those cute little lips he's thinking, "Yeah, I am one cute kid!"

This was taken on the day he turned 4 months. He's getting so big already!

We love this time of year and we've been having so much fun together. Oh, and our forecast calls for snow tonight and tomorrow. We'll see if we're that lucky!

Ghost Town Fun

Today the weather was so beautiful we decided (after Carolyn invited us!) to take a family trip to the ghost town of Grafton, Utah. We had so much fun! When we first arrived we were greeted by all the ghosts:

Actually, we were quite shocked to see all those people there. We were expecting the town to be vacant. Instead, we found all these people there who had just competed in the Butch Cassidy 10K. Luckily, they'd just finished the race and were handing out the medals and so they weren't there for too much longer. We found a nice shady place for a picnic and ate our lunch while the crowd cleared out.

While everyone was finishing eating, my two monkeys, er..I mean BOYS...entertained themselves on the fences and on a tractor.

Here's a picture Chris took of me and Alex:

After lunch we went and played on a rope swing someone had attached to a nearby tree.

And in case you were wondering...the babies were having fun, too! They were just chillin' out in their strollers and watching all the kids play.

We finally decided it was time to visit the buildings of Grafton. We got to walk in one home that consisted of a bedroom, a kitchen, a main room and a loft above.

The other buildings we could only peer in through the windows. The biggest one we thought was maybe a hotel or something, but it was actually a house.

They also had a schoolhouse/church--like on Little House on the Prairie.

Caleb also found a way to have fun here.

Here's a brief history of Grafton, if you can read the small print.

On the way home we stopped at the Rockville Cemetary where my great-great-great-great grandmother was buried.

One more stop before home brought us to a park in Hurricane so the kids could finish burning off their energy (is that even possible?) I know I was tired!

Halloween Pics

Halloween was fun this year but not as well-planned-out as I'd have liked. I wanted to make a fun spooky dinner like last year, but I just ran out of time! Here's a few pictures from Halloween night.

The boys in their costumes. Caleb was batman and Matthew was a monkey. Alex was a penguin.

Caleb took this next picture of me. It's kind of dark. I was a witch. I added the orange triangles at the bottom of the dress because it was a little short.

Our ward did a trunk-or-treat that night. It was pretty fun. Matthew doesn't remember trick-or-treating last year, so it was fun to watch him figure it out this year. All he knew was that he was getting dressed up in a monkey costume, then we went to the parking lot at the park and he walked around and people gave him candy. You could just see the wheels turning in his head as he was getting the hang of it. It was pretty cute because after he'd get his candy he would tell the people "thank you," but if they didn't hear him because of his soft voice he would stand there and say it over and over again until they'd say "you're welcome," and then he'd move on to the next trunk. Such a sweetie! All my pictures from this point on are of Matt because Caleb found his friend there and they went around together and had a great time, and Alex was asleep.Can you tell his basket is heavy from his load of candy?Digging into the goods.Cute little monkey eating his candy!

Abe Lincoln slept here last night...

and here's the proof!