Merry Christmas Family

We wanted to tell you all Merry Christmas.  We are so excited to see all of you

at the Smith Family Christmas Party!!

Drive safe and get ready to have some fun but meanwhile have

an AMAZING Christmas with your Families.  Remember

to enjoy and make an extra effort to remember

the Christ in Christmas.

We love you!!

Yearly Smith Camping Trip

Our annual Smith Camping trip

Pictures Say It ALL!!haha

WEll  it all began one normal camping day... oh wait what hi Britton!!

Next... Dinner time... Jody we love your face in this you really are enjoying this maybe its that grilled mushroom!!!

NOtice Fork in one hand Dirt in the other!!

Zoey You just loved being around dadda.

HMMM!!  Wait 2 hands now = Dirt

Zoey what ya talkin about !!!

 Zoey's first attempt at  Cinnamon Bears... Maybe Peyton's also!!haha

Our Wonderfully, Beautiful, Glorious Fire!!

 Ange's first attempt at carving a Magnificent Masterpiece!!!
hmm how did that go by the way?

AHHH!!  NO DIRT IN HANDS=ALL OVER FACE!!

Talking about goofing off

Great... but just amateur

AWESOME... THAT'S PERFECT HA!!

Awesome hanging out time!!
Perfect family fun Album!

Work Christmas Party and a New Year!!

 We have such a great blessing in which Al has a job working in the field he's always wanted.  Right now there are 3 men in total so Al stays pretty busy.  He loves it and honestly I LOVE IT!!  He gets up for work happy, he comes home happy, and he's happy at work!  It's such a blessing so many look for a job like this their entire lives.  The best part of it is that they are helping Al get his degree so he can further help the company and visa versa!  We love it!!  Last night I had the chance to meet some of the great people that work with him and those that gave Alex a chance at such a magnificent shot is his life.

We went to his company Christmas party and I've never felt such a Christmas spirit in a company party EVER!! It felt so good to be around people that honestly spread the right type of Christmas cheer!!  Along with so many great programs and events they will be doing for others in the community they brought 2 very important people that helped begin the Christmas spirit.

We met the man that played the piano.  He plays all over and currently plays in Nordstroms.  He played so beautifully...  Gary, the head over the company, introduced us to him.  The miraculous part about him is that he is blind.  He was so cheerful and his mom takes him to all of his events.  The second man is actually Gary's brother.   He was described as the most cheerful man there.  "Not a mean bone in his body"  He was so happy and oh yeah...he has down syndrome but what does that matter!.  He was surprised with his favorite things to do...  a big box of crayons a jumbo coloring book and newspaper to tear strips from!!

The description the unbelievable talents and happiness that a couple of men can bring just prove that we have all that we need to be happy.  Family, Friends, the Gospel, our health, and the potential to do so much more!  Times like these are perfect to re-evaluate your priorities in your life, it sure has been for me.  The building is gorgeos the room magnificent and the people happy.  We are blessed with so much  Happy Holidays!!!

Janitors

What a fun book to read! I have been waiting to read this for awhile I've even seen it aired on the news.  When I received this book from my editor at Squeaky Clean Reads to review you can only imagine that I was stoked.  Well of course it's a story for younger children.  I was a bit shocked at the rudeness of some of the adults to the younger kids but I guess there ends up being a reason for it all!!  This book was a fun read yes a bit different, but I guess that's expected from a book with a cover like this!  There is a character that bullies some kids around and it gets me a bit riled up. Read the rest of my review on Squeakycleanreads.com www.squeakycleanreads.com.  The review will soon be posted!!

I sure hope that this is fun read for the younger kids and for you older kids :) 

Salt Lake and Logan Temple

We decided to make a round trip to temple sights we even made a weekend out of it.  One of my bucket list goals is to see as many temples from around the world and create our temple Scrapbook and what better way to start than your on state!!  We visited Salt Lake Temple first.  Our awesome friends, Matt and Connie Lyons babysat Zoey for the evening.  I've got to say Salt Lake is a very beautiful temple.  I forgot to recharge camara batteries so I had to skip on pictures.  No worries though we visit SL Temple a lot that we'll get another picture its just a shame we didn't get it for the day we went through a session.  It's great to know that we walked the halls of our prophet and apostles of our latter days!!

Next day we hit the Logan Temple.  I was actually very shocked with how beautiful it really is!  This is my second favorite temple... I think!!  We went with Shem and Jen and we where so grateful that Jenny's family could watch Zoey for us!!

Such a great experience and a HUGE thank you to the Lyons and Jen's family for helping us on important dates!!

If You want the rainbow

I've got to admit... we've had some B-A-UTIFUL rainbows here in town!!  I've got to say it's the area we live in coming out of the canyon and all.  I've heard this place is windy and rainy because of it's location and I thought bummer....  I remembered a really great quote we received in relief society one time and I figure to share it.

"If you want the RAINBOW you have to put up with the RAIN"

pretty basic right, but it hits home!!  Now whenever I have a bad day I do my best to remember this simple saying!!

Back to Labor Day!

So no questions here please?  Those of you who read this blog, it's actually meant as a family journal (which I have talked about before) anyways so I use it to write down what's going on, what happened with who and some of my fav pics of course I just load the jist!!  The reason being... I enjoy to scrapbook and lets face it  I don't keep up with printing, collecting all the photos I want from relatives and writing memories down.  NOw there are many posts that I post up here that I know I will not get around to journaling in our scrapbook so I write them down and occasionally I go through my posts and make sure I have everything I want.  Of course keeping your own journal is great, but I can't put pics with faces and sometiems I forget what pictures I have!!  I"m sure some of you go through that.  So that and of course to keep in touch with fam and friends and anyone interested in reading a  little bit about a small family!!  So I think I wrote all that just to confirm why I am doing this haha!!

Anyways back to Labor day!!  (If I can remeber everything)

 Zoey has been enjoying nintendo remotes!  We think it's so funny she plays along with us it's so cute! 

Zoey also enjoyed the parades.  Spanish Fork had a pure horse parade the next morning we watched the main parade!!

 We didn't know how Zoey would take to these but she was very curious and actually enjoyed it.

 There where so many floats but we thought these where the best.  The one on the left is a game board float promoting family time how many times do we see things like this??  WE thought it was awesome

Springville is known for being a city of art and so their float showed!! REally creative

 Chase and Quita met up with us to watch it and don't ask what Zoey was doing!!

 This was rather neat...  They had 5 jeeps and 4 of them would all climb on top of the one it was really neat!

 I was soooo anxious to see the quilt show... I hope I could enter the show next year we'll have to see!!  There where so many incredible quilts, I seriously just randomly clicked to chose the pictures.  SO NEAT!

 We went to the carnival and watched fireworks that night. We really enjoyed spending a day together and the best part of it is that we are walking distance so we can come and go as we pleased!!We love Spanish Fork.

Raspberry Pie

We want to teach our kids to work and lets face it... we don't have a farm we can plant a garden, do chores and other basics. We really want to teach out kids to outcome of good labor is a good reward but since we only have Zoey and Zoey is about 1yr and a half we can't take them out weeding or anything like that.  Alex and I wanted to check out the raspberry patches since we want to start growing rasberries and hopefully have an opportunity to have a small one later on in life.

I decided to check it out.  One of my friends asked me to come along.  We left early saturday morning and us three girls went picking.  It was so much fun the picking the enjoyment and great thing is many families where out there themselves. 

The Work:  picking every raspberry by hand and choosing the BEST most delicious sweet red raspberries!

 The Patience: Making and stopping yourself from eating the raspberries!!

 The Outcome: A delicious Raspberry pie that you can share with neighbors, family, friends, and of course yourself!

The Teach:  By working hard you can get something even better!!

We love that we can use this and we are so excited to go together as a family next year!!  Hopefully we'll have our one small bush by then!  Honestly this was the most delicious pie we have ever had (not just said by me).

The love of an early tradition!