Ringing in the New Year

Rebecca's parents and her brother's family came to our house to celebrate the new year with us. They arrived on Thursday night and then we had all of Friday to celebrate. Rebecca and I did sneak off to do some furniture shopping, but mainly we all played games, ate snacks, and had a good time.

One of our children's new favorite games is spot it. It is a game with a bunch of cards that have 7 or so pictures on each card. No two cards are alike, but any two cards have one and only one matching picture on them. There are lots of different games that you can play with them, but what we do is split up into two teams and then just flip over two cards at a time and the first team that spots the matching picture wins those cards. We go through the whole deck and the team with the most cards wins. I think our children like it so much because it is a game where age doesn't really matter - Elliott gets just about as many cards as Julia and Ethan, and the kids get just as many as Rebecca or I do.

Some of the snacks that we had were Grandma Swift's popcorn cake (a tradition we do on New Year's Eve every year), a homemade chocolate cheesecake (another tradition), pizza, stuffed mushrooms, bacon wrapped jalapenos, chips, a salad, and pop. Right at midnight we toasted in the new year with some sparkling cider and then watched some of the fireworks out our back windows - we are loving our view! All of the children stayed up until midnight except for Agnes.

The next day we drove down to Utah and spent a few nights with Rebecca's brother's family (Tyler & HyeWon). That was a lot of fun. On Friday evening we met up with many of Rebecca's aunts, uncles, and cousins for her Grandparents to treat us all for dinner at the Provo University Mall food court. Then on Saturday Rebecca's dad and mom watch the children while Rebecca and I went out furniture shopping. We ended up picking out two beds and a dresser from RCWilley that they are shipping to us, two dressers from IKEA that I am still working on putting together, and a dresser from a small furniture store that we strapped on top of our van for the 3.5 hour drive back to Pocatello. That means we now have a table (we got that in Idaho Falls right before Rebecca's family arrived), bar stools (we got those of craigslist), couches for the living (just got them from Costco, and then those dressers and beds that I mentioned. Here are some pictures:










On Sunday we went to church in the morning, packed up, had dinner at Rebecca's grandparents house, and then made the drive home. We stopped by temple square for about 30 minutes to look at all the lights. I think we will want to make that a yearly tradition now that we live so close. Our children we eager to get back in the car because we had a book on tape going, but we still had a good time and they were impressed by how many lights some of the trees had. Just one block after we were in the car Christian said he needed to go to the bathroom, so we pulled over right in front of the conference center and I made all of the children run in so we wouldn't have any more unexpected stops. There were a few complaints, but they really liked getting to see the conference center after only seeing it on TV in the past. They have been asking if we might be able to go there to actually watch conference sometime.

It was a fun little mini-vacation before the kids had to start school again.