Being the "Favorite Aunt" is work - but it is worth it!

A couple of weeks ago my niece Anna was at my house and was crying because she didn't want to go home, and I told her that we would have a sleepover one night with her and my other niece and nephew. When you tell a smart little 4-year old that doesn't forget anything something like that you better prepared to follow through. So, last Friday night we had our "little cousin" sleepover at Aunt Steph's. I didn't do it by myself - Bryn and Syd helped a lot (Mason was at scout camp). We had pizza, made cookies, walked to Snoasis (the best snow cone shack in town!) and got snowcones (we had to walk because I didn't have car seats - luckily it is just a few blocks up the street), made a craft - we always have to have a craft, played games with prizes for the winners, watched a movie and had popcorn, slept for a few hours, had pancakes and waffles for breakfast, and played some more. Little Thys came for part of the activities but didn't sleep over. So, here is a picture of my family room around midnight. Anna - the one with the green pillow is playing like she is asleep for this picture - it may not be such a good idea to give 3, 4, and 5-year olds snow cones at 9:00 at night right before you want them to go to bed! But, we all made it through the night and nobody woke up crying for their mom in the middle of night - which I was happy about! We had a lot of fun and we will probably do it again (but don't tell the kids that just yet, Jan and Stace).

E was really sleeping with her little hand on her cheek - this picture isn't posed!

Sweaty little O - he had to sleep in a sleeping bag even though it was a little warm.

Here is what Anna really looked like at midnight - wide awake!

Here is E with her lunch box we deocrated for our craft.

O with his lunch box.
Although it doesn't look like it in this picture - I think everyone had a good time.

Stace came to get Anna for her dance class and she wasn't happy about leaving.

Aren't they cute!!!!!

So, little cousins, thanks for coming and we love you!

Catching Up

This is my monthly (or bi-monthly) posting session. We have had a busy end of summer and we are sorry to see summer quickly coming to an end! The last few weeks we have been to a family reunion (see post below), Mason went to scout camp, I cleaned out and organized every one of our kitchen cupboards, we have finished our school shopping (I wanted to get it done early for a change!), we are watching as much of the Olympics as we can (I have always found it amazing that I get so excited to watch sports I have never watched or even heard of before), and with the exception of Dru (who has to go to work every day) and Sydney who is an "early to bed early to rise" kind of girl - we sleep in every day we can! We also got to spend some time with my sister and her family which now includes cute little baby Kira. Les and Jake adopted Kira and we are so lucky that she is part of our family! The only bad thing about Kira is that they took her home to Montana and we miss her (and Luke and Les & Jake)!

These are the two pictures we used for Kira's baby announcements.

Luke is such a cute big brother!

A few posts ago I blogged about our trip to Chuck E. Cheese for Anna's birthday. Just to refresh your memory - O totally freaked out when we walked in the door and the first thing he saw was Chuck E. Cheese. He ran screaming out of the door and did not want to go back in. Here is the picture of a traumatized O. While O was outside crying, Anna was hugging and posing for a picture with Chuck E. Cheese.

Family Reunion

The last few days of July we went to Zion's Ponderosa Resort on the east side of Zion's National Park. We went for a big family reunion with Dru's aunts, uncles, and cousins. There were probably about 150 people there from Canada to Las Vegas and lots of places in between. The resort was great, the weather was not too hot, and we had a lot of fun getting reacquainted with all of Dru's relatives. These are just a couple of pictures we took as we were getting ready to leave.

Mason, Syd, and Bryn with their cousins Elizabeth

and Nathan and Grandma and Grandpa Wynder

The Big Read

I saw this list on the blog of a girl (thanks, Maren) that is in my ward and thought I would put it on mine. I was happy to see that I actually had read more than 6 books - although I am sure Stacey has read way more than I have. So, I will be watching your blogs to see what books you have read . . .

The Big Read, an initiative by the National Endowment for the Arts, has estimated that the average adult has only read 6 of the top 100 books they’ve printed. How did you do?

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read.
3) Underline the books you LOVE.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy (I definitely did not love this book – depressing!)
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44. A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51. Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White – the first real book I ever read when I was in 1st grade
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince- Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo