Christmas Eve 2010

As we have every year since we've been married, we headed off first to see Paul's mom's side of the family. His grandma does the most extravagant food display you have ever seen - ten kinds of everything - and we all just sit around and talk. Not much going on there.

Halfway through the night we head over to my parents house. It felt a little small there with out my two nephews...funny how the lack of two little kids makes it feel as if half the family is gone - it's not so loud :) ha ha. My mom does a small little buffet of our favorites and we munch and play. This year, Gaven introduced us to Ninja. It quickly became everyone's favorite and we played it for FOREVER.

Amanda, Morgan, and Gaven fighting to the death:

Here is a little sampling of how it is played:

This one is Gaven and Paul and fighting it out - pretty funny. My sister says the B word for those reading who have little ears around.

And lastly, the two comedians in the family doing what they do best:

Paul loves this game so much that we played with his family the following day....and then he taught it to his primary class...10 & 11 year old boys. It's easy to see how they spend a portion of their time on Sundays now.

After the Ninja game, Gaven tried to explain to us how to play the Name Game. Well one of us had the idea to take the Name Game and turn it into Name Charades. I put the name of everyone in our immediate family in a hat and we each took a draw. Then we acted out who we had and we had to guess which of our family members we were imitating. It was quite hilarious...we had some great impressions and trips down memory lane and it was FUN!!

It was a great way to end the night and go home to get ready for Santa!!! ;)

Temple Square

Paul and I hadn't been to see the light at Temple Square in a few years and we had some friends who happened to be heading down there and so we made it a group date. We took Trax down (barf!! I hate riding Trax!) and enjoyed some hot chocolate once we reached the square.

My favorite part is the Reflection pond...always so pretty, especially at Christmas time. While we were there I discovered an awesome trick I can do with my point-and-shoot:

Pretty cool, eh?? Yeah....I made that up...on accident. Paul and I then had lots of fun seeing what kind of images we could come up with but none so cool as the one above there of our friends.

We continued to walk and I snapped pictures of all the Nativites. I hadn't seen all the different ethnic nativities before and I found them quite awesome:

But none as cool as the one on the water with all the pond lights...it's amazing:

Off in the corner of the Visitor's Building I found someone else's work of art...these miniatrue snowmen that were only a few inches high! Ha ha - I loved them:

And when we just about frozen through, the square started closing so we booked it to the Trax before it got slammed....and then ended up getting on the wrong one headed up to the U. Annnnd then we backtracked and had to try that again. Needless to say it was too much time on that thing and I couldn't help the fact that I puked once we finally got off. Motion sickness blows.

Girls Night Out!

After our Ice Capade adventure the previous night, the Madsen women piled up and went out for some dinner and shopping. We fine-dined at the lovely Bajio ;) where I salivated because I haven't been there in a year or more. So good. We spent so much time laughing at the restaurant we almost forgot we had some shopping to do!

We malled it up and shopped the sales and bought new duds and jewelry and had a rockin' progesterone filled night.

Mom, Katie, Sam, Bronsynn, Amber ...me and Amanda up front:

Ice Skating Awesomeness

I have not had one tiny bit of desire to blog in about a month so it's quite obvious I have some journaling to make up. First up: Ice Skating!!!

December 17th was my company holiday party. We had to skoot straight from that and meet everyone over at the Cottonwood Rec Center where they have an indoor rink, especially nice since it was cold enough to freeze your eyelids together.

Me and Aiden:

The kid being towed by Amber and Paul:

Me and my madre goofing off:

Amber the Ballerina:

My niece and her best friend, Katie. These two are conjoined twins basically and of course had to get on a sweet gettup:

My dad even got out on the rink:

The ice sucked a little with so many people on it and the skates really hurt your ankles, but other than that it is good times all around. Our family spent most of the time playing tag and you usually had no idea who was tagged until you got tagged because everyone was spread out everywhere.

My favorite part was towards the end when Aiden decided he was going to be brave and try skating on his own. He stuck to the outside wall just in case he fell and he would kind of 'run' over the ice. Since he is a totally cool dude, he would jump in the air suddenly for a trick. :)