Grandkids and Grandma Outing (and moms too)

We wanted to continue our tradition with Grandma Vicki to see the SLC Temple lights and dinner but we sure did pick a CrAZy night to do it....We forgot that it was the first Presidencies Christmas Devotional and it was PACKED everywhere!!  After driving around trying to find parking places for 2 cars, standing out in the parking lot to save one parking space, finding out they had closed the paking garage and wouldn't let Mandi in, her dropping off some of the kids, losing each other and not having phone service and then finding out that our wait for dinner was over an hour-and-a-half, we jumped back in our cars (Mandi still couldnt get in the parking garage) and headed back to the south end of the Valley to catch a movie and dinner, away from all the craziness. All of the movies had already started so we skipped the movie and ended up at the Myan. The kids had a lot of fun watching the cliff divers and the food was delicious!!The night started out REALLY crazy but turned out really good.  I love that we have kept doing this tradition!  



We stopped for one second to get our traditional family picture in front of the big tree in the JS Building



Our flaming dessert



making smashed pennies before we were seated



I think they were staring at the dessert on fire

Our First REAL Christmas tree

I have had a fake christmas tree for as long as I can remember.....I LOVe the smell of a REAL tree but a fake tree just seemd so much easier than getting a live tree AND cheaper too, so I have always put the fake one up...ever since we have been marrie, Paul has teased me about the fake tree, that it wasn't a "real" Christmas treeand and that he missed the smell of a live tree...Well, this year he talked me into getting a live tree, I think it was mostly that our fake tree seemed too small for our high ceiling in our front room and he said we could get a tall one that went as high as our window ( I have always loooved seeing tall christmas trees in people's windows.)  Anyway, the first part of december we headed down to his sisisters tree lot to find the perfect tree. How could we not get a REAL tree when his sister and bro-in-law have a bunch of tree lots all over??

We bundled Lainie (and Kaiden :) up and set off to look for our tree....When we got there, I had to take some pictures of Lainie and her first REAL tree. I forgot that Kaiden hadn't ever had a real tree either, so he made sure to let me know, and we got a picture of him and Lainie looking for their FIRST REAL Christmas tree. (Their pics turned out really goofy so I didn't put them on here) Paul went off on his own to look at the trees, since I was taking too long getting pictures....When we met up, we all had a few ideas of which trees we liked.  There was one tree that all three of us thought was perfect...It was about 10-12 feet tall and soooo pretty...that's the one we decided to take home....I thought it looked so good in our front room...Paul didn't like the multi-colored lights that I had on the fake tree so he ran down to the store and got tons of plain lights and talked Brayden into stringing them on the tree.  I hate to admit it but it took me quite a few more days to get the rest of the ornaments on the tree...but I did get them on before Christmas. (I know, I am a slacker but that's how i have been since I have had Lainie;) Having the real-tree-smell made me think of when I was growing up...I think that getting a real tree will be our new family tradition...

All bundled up