The stars at night...

Hello everyone!  We have had a good week.  Maddie turned 13 on Thursday. So let's talk about her a minute.  She's such a good girl.  She's amazing and we're so glad we have her. She's been sharing her testimony with her friends at school.  She's doing a great job answering their questions.  She presented a personal progress project at YW in Excellence this week that she's done on Family History.  She has spent over 10 hours doing indexing, searching for names, teaching others how to do it, and taking the names to the temple for baptisms.  She's also a good sport about school. Turns out her mom didn't realize she was in the wrong math class at school, so now she has an online class to do over Christmas break.  She'll be booking it through a semester of algebra starting this week.  And she has the best attitude about it.  She's been doing swimming and is getting so good at it. She can try out for a team in January.  For her birthday we picked her up from school and went straight to a movie.  Our theatre is by the harbor (Lake Ray Hubbard) and has a beautiful waterfall that goes down into the lake.  That's where we are in the first picture.  Yes, Corey let them buy something from the quarter machine outside and they all turned out to be fake mustaches.  :) And the movie was so cute by the way.  

    We've had fun with the hand foot and mouth virus this week.  The older kids and grown ups got a version of it that has wiped us out.  Headaches, sore throat and fevers....longer than normal.  Four of us stayed home from church today, but I think we'll all be back into life tomorrow.  

     Some things we left out of our entry last week...we had family pictures taken on Tues morning by a girl in our ward, then we went to Firehouse subs afterwards.  And the day before Thanksgiving we went to a care center for elderly with memory problems.  We went with some other families in our ward.  We sang and danced and visited with them.  We all had a lot of fun.  These are some pictures from that experience.  

      We hope it snows in Idaho before we come.  It's kind of hard to get in the Christmas spirit with our air conditioning going.  Actually, it's not hard to get into the spirit of it, it's just a strange twist to go outside to check out the christmas lights on the house wearing shorts:)  

Poor girl is already getting sick... 

Sizzle was a sleeping, but this is the rest of the brood.

SOoooooo happy to get a 1D shirt.
so happy...

The fountain outside the movie theater following the birthday viewing of Rise of the Guardians.

Lunch at Firehouse Subs.

At the playground of the kids school by our house.

It says, "I am in luf with justin bieber and One Direction".

For Movember.

Singing at the Center.

Sisters singing "Sisters" from White Christmas.  Nori just joined in because she loves Megan.

See, she loves Megan.

Oh, and she loves Megan.

Isaac intent on the lyrics.  (His scout leader, Sister Christensen, playing.)

Aaaaaand, you shake it all about.