Scott's Mom turns 60!

Last weekend we went up to Logan for Scott's Mom's surprise birthday party. Here is the awesome cake that Robin, Scott's sister, made for her Mom. It was really cool and yes it had 60 candles on it!!

We went down early to the house while she was out of town and decorated everything in black. It was great! She was surprised!!

Zack used his own money to buy Grandma a gift!

Blake and Robin gave her a book she'd wanted to read. Brad gave her a gift certificate to a restaurant.

Cassidy wrote a book for her and so did Haven. They were both very creative and fun! Lara made homemade bread for her Mom and gave them to her in cute apple baskets.

Lisa's family gave her a new comforter set for her room and she loved the colors!

Scott organized (and I helped a LOT) putting together a scrapbook of memories from all of her kids. It also included photos from her childhood so Scott and I had fun scanning photos to make the album reflect her life. It was an endeavour but now Scott is a seasoned scrapbooker!! The album turned out really neat!! Here is grandma with all the grand kids that were there holding her album.

After we opened gifts the kids put on a little talent show of sorts with skits...

musical numbers and fun dance routines. Afterwards we had dinner. It was a fun celebration!

Hill Air Force Base Trip

The kids had fall break last week and it was fun to have some time to spend as a family without all the usual commitments!! Since we were going to drive to Logan for Scott's Mom's party we decided to plan a trip to the Hill Air Force base museum. So we went a few hours earlier so we could spend time at the museum before heading to Logan. Here are some photos of my kids enjoying the museum.

He sure looks like a great fighter pilot!

I think that helmet is just a little too big for Kyler!

My kids had a great time and sometime when Kaylie and I are having a "Mother Daughter Date" Scott will bring the kids back so they can explore more!

Awesome Planes!

The boys were SOO into these planes. Dallyn especially wanted to know everything there was to know about each plane. It was so funny seeing how excited they were. Especially when they saw the machine guns that came out of the bottom of the planes which reminded them of Star Wars. Definitely a boys place to visit!

Cameron amazed that this airplane tire was taller than he was.

I loved the stars on the bottom of the air force planes.

Cameron hanging on to a few of the machine guns...like I said..boy stuff.

Kyler really enjoyed collecting rocks and constantly wanted me to take photos of different ones, so I took many photos of rocks. Here is one I will share with you. =0)

Mom with the kids...=)

Kaylie with one of the retired Air Force One planes.

Kaylie and Kyler

Here's what Kaylie and Kyler have been up to....

Kaylie turned 12 and so she had the opportunity to decide about getting her ears pierced!! Here is the before...

And here is the after photo!! She looks so daring with earrings. She has to wear the same ones for about 6 weeks and then she can try on some new ones. She had a fun time shopping with Aunt Laura for jewelry for her birthday.

Kaylie has started working on her personal progress since she is in Young Women's now. She had Young Women's in Excellence the other day and she did her value focusing on scripture study...so this is a photo we took for her display board.

Kyler just finished his first sports event ever. He played on the "Green Lightsabers" team coached by his Dad! It was pretty fun to watch and Kyler sure had a great time. You sure would not miss them in theeir crazy green outfits! Here are some photos of Kyler in action.

Way to go Kyler!!

Mid October

Ok so I need to take a break from our NY trip because I am so behind on blogging. So I'm going to update a bit of our 'current events' and then I'll go back to the rest of our New York trip.

October 11th we celebrated our 14th Anniversary! These are the pretty flowers I received from my love.

As a gift to Scott I made his favorite dinner..and it took me about all day. I did Thanksgiving dinner which isn't an easy task on weekday with all the crazy things going on!! Scott was definitely surprised since I really don't cook much these days!!

The real labor of love was making his favorite sugar cookies...wow my kitchen was such a mess and it is really a lot of work!! By the end of that day I remembered why I don't enjoy cooking!!! But I wanted to do something meaningful for our anniversary!

That same week Kaylie had a musical performance. She was Jessie in her musical theater concert and she sang the song "When somebody loved me". She has really developed her talent of singing. Here she is dressed up for her performance.

Cameron wanted me to take a photo of his creation the other day. He was making snack and was excited about his "smiley face" snack.

Kyler also loves to help in the kitchen. Using a smaller rolling pin he made a bunch of his own cookies for our anniversary dinner!

The Grandin Printing Press

This was one of my favorite tours on our trip to Palmyra.

We went to the Grandin Print Shop where the first 5000 copies of the Book of Mormon were printed. We had a fantastic tour there by a sister missionary.

Look at all the languages the Book of Mormon is now printed in!

I loved seeing the copies of the Book of Mormon there in the bookshop.

Scott and I at Grandin's Printing Press.

This is where the contract was signed for the printing of the Book of Mormon.

Original copies of the Book of Mormon..so neat!

The pages of the Book of Mormon were large before they were cut and they used to pull them up and down the different levels of the printing shop with pulleys and ropes!! It's amazing to see what they went through back in the day just to print the scriptures!

They demonstrated how these were inked up and used at the press for preparing the pages for printing.

Each of these cases was filled with lots of tiny trays of letters, what tedious work it would have been to line up the words letter by letter!! It's from the process of printing back in the late 1800's that we get the the phrase 'upper case' and 'lower case' because the letters were kept in either the upper or lower cases depending on which letter they were. I thought that was fun to learn!!

Scott standing in the printing press, it was really interesting to see how everything worked and how they would have made the pages back then!

This was the finished product...interesting how the lettering was not straight as they had to do each one individually and sometimes the worker didn't have the steadiest of hands. Boy how far things have come!!

Here they showed us how they bound the books, stretched the skins and put the leather covers on.

The process of binding them was so interesting. How they used string and their paper cutters of the day...its so amazing to me to see all that they did. An amazing effort and such a big job for a small town printing press in Palmyra. Scott and I were surprised, after all this time, how small and quaint Palmyra is even today!