December stuff

Whitney, Cody, and Tyler came to Park City a couple weeks before Christmas, so we got to hang out with them. Here they are at Whitney's inlaw's condo in Park City.
This is Cody trying out the snow hill he made for the kids to sled down while we were waiting to go real sledding.

And this is Tyler shoving Rivers down the hill on a popped swimming pool.

Another pic of Whit and the kids - they kind of got snowed in at our house for a couple of days (which we were happy about).

Bonnie, my Dad's little sister came with her family to stay in their house in Park City, so we got to spend an evening with them. It was a really great (and delicious) night. We don't get to see them very often. Their house has a bunk room for the kids that we all loved.

Here's the whole Bushnell-Quigley crew that got together that night.

Tyler got to come to Rivers' Christmas program and she got to show him her school room.

This is how we go to church sometimes - pulling D in the little sled. He loves it and grabs snow the whole way and eats it.

This is the best nativity ever - everything is live, including the camel in the background of this picture. You go through a big entrance where everyone is dressed and pretending to speak Hebrew, then you go to a little village where you get hot chocolate and see the camel and then you keep walking along a trail to the stable scene complete with all the animals and a real baby (luckily they had heat lamps because it was FREEZING this night).

We braved the roads and weather and drove to Oregon for Christmas. We finally made it there on Christmas Eve. We didn't think we were going to make the trip this year, but Rivers was so nice in her incessant pleading to go to Oregon for Christmas that Carlos was able to make the trip happen. This is a picture of the road going over the Santiam Pass.

#1 on Rivers Christmas list this year was a robe! Here we are in our matching blue robes on Christmas morning at the Bushnell house.In front of the mammoth christmas tree we searched forever for on our friend's mountain.

Tyler always gets turned into the playground. Here he is with 4 kids on him.

Rivers and Madison spent hours out in the barn in the loft at my Mom's house. Here they are with make shift lassos. It's funny to secretly listen to them when they are pretending. They have some good imaginations.

At Whitney's house on New Year's - Rivers turned into a snowman when we turned the jets on with bubble bath.

Rivers got to try out her new bike (my old banana seat bike from when I was her age, nicely refurbished by Tanner) while I ran around sugarhouse park on a very chilly day.
Needless to say, we were the only ones at the park this day.

wearing Carlos' boots. Pretty funny watching him try to walk around the house in these.

Rivers looking like quite the Diva after a friend's birthday party that included make-overs at a beauty school. You can't see in these pictures how much glitter she has in her hair, but it's been weeks and I'm still finding it places.

C.Dizzle has some moves!

Fall Festivities

Girl's date night to go see High School Muscal 3

Terrible picture, but this is Rivers testing to get her yellow belt in karate - she passed and is very proud to show her belt to everyone.

We like breakfast in bed (it's actually the only way I can get Rivers to wake up for school)

For Thanksgiving Rivers made everyone (the whole Nuno bunch) Indian names and wrote them on name tags. Dwight fittingly was Whispering Owl.

She also got dressed up in her Native American dress from a previous halloween (glad I made it too big) and was named Beautiful Sky.

Cousin Salesi and CD after the meal. They're still kind of in awe of eachother.

Dwight likes to copy Rivers and be right by her, so I like this pic of him pretending to lay down and read while Rivers does her reading.

Early snowstorm. CD is wearing Rivers old coat and her little pink mittens because the snowstorm was a surprise and he didn't have any of his own cold weather gear.

Now he's set!

Rough mornings-oatmeal from head to toe- he insists on feeding himself
I took the kids on an amazingly beautiful hike up Big Cottonwood Canyon called Stairs Gulch.

We didn't see one person, and the leaves were AMAZING! Check out that backdrop. It looks fake and you can barely see the trail going through it.

Go Mustangs! Rivers played 5 on 5 soccer.

At the zoo.

My little owl and tough supergirl.

At the Peterson family reunion

Wheeler Farms where Rivers got to milk a cow and my son sported a belly shirt.

Even his morning face is pretty darn cute.

Tanner's birthday - we celebrated with my super healthy zucchini/flaxseed cupcakes after ultimate frisbee.

My brother Jason and his family (that's Diana) came to visit family and go to football games. Here we are decked out in our Oregon State Beaver gear. We all decided that University of Utah fans are just about the worst - so rude to us, but maybe it was because the unranked Beavs were spanking them until the last second of the game at the Utes home field.

The next night we got to go to Logan and watch BYU win. I only own the old school BYU gear from my days there.

Cousins making pancakes together.

We impulsively decided to put a sprinkler system in by ourselves so we wouldn't be the only ones on the block with a brown lawn again. Turned out to be a little bit more involved than we were prepared for. We did it though and boy did it feel good to see those sprinklers sprinkle.

We needed a walkway to our driveway from the front door so I collected rocks that were in our soil and unearthed from excavating sprinkler trenches. I scrubbed them all up, got a book from the library on constructing pathways, dug 8 inches down with a pick-axe (what a wonderful tool) the length of the path, shoveled in a layer of gravel, compacted, shoveled in a layer of sand, compacted, mixed up 5 bags of mortar, and wiggled in all of the stones like a puzzle and voila, I finished my cobblestone pathway.

Here's a picture of the completed project (it runs along the driveway too so we don't step out of our car onto the grass). This also shows the new grass coming up that I seeded after the sprinklers were done. Thanks to Whitney for sending me free grass seed and cool little bulbs to plant throughout the grass. Spring will be fun to see everything come up and plant little beauties along my path that I am so proud of doing all by myself. It reminds me of all those cobblestones I walked on in Germany.