The Dark Side

Lately, Ethan has been obsessed with all things Star Wars.  Here are a few of his drawings.

 Count Dooku

 General Grievious

 Darth Sidious

 Darth Vader

Darth Maul

Our New Project

This may come as a surprise to most of friends and neighbors, and even many family members:  We are building a new home. When we purchased our Stansbury home six years ago we had the vision of staying in it for around 5-10 years and with rates being so low right now we've felt like the time is right. For the last year or two we've kept our eyes on the housing market, but only more seriously during the last six months or so. Unable to find what we wanted (particularly a big yard), we've decided to build a custom home. BTW, it is really hard to find lots larger than .25 acre in the Salt Lake area. After several months of looking, we fell in love with a lot in Farmington and even got in a bidding war over it on my birthday of all days (not such a fun way to spend a b-day).

Why Farmington, you may ask? As much as we've enjoyed our neighborhood in Stansbury Park, we've always felt a bit isolated from family and shopping. We lived for a short time in the Bountiful area before purchasing our home and really loved Davis county. We are so excited to be moving back to the area and love the small town feel that Farmington provides. It seems like a special place to be so close to the city, but still having a country feel. The schools there are some of the best in the state, and it has also been rated as number 12 of the top 100 places to live in the US (link). We also love that it will cut our drive to Cache Valley down by almost half. 

We are excited about the amazing view from our future deck of the mountains and are also looking forward to not having backyard neighbors . . . well except for this cow and buffalo who live in the pasture behind our future house.  lol

We've been finalizing our building plans over the last few months and are now waiting for our permit. We should be breaking ground sometime in February and will most likely be in the new home in May. We are also hoping to have our Stansbury house on the market sometime next month.

We've had a very difficult time over the last two years dealing with infertility. We're excited to have a new project to focus on to help take our minds off of all the disappointment and heartache we've felt. I like to joke that "if we build it, they will come." We hope and pray it will be a home we can fill with many more little feet.

Favorite Books of 2012

Kyle and I love to read. I've never been more addicted to it as I have been in the past year. 2012 was a hard year for us. One way I found to cope with my stresses and disappointments was through reading. I was surprised to find that at the end of the year I had finished 35 books (especially since I didn't read anything until April). So many of them were hard to put down, others just fun and fluffy, and some really made me think. Although it was hard to choose, here are my top 5.

1.  Edenbrooke, by Julianne Donaldson


2. The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak


3. Heaven is Here, by Stephanie Nielson


4. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte


5. The Winter Sea, by Susanna Kearsley


What was a favorite book you read recently?

Creativity

 Ethan has been drooling over a Lego board game for months.  Today, he decided to take measures into his own hands, and he built it with his own Lego game.  We think he did a pretty good job. (the real game is shown below...)
See if you can spot the following details:

• Stack of gold bars
• Improvised dice (you can see the yellow and gray faces)
• Crook in jail with escape plans
• Police car (instead of police helicopter)
• The multi-colored Legos are supposed to be the numbered dice in the real game

We love Legos!

Trimming the Tree

The tree is up at the Morrey house.  The kids are at such a fun age!  They were great helpers.  Brooklyn proclaimed it "the best day ever."  

While unpacking the decorations, Ethan saw our mistletoe and said, "Hey, is this mistletoe?" Jen replied, "Yeah, do you know what mistletoe is for?" Ethan didn't know. Jen told him that whoever stands under it gets a kiss.  Ethan replied, "Oh.  So it's kind of like a trap!"

 

Ethan was excited to climb the ladder to decorate the tree.  Unfortunately, there was only one branch that he could reach from the ladder.  Kyle noticed this early in the decorating, and snapped a picture, because he thought it was funny that there were four ornaments hanging from the same branch...

 

...By the end of the night, this is what the branch looked like.  We counted 13 ornaments.

It was fun to talk about the symbolism of the different ornaments.  The kids requested three tellings of the Christmas story so they could act it out with the nativity figurines.
It was also fun to talk about the significance of the different ornaments as we got them out.  We have a tradition to get a new ornament every year depicting a memorable event from that year.

Busy November

November is the busiest month in our family.  With two birthdays, our anniversary, and Thanksgiving, we always feel overwhelmed. But we had a good one.

Have we mentioned that Ethan loves Legos?  We find these kinds of scenes around the house all the time.  We got him some Lego books from his book order, and he reads them every day.  It's really helped him be motivated to read.

Halloween. That was a long time ago.  Ethan wanted to be a Lego police officer, but settled for a regular police man when we couldn't find anything that specific.  Brooklyn was happy to be Jessie (which was a costume we already had for dress-up.  It's nice to have a little girl who is so easy to please).  To quote Ethan, "This is the best Halloween ever!"

Jen had a birthday.  It was nice to spend it with family. The kids were very sweet and excited that Mom had a birthday. The treated her very special.  Kyle too.

Mid November we had a nice snowfall.  Together, we built "Snowy" (named by the kids) and we got to try out our new sled. This is one of the few benefits of having a hill in our front yard :)

 Brooklyn had a very exciting Birthday.  She was so happy all day.  She was so excited to turn four, and had a very special day. We even had a pizza party with root beer (her choice).

 Brooklyn asked for a chocolaty cake.  That's our girl!

 She got all of the candles out in one breath.

For Thanksgiving, we visited Grandma and Grandpa Morrey.  It was fun to see all of the family together. Even Justin flew out from San Francisco.  Brooklyn made a special connection with her Aunt Kristina.  All Kristina had to do was play with her for a few minutes, and Brooklyn became her shadow.
Grandpa Morrey got a new baby horse a few months ago, and Brooklyn helped take her out for a walk around the pasture.

Grandpa Taylor helped Ethan give his Lego mini-figures a train ride.

 This afternoon, we got to attend the blessing of John Max Morrey.  Little Max is the 7th John Morrey, all of which are the first born of the first born in their generation.

Brooklyn-isms

The other day, Kyle and Brooklyn were playing with the play kitchen.  Brooklyn handed Kyle a cup to drink.
K: "What's this?"
B: "Coffee!"
K: (thinking this would be a good teaching experience) "We don't drink coffee.  It's not good for you. Heavenly Father doesn't want us to drink coffee."
B: "I like coffee!"
K: "I don't want coffee.  Can you get me some hot chocolate?"
B: "Ok."
Goes over to the sink, pretend-fills up the cup.
B: "Here's some hot chocolate."
K: "Thank you. It's yummy."
B: "That wasn't hot chocolate!  That was coffee!"

Apparently, she learned about coffee from Lego City cartoons.

Tonight, while sitting on the potty:
"I have to go poop.  It's a hard poop.  But it's ok. My bum is strong.  My bum is strong like a house."