KUNG FU FIGHTING

Congratulations, Blake!!! Blake earned his green belt with a white stripe at his karate testing. I especially like karate because the kids are supposed to do "homework" such as taking out the garbage and making their beds. They also recite a karate pledge which states, "I will respect my parents". Yeah!

Happy New Year!

It has been a crazy month!!! That is my lame excuse for not updating this in a long time! Here are some pics from our Christmas festivities. Our big family gift from Santa was a Wii. It's really fun, even for the parents! Santa also replaced the hiddeous light fixture above our table with this one! The old one was basically an upside down plastic bowl hanging from a brassy gold

chain! YUCK! Ray will now take that one to the desert and "shoot it up" with the new shotgun he got for Christmas (thanks, Sam!). All of my siblings were in town, so my mom sprung a last minute family photo shoot on us. I'm sure she did not give advanced warning this year because she didn't want to allow time for mustache growth, which was planned by Richard for last year's picture. Please note the pic of my siblings and I, in which my brothers are not making silly faces of any kind. This is a monumental development, because one or both of these lads have been making some goofy expression in every family picture (including my wedding photos) since 1982. My mother promptly blew that one up and framed it because she was so delighted. I made the birthday sign for my mom's Christmas present, thanks to the idea I stole off Ashley's blog. We were able to go to Utah for a short visit after Christmas and spend time with Ray's fam. The kids were in heaven running wild with their cousins for 4 days. We weren't surprised in the least that Marinne and Blake caught strep throat! We did a temple session with Ray's parents and most of his siblings at the Jordan River temple. We also went to BYU to bowl and then feasted at Brick Oven. It makes me so happy to go back there, because I have such great college memories. New Years Eve was a real party - driving back from Utah all day and then sorting through the Christmas mess and unpacking. Someday I will have some sort of real party on New Year's Eve. Oh Well. Happy New Year! My resolutions are too many to mention, but the main one involves the fact that I have recently seen some scaaaary numbers on the scale and am now eating a Special K bar for lunch.

Gingerbread Houses

For FHE a couple weeks ago (that's how bad I am at updating this) we made ginger bread houses out of graham crackers. They were really easy to "build" because the icing is just like glue. I wanted to leave them out until Christmas for decorations, but as I suspected, many of them have suffered roof dammage and are missing their gumdrop shingles. Too hard for the kids to resist, I guess! Oh well, they were fun to make. I was quite impressed with Ray's skill. He had a masterpiece finished in no time at all. He says his mom trained him well. The kids also had fun decorating our "hodge-podge" tree. Many times I have thought about having a "put together" tree with matching ornaments and everything placed symmetrically, but I have decided I like our crazy tree, with ornaments ranging from a gold Navoo Temple to Chewbacca holding his weapon! Someday soon enough I'll have my perfect tree, but while the kids are little this one is just right. We decorated the tree right after Thanksgiving and only one ornament has been busted so far! We're doing great!

FUN, FUN, FUN!!!!!!!!

Last Saturday I took all of the children shopping and it will NEVER happen again! I wouldn't have done it, but it was necessary because all of them needed new Sunday shoes and clothes, and you can't buy shoes without trying them on. Whoever is in the kids' Sunday shoe making business is filthy rich , because have you noticed that new ones get tight much faster than tennis shoes or any other kind of shoe? I feel like every Sunday we are cramming the kids' feet into their shoes while they complain that they don't fit anymore. Then I reply, "We just got these so you have to wear them one more week". We then forget they are too tight until the following Sunday when we shove them on yet again! Finally, I went to buy some new ones, and in the future I will take each child individually, because the adventure was more than I could handle! It took forever for everyone to A) find shoes they liked, and B) find the right fit. We then took even longer picking out Sunday clothes, and a lady that worked there had to tell Blake and James to "Settle down!" because they were wrestling in the aisle. We finally made it up to pay, and after the cashier began ringing up our purchases, I realize that Blake no longer has the shirt and tie I mistakenly let him carry. So, we leave our stuff and retrace our steps around the entire store to hunt down the missing items. We then go BACK to the register. Yeah! we can get out of here now, right? WRONG! Marinne chose her own Sunday shoes and placed two different sizes in the box! Are you kidding? We leave the register AGAIN and go back to the shoes to search through the boxes for the right size, which is, of course, no where to be found. We end up getting a matching pair of the next size up, (they get tight again all to quickly anyway, right?) and finally pay the cashier (third time's a charm), who no doubt thinks we are the craziest bunch he's ever seen!

Belated Thanksgiving Thoughts

After loading my cart with 10 cartons of cool whip, oodles of fruit cocktail, and the last 10 boxes of pistachio pudding in the store (I needed these items to make the biggest batch of Thanksgiving "Shluff" you have ever seen), I heard the cashier asking the man bagging the groceries what he was doing for Thanksgiving. He replied that he wasn't doing anything because he had no family. He said, " I think I have a half brother somewhere, but I don't know him". This just struck me and I was so sad for him. I almost went back in the store to see if he wanted to come to our Thanksgiving. Too bad the world is so messed up that you can't really safely do something like that. This little experience made me count my blessings! Our thanksgiving included around eighty people this year! It was a huge Smith reunion and we ate Thanksgiving dinner outside in my parents back yard. My dad had to rent an outhouse so their septic tank wouldn't be over loaded. A bit "white trash", I know, but I am grateful to have such a huge family! My Grandma Smith has 44 grandchildren and 56 great-grandchildren (half of my cousins haven't even started having kids yet). My dad even set up a big screen in the back yard to watch the talent DVDs each family made. Amy made ours, of course, and it was the best! We played lots of "Settlers" and ate lots of food!

WARNING: contents may be smaller than they appear on box!

A few Mondays ago, I decided to pick up a quick F.H.E. treat from the grocery store. These Reeses peanut butter bars looked tasty and easy, so I grabbed them and brought them home. Upon looking closer at the box, I saw the words "Convenient Pan Inside!". Pan inside where? Surely there isn't a pan inside this tiny box! Well, as you can see in the picture, sure enough there is a miniscule pan in the box. I just had to share all of this because it was so comical to me how little dessert this actually made. This is not enough for an entire family! I laughed the whole time I was making it because I felt like I was making an easy bake oven recipe with itty bitty pouches of ingredients. The bars on the box are misleading! Don't be fooled! So, just for fun I looked at the number of servings Betty Crocker thinks you should get out of this... 15! Can you see any way to get 15 bars out of this pan? This is more like a personal pan Reeses bar, if you ask me, which they obviously didn't. I do realize I can eat more than the average Joe, but this was a cruel joke!

HALLOWEEN

We had our annual Halloween party with pumpkin bread bowls and soup, and this year Karin made doughnuts from scratch! They were delicious! Blake was a skeleton, Marinne was The Corpse Bride, and James was a Fireman. Poor baby Matthew did a face plant on our porch, and Marinne had a meltdown when she lost her spider ring, but other than that, things went swimmingly. Hey, we felt lucky that no one barfed this year! (Last year Blake threw up all over the stairs while our guests ate their soup)! Ray made a commemorative jack-o-lantern, as you can see in the picture.