Our holidays were wonderful! How were yours?

We began the holidays by taking a quick trip to California to visit my brother. James and I made the trip with my parents and wee sis.

James was a trooper for his first looong drive

He only had one freak out. We left a few days before Christmas, stayed a day, and came back. Remember the big rain storms in southern CA and southern UT? Yeah, we drove through those.

Before we left, we took out one of the captains chairs in my parents mini-van so there was only one and the back bench, giving James a little bit of crawling room when we were stopped. It was a wonderful idea. Because of the rain and the cold, I didn’t brave the weather to take him into gross gas stations, so he just chilled in the car, crawling around while we took turns going inside. Thanks to Grandma, he even got chances to sit up front and play with buttons.

"Driving" the car was his favorite part of the trip.

(Don’t worry, the car was in park and the emergency break was on while he “drove.”) Notice the band-aid on his hand… two days before we left he pulled my straighten off the bathroom counter onto his hand. Luckily, it was in the process of cooling down, so the burn wasn’t as bad as it could have been (and it was a straightener and not a curling iron so it wasn’t as big of a burn). He also ran head first into the bed frame giving him the lovely line on his forehead that you can see in the top picture.

Begin side note:

This kid is into EVERYTHING and never sits still. He can open drawers, cupboards and his favorite thing in the world to play with are doors, swinging them back and forth. If he does ever push them all the way closed, he cries, because he toy doesn’t work any more. He tries to “walk” between his two standing toys, falling on his face. He attempted the stairs and tries to scale our entertainment center. Yesterday, I took something in the bedroom and came back and couldn’t find him anywhere… He’d made his way into the half bathroom and discovered the toilet paper. joy.

He's a little booger...

Needless to say, baby-proofing is in FULL SWING at our house. He finds things I never would have imagined.

End side note.

Back to our trip. We stayed with my brother, Rob and his beautiful wife, Ali. James is now afraid of Rob (I might be too if I met him in a dark alley). Due to the rain, and their flight to Australia we didn’t stay long and were back on the road in the torrential rain.

On the way home, we brought my brother’s three dogs. James LOVED them. They HATED James.

This was the closest they got to him

The car ride back was a little crowded with 4 adults, a baby and three dogs. Yes, they are small dogs, but they still got in the way. We even had a little diaper changing incident the ended with unpleasant stuff on Rachel’s pillow because the dogs were taking up all the floor space I needed to change a diaper.

On Christmas Eve, we joined my mom’s family for the traditional Food and Nativity night. The food was fabulous. The company was wonderful and James found something new to scale.

He might be Evel Knievell reincarnated. He has no sense of fear.

My grandma was able to join us (she’s been staying in the rest home while her broken leg heals, she’s almost ready to go home! Yay!), and read the nativity from the Bible. James got to be Baby Jesus this year and he even sat still longer than I thought he would.

The grandkids acting out the nativity

On the left, Rachel and Bree are the shepherds. Next, standing in the red is Emily as an angel and Abby as the star. Below the star we have Mary and Joseph, as portrayed by Andrew and Leah with Mary holding Baby Jesus. Above Mary and the baby are our wise men, Jared and Jessie. I think the 3rd wise man (Alyssa) decided to stay with her mom instead.

My grandma reading the story of Christ’s birth is one of my favorite memories of Christmas each year.

On Christmas morning, we woke up earlier than we wanted, our sweet baby decided to sleep from 9 until 12, then stay awake until 2:30, so 8 a.m. was EARLY. But it was worth it because we got to talk to JOSEPH, AKA Elder McCracken, in Peru.

Listening to Uncle Joe

(I realized that I didn’t get a picture of all of us listening, but you can see my dad in the background with the phone. We listened on speaker, while he held the phone close to a recorder.)

It was great to talk to him. He loves it there and is enjoying the people and the work. He described it as the happiest and saddest time of his life. The happiest because of how much his testimony is growing and the saddest because he sees the people and knows how much the Gospel could help them, but they aren’t willing to listen.

(I also realized that I didn’t take any pictures of the present opening. James loved it… mostly the wrapping paper.)

so excited

He was pretty stoked about getting his hands on his dad’s mini oreos. Santa didn’t bring him a lot of candy, just some fun things to chew on and one candy cane. He was in heaven.

The next day we got together for the Phelps’ Family party. The kids all got together and bought Bryan’s parents a new TV so it was pretty exciting to bring it in. It is a super thin LED, only 1.25 inches. It’s crazy the things they do with TVs now.

James got to play with his favorite cousins too.

"Friends, forever...Talkin' 'bout Friends"

(name that song…)

The next week was really relaxed. It was wonderful. Bryan was able to stay and hang out with us all week, so that was lovely. We played games with my family, we made a gingerbread train, pillow piles and we watched lots of movies.

Pillow Pile

New Year’s eve was pretty low key too. We stayed home, tried to get James back on a normal sleeping schedule, watched movies and went to bed.

It was a lovely end to a lovely year.

On May 2, my family and I traveled to The Great SaltAir to see visit my older brother (we hadn’t seen him since Oct.) and to see him with his band, The Used, in concert. It was so much fun. We got up to the show early to make sure that we would be able to see the opening acts (Straylight Run). While we were on our way up to Salt Lake though, we listened a little bit to Rob on the radio. Once they got into town his band went to X96 to advertise for the concert later that night. Once at the show, Rob was taking a nap, so we watched the other bands while we waited for him to wake up. Once he woke up, we went behind SaltAir to his bus to see him. It was so great to see him. It had been so long since we had see him. I think he was pretty excited to see us too.

We left him a little while later to give him time to warm up and get ready for his show. Then instead of going back inside and watching from the back of the auditorium, we went in behind the stage and picked a spot to wait for the show to start on the side of the stage. I prefer to be over on the side of the stage because then we aren’t in the middle of the crazy mosh pit. It can get pretty insane in there. Joseph my little brother decided that at this concert he wanted to watch from the mosh pit, so he positioned himself right up front in the center of the crowd. It was pretty crazy. When Rob came out on stage he instantly saw my brother and said into the microphone that he was excited to start the show and to see his brother in the front row.

During the show Rob yelled for everyone who was a fan of The Used to scream. We stood and yelled, to support our brother. While we were yelling, the guitarist, Quinn, saw my dad cheering and stopped Rob. He said, “Bert, I found the biggest Used fan,” and Rob stopped and said, “Who?” Quinn pointed to my dad and Rob stopped and said, “Hey, it’s my dad! Everyone say ‘Hey Ed.’” Then the whole crowd yelled, “Hey Ed!” Rob then stopped for a minute and said, “Let’s have a little moment, let’s bring my mom and dad up on stage.” And so he did. The bouncers helped my mom and dad climb up on the stage. It was actually really cool to see. While on stage he hugged and kissed both of them. My parents and my brother have been through a lot and I think it is so wonderful that he loves them so much and is so close to them and I know how proud of him they are. It’s pretty awesome to see some time. Watch the Video below of my mom and dad’s moments on stage.

Also during the concert, Rob brought a bunch of people up on stage to be his “backup dancers” during one of the songs and he called up my little sister, Rachel. It was so funny. Needless to say, she didn’t really fit in with most of the other people up on that stage. It was pretty entertaining to watch her dance up there. Apparently, she can’t dance very well (neither can the rest of us though). :) I’ll post the video of her dancing later. She’s great.

Anyway. It was an awesome concert. I love my brother so much and I’m so glad that I was able to see him. Here’s some more pictures. Enjoy!