A Hillstead Holiday Greeting

Happy Thanksgiving!
"From our little Turkeys,

To Yours!"

Sorry, I had to share it again! Thanksgiving 2006, my mom bought a 16 pound turkey and baby Jake weighed 16 lbs too! When she got the turkey out to prepare it, I was getting Jacob out of the bath and the resemblence was hysterical! We had fun trying to get his picture! I think someday, he'll really love me for this. ;)

The Holidays are Upon Us

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

"Hillstead Blood"

At school Luke has been practicing dummy roping. His equestrian teacher told me a few weeks ago that she thought he was good enough to enter into a little competition that they were having this weekend in an ACE hardware parking lot! Luke was excited about it, though clearly one of the non-cowboys in the bunch by what he was wearing...

He had two tries to qualify for the second round and he succeeded on his second try! Unfortunately my camera missed the moment, but it was cute! He was beaming. In the second round he only got one try and had to stand further away and missed, but that was okay. It was a fun thing to try. And we were proud of him. I knew Poppi would have liked to be there to see the cowboy coming out in his grandson. It's that good old Wyoming blood, I tell you.

It's a Go

I just wanted to post an update on how our move is coming. We are big time getting into boxes now, and the house is looking bare. Everything has gone smoothly with the sale; the appraisal came in "fine", although I still don't know exactly what at, the inspection was good and we have just a few things the buyers want us to fix! We got word today that their house in CA closed so they are definately on their way!

As for us, we are moving out next Saturday, the 22nd. We've got a rental in our neighborhood lined up, it is actually the house one of my friends just moved out of! We are excited that we can stay in the ward and close to the school, etc so as to avoid moving the kids around too much in the next few months. We close the Tuesday before Thanksgiving and hand over the keys on the 29th.

The job search in UT has begun a little bit, but not too much until after we get settled into our new place... one thing at a time. We plan to at least be in AZ until March and anything goes after that.

The kids have been amazing with this transition. My mom came and worked her head off to box this week for a couple days, and Tyler is finally coming home from NY for good... at least for a few good weeks. He's had to be gone the last two weeks... which has not been fun for either of us.

Life is good though.

Drew is the face of DearElder.com!

Remember the post about nominating my handsome brother to be the face of Dear Elder. com - and winning? This week the billboard went up (all except for the top of his head, which is coming) click here to see pictures that my sisters took: http://www.kendallmugleston.blogspot.com/ and the website is up too! http://www.dearelder.com/

I think it is so fun that my mom and sisters can see his smiling face each time they head up to Salt Lake on the freeway and I can't believe it was my nomination that got him up there! If only prize money had been part of the deal... then I'd be shopping.

We love Elder Mugleston!!

"I Play Tennis!"

Last weekend in Utah Jakey's Nanna played tennis with him and he LOVED it! When we got home he took his racket everywhere with him in the car and even to bed until I confiscated it. Ever since then he begs to play tennis and finds anything small which can be the ball (plastic cups, dolls, legos, etc) and anything long which can be the racket (wooden spoons, toy instruments, sticks, etc). He basically plays baseball, but thinks it is tennis and it is so cute!! This is a picture of him playing "tennis", as he put it. :)

I'll have to get a picture of him with his tennis racket and put it on here later. SOMEDAY I might get a camera that takes decent video so I can do that on here too... someday.....santa?

Wrapping things up around here.

So by now, most have heard that we are on our way out of this house (barring all continues to go well through the weekend.. the appraisal was today and inspecion is tomorrow...) Our minds are still wrapping themselves around the fact that we will be out of here so soon, that we are really moving.

I've begun boxing all the non-essential items. It is fun work, but a lot of work. Also, we went out and picked our watermelon finally as a good-bye party to ourselves on Sunday. It actually tasted really good. And then Luke went a plucked a bunch of peppers and ate them like apples! (my kids do that with peppers can you believe it? And they also eat broccoli crowns like ice-cream cones!)

Lots of great memories here in these walls!

My turn

I thought I'd take my turn to post pictures of the fun Hillstead weekend in St. George. Such a great time with wonderful people. When it was time to go it made me very sad to watch the others head North while we went South.. but hopefully not for long!

Tyler, his dad and brothers Zach and Blake
Handsome Andrew at 11 months
Tyler relaxing on a beautiful night
Cute Nat, 8 months prego if you can believe it!

Halloween in 2008

Halloween is fun. Lots of excitment always in the air. We hadn't carved pumpkins until Halloween night and decided to do it in the driveway as we prepared for neighbor kids to start coming. The kids liked that. Jacob had no interest whatsoever in trick or treating so he stayed home with me and passed out candy... oh well. I was Alphaba from Wicked and the kids thought that was great! Ty was a guy with anything he could find in the Halloween box on (rainbow colored glasses, a wig, sometimes a mask, a necklace, etc.) He really likes Halloween! We always have a crazy night on Halloween...

Trunk or Treat!

Tonight our ward had our trunk or treat. Thankfully we went very simply this year with no dinner or anything -- just trick or treating and a trunk decorating contest!

The night was beautifully warm and all the kids had a ball. I was glad not to have spent my day setting up. And in the end everyone had a good time.

Here are some pictures of the kids: Minnie Mouse, Superman and "The HUMAN TORCH from Fantastic Four" (amazing) and the two winning trunks! Pretty good!

MOVING

We put our house on the market last week, hoping to sell it by this summer so that we could move closer to family. Ty put it on the MLS Thursday and it sold yesterday! Pretty surprising, to say the least.

The contract puts us on the streets in 30 days (the Sat. after Thanksgiving)... and we are not yet ready to leave the state (don't want to go until late Spring), so we have to find something to rent for the interum... until March or so.

If you know of a place, or have a place nearby let me know. It'll need to be a month to month agreement ... but we won't be picky.

So that's the big news from here for the month. I remember at Christmas when our family made 2008 predictions, I stated that I just wanted our year to be status-quo/no big changes. But by February Tyler had changed jobs, and by December we'll be in a new house! At least our number of children has remained the same... :)

Great story

If you are hungry for a good laugh, see the new joke blog my sisters set up for my mom. There is a PRICELESS and FUNNY story waiting there for all to read!

it's: http://www.kendallmugleston.blogspot.com

Jake's Room

I finally did something with Jake's room. Wallpaper! If it wasn't so out, I would probably wallpaper every room in my house. It is so easy and fun!

I used the remaining paint from the kids bathroom to paint the little-boy finger-print-covered bottom half of his room, and then I was going to put up chair-rail but I got impatient.

He loves Jungle Animals and I thought this would be cute for a while, so I went with it. And now the room is done -- $14 and 2 hours later. That is my style.

I also took off his crib skirt and put these big bins under his bed so that I can have him clean his own room in a jiffy. 'Books', 'toys' and 'toys' they are labelled. Easy enough.

I am officially tired of house projects now and need to remember what my friends' phone numbers are (sorry guys). Next week I am checking back in to life!

My Fourth Child

Here she is! And she's prettier in person. I have slaved over this piece of furniture painstakingly... tediously... methodically ... almost slave-labor-in-a-sweat-shop like, and she is finished! At last!

As I mentioned before, I've envisioned a piece just like this for years. She lights up at night and looks so pretty in my kitchen. I pulled all my dishes out today and organized them in her. I am just so happy!

Last night in bed, Tyler expressed some concern about the amount of time that this little endeavour was demanding of me, and I stopped him in his tracks - "No. Stop. This is like our fourth child, honey! You can only win by saying good things about her."

He must have gotten the message because he came home tonight, kissed me and looked quickly to her, "Oh, wow! That looks so good! It is way better than I imagined!" After I excitedly showed him how nicely everything fits into it, he commented that, had he known how much I wanted one of these, he would have bought me one years ago.

Oh well. She's a special piece of art, this hutch of mine. She and I have a life long bond.




P.S. In case you're wondering what all I had to do to her, here are my steps: I got her, took all the hardware off, glass panes out, doors off. Lugged her piece by piece inside, primed her white, primed her red, lugged her back out to the garage, spray painted her red, sanded her, put the hardware back on and her back together, lugged her back inside, stained her sanded spots and loaded her up. Don't worry, I'll never do anything like this again.

Fall at the Farm

We went to Schnepf Farms this weekend. LOVING the fall weather! I think it was a high of 78 that day, amazing. Lots of fun miniature golfing, picking out and painting our pumpkins (we like little), riding rides, eating hot dogs and kettle corn, and enjoying the feeling of FALL! Yay!