Christmas Eve

We celebrated Christmas Eve with Quent's mom and sister.  While they all went to Mass I stayed home and cooked prime rib. We all had a great time opening presents and enjoyed each others company, it was a great night even if I did have a potato explode in the oven.

Dickens Festival

We had the opportunity to go to the Dickens Festival this past weekend.  Morgan and Alyssa were dancing at the festival and I've always had a great time looking around the festival at all the random items being sold. 

We were able to finish up our Christmas shopping at the festival and enjoy the season.  We hit up Red Iguana after the festival for dinner.  Oh how I love some good mexican food. 

Jon Schmidt Concert

Quent and I were able to attend the Jon Schmidt Christmas Concert with my parents and my brothers.  We hit up Ruth's Diner for dinner prior to the concert and enjoyed a night of Christmas music.

Jon Schmidt and Steven Shape Nelson were really fun to watch.  If you have some time I suggest you look up their piano guys channel on YouTube, they are very entertaining.

It was fun to do something cultural, we haven't done something like that for a long long time.  Below is a video from YouTube of the Piano Guys ... they performed this at the concert.  AMAZING!

A trip to the Blue Bird

I have wanted to go to the Blue Bird since moving to Mantua.  The Blue Bird is a throw-back restaurant in Logan complete with soda fountains and homemade candy.  Friday night we had my faculty Christmas party and it happened to be at the Blue Bird. 

We had a great time (and the food was great) at the party, it's always fun to see the coworkers away from school.  We had a fun white-elephant exchange which at one point I had an amazing Gene Simmons doll.  Unfortunately for me, I didn't get to keep it for very long.

It was a pretty quiet weekend for us, next weekend is action packed with more holiday fun.  It's a good thing the holiday's only come once a year!

Quent's Birthday Part 3...

It's been a busy weekend.  Ashley, Rick, Joe, Joy, TJ and Morgan drove up for dinner Friday night, we had a great dinner at Maddox and had dessert at our house.  Rick and Ash slept over and Rick helped Quent with a few projects around the house/hatchery.

Saturday afternoon was the big gingerbread house party (see previous post). Today, Joyce and Kerry drove up for dinner and to celebrate Quent's birthday.  We had a great weekend but boy was it busy, we are looking forward to a fairly quiet week.

Annual Gingerbread House Party

My family celebrated my mom's birthday, Quent's birthday and Melissa's birthday at the annual gingerbread house party.  Everyone got into action this year building their gingerbread houses.  We had a great time with the family and are already planning what we're going to do next year.

Giving Thanks...

Where did November go?  I must get better at keeping up the blog!  Quent had to work on Thanksgiving so we had a quiet lunch with turkey and all the fixings.  I left Quent at home and headed down my parents house to celebrate the day with my family.

We didn't do any black Friday shopping this year and spent a quiet weekend at home.  It was a much needed five-day break!

Fun in the Snow!

We had a early snow storm this week and had just enough snow to cover the ground, ice up the driveway and of course play with the kids in the snow.  Joe and Joy had to run some errands in Logan so they dropped off the kids on their way through so that they didn't have too spend anymore time in the car than they needed too.

Uncle Quent got out the sleds and pulled the kids in the yard.  There wasn't enough snow or ice on our sledding hill so the kids had to settle for playing in the snow with Uncle Quent.

South Dakota Recap

Here is a link to each day of our road trip.  Enjoy!

Mileage:  2175 miles

(click on the day to see the daily recap)

Day 1 -- Casper, WY

Day 2 -- Spearfish, SD

Day 3 -- Blackhills, SD

Day 4 -- White Lake, SD

Day 5 -- White Lake, SD

Day 6 -- Mitchell, SD

Day 7 -- Mantua, UT

Road Trip Day 7 ... Mantua, UT

We left Don and Leanne's house about 8 a.m. (MT) and were headed to Casper.  We decided once we got to Casper that we would just keep going.  965 miles and 15 hours later we arrived home.  We did a little unpacking and called it a day!