The Holidays are for Spending Time with Those You Love!

So far, I have had an awesome Christmas time. These are some of my favorite things about this holiday season:

1. Hanging out with my friend (and FABULOUS hairdresser!) Liz, and her daughters Taylor and Trinity. Liz made me a wonderful lunch of corn dogs, mac & cheese, and green beans! Wahoo!

Trinity holding their dog.
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2. Making homemade candy with my family on Christmas Day.

After Christmas dinner, Jeremy & Valerie wanted to show us easy ways to make candy. We had such a blast, but our little tummies were sure full at the end!

In this pic, Amanda and Jeremy are dipping pretzels in the chocolate. Yummy!



Valerie as we're making more candy!!

Mom admiring all of our hard work.

Sam was hard at work watching football. I'll bet he was missing our big screen TV

Look at all of our candy!! We made chocolate covered pretzels, dipped Oreos, chocolate dipped Nutter Butters, Oreo balls, Avalanche bark (recipe from the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory), and fudge. We're still eating our candy....almost a week later! :)

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3. Visiting Mike & Jen and my nephews Gaige, Hayden, and Logan.

We visited them the day after Christmas and we had a good time. Jen made some delicious vegeterian lasagna, funeral potatoes, and lots of yummy desserts! I LOVE holidays because of all the yummy food!

Here we have Hayden, Gaige, me, and Amanda. I think the boys are getting anxious to open their Christmas gifts.

Mike helping Logan open his gifts. I think Logan was more excited about the wrapping paper than the gift! Jen is in the background picking something up.

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4. Going to the LA temple.

On Saturday, my family and I went and did a session at the LA temple. It's SUCH a big and pretty temple! It was awesome to have 4 out of 5 of my siblings (along with their spouses) in the session. Then we went to Knott's Berry Farm and ate the Famous Chicken Dinner there! Yummy!!

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5. Visiting Simi Valley

On Monday, December 29th, we went to visit the Ronald Reagan Library.

On our way to Simi Valley, we stopped at this place in Pearblossom called Charlie Brown's. They had the BEST shakes and their BBQ smelled SO good! So we had to stop and partake of the yummy shakes. This is Emily and I at Charlie Brown's.

Unfortunately, Sam had to work on Monday. I still wanted to take a pic of Sam and I (we're going to PhotoShop him in later). Isn't he so cute!?!?

Us as we're waiting for our shakes. Aren't we a happy family?!

The Reagan Library had the most BEAUTIFUL Christmas trees. These trees represented all the countries that Ronald Reagan visited in his administration and they were decorated according to that country. They were gorgeous! This tree is from France (how ironic that I took a pic of one from France! Only 3 more months!).

More Christmas trees

At the museum, they also had Air Force One. It was pretty cool to walk through and see how he traveled. Sam now needs to buy me one for all of our upcoming trips! Hahaha!

There was also a section of the Berlin Wall, since Reagan was so influential in helping to take it down.

The views from the library was just astounding! Sam can build me a house there anytime he wants! :)

After the library, we went to Red's BBQ and we ate some FABULOUS ribs and steak. Then the steakhouse gave us some ice cream in a martini glass. But look at how MASSIVE the glass is! Kyle and Amanda ate all of their ice cream in one gulp! j/k!

Well, I think that I'll post the rest of this later. This is getting to be a really long post! :)!

To be continued . . .