...coming to town...

YES, I am headed to Utah for Christmas. I come the 14th...let the party planning begin! If you are reading this, I am sure I would love to see you!

Sweet Surprise!

Tyler made my day when this came in the mail for an early Christmas surprise...



I LOVE Willowtree figures and now I have a very large set! Thanks Ty, I love it!!

After a long airplane ride we are finally home! We had a wonderful time in Europe, but of course it is nice to be home. Southern Germany made for some nice family time with Tyler not working. It was absolutely freezing for us. It was kind of funny, we just came to expect the cold. We got in Saturday night and when we woke up on Sunday out of habit we bundled ourselves up for church with sweaters and coats. When we got home the sun was shining and we were sweating to death. So California is a warm place...who knew? It has taken me a few days to actually realize that I need to wear short sleeves or I will be real hot!

Anyway, the next few posts have some pics from our trip. The rest can be found on our smugmug site the password is Fish.

A sad day in Dinklebahl...

My favorite little place in Germany was this little city called Rothenburg Ob Der Tauber. We spent the last few days after Tyler finished work driving down into Southern Germany and the Alps. Wow the German countryside is amazing. Well our first stop was in Rothenburg o.d.t. It was a walled city, completely picturesque. In fact, we spent the night there and in the morning we went out walked around the city and Tyler (who is getting very good with our camera) took the most amazing pictures of our kids and of the city. I was so excited for them. Well, later that day we headed down the Romantic Road to Munich. First stop, Dinklebahl. An unfortunate mishap occurred in this place. We lost ALL the pictures that were currently on our camera...wipe tear. We were so sad that it literally ruined our experience in Dinklebahl. So we continued on down the Romantic Road.

The beautiful German Countryside.

We drove all the way down to the Neuschwanstein castle, aka Cinderella's castle which was awesome. It is right at the base of the Alps. It snowed on us, so we woke up that morning and first went shopping at any little place we could find to get hats, gloves, coats...we were not used to that freezing weather. Here are my favorite of the pics we took...

The most beautiful emerald river.

Ava loved eating the snow...yummy.

Carriage ride to the castle.

London

My other sister Amanda and her family are living in London for about 6 months so I was able to go and visit her while I was there also. London was great. Unfortunately, all my pics from London were deleted too. But here are the highlights of the trip...

A day in London with all 6 kids (my 2, Amber's 2, and Amanda's 2) a pregnant sister, my BIL and other sister. We went on the London Eye...I had really good pics of this :( Then we just kind of walked around to different places.

The next day my 2 sister's and I went into London without kids while my superstar BIL watched 5 kids (we took Christian) and did I mention they are all 3 and under. This was so fun though. We went to the Tower of London and walked around a few other places then went shopping. We went to Marylebone Street, which was fantastic. I loved ALL the shops we went into. I highly reccommend it to anyone in London. There was this little vintage store called Cath Kidston. You could get the cutest bags and random stuff there. It also sold fabric that was adorable. Anyway we loved shopping here, it was darling!

Our next and last day there we went into the city, went to Harrod's and saw there Christmas stuff. They create this Christmas store within the department store that sells all sorts of darling Christmas stuff. I loved it. The we went to Mass at Westminister Abby.

London is great city. Thanks Amanda and Clark we had tons of fun. Ava misses her cousins already!

A week in Prague

If you have never been to Prague, you are definitely missing out! It is a beautiful, old city that was not destroyed by the war. Lucky for me, my sister happens to live there. I packed the kids up, left Ty to work in Frankfurt and headed for a week of fun. We weren't too adventurous since I have been there before and between the two of us we would have been toting around 4 kids. So we did a few things downtown and had a blast just hanging out.

Ava and Anna looking at Prague castle from Charles Bridge.
We took the kids for a carriage ride around old town square.
The Zoo.




We were there for Halloween, luckily or my kids wouldn't have had one. Amber let us borrow a few dress up things for our costumes.
The kids were so funny. We carved pumpkins and had these little ones for decorations. We went out one night and left the kids with a babysitter and came home to them each sleeping with a baby pumpkin. It was so funny. We could just imagine the girls talking the babysitter into letting the sleep with them (like it was something there mom's would never let them do).

Thanks Ambs we had a ton of fun!