Family Blessings

It is fall and I finally am getting around to changing my page for the season! Unfortunately, it will last about 2 days and need to be changed again! Oh well! Obviously it is Thanksgiving and I have so much to be thankful for! In fact, Romney gave me the idea, and so our pictures of the day for November are all about things we are grateful for! It is not hard to be grateful, just hard to always figure out the best way to photograph it! I've tried to be creative, especially since my family still runs when I pull out the camera so I can't just be thankful for family members! Anyway, here is one new family member that isn't camera shy!

This is Brynlee Jean Summers who was born on 11/22/11 just before 5 pm. She is 6lbs. 13 oz.

Jocelyn is loving being a big sister! She takes her job seriously and is doing great!

It has been fun to call our parents and report on their newest great-granddaughter! They all know much more about the posterity thing...Clark's parents have 33 grandchildren and this is the 3rd great grandchild and my parents have 27 grandchildren and 18 great grandchildren! Even though we are just getting started, I am continuing to enjoy the promise of finding joy in my posterity. Thanks, Scott and Romney, we love our little girls!

Finally! My New Favorite Room

We finally finished the room off of my kitchen! When we moved in it was a good place for the tv/entertainment center, but we never decorated it too much. We added a couch and I kept planning on making it a theater room. We found a great deal on theater chairs and bought those with plans to make the theater. Then we finished the basement with couches and a flat screen and no one ever even watched tv upstairs anymore. Then I wondered why we even needed a tv in there. I tried to sell the furniture on KSL..everyone tells me it is easy and quick...well, no one wants entertainment centers anymore so we gave ours away to a grateful family who had just moved here from another country and had an offer on the chairs. After much drama and a near miss at being scammed thru KSL, we still have the chairs, but we moved them to another room! Now I could move on to my better idea for the space...a computer/office/study area. I cleaned it out and had it painted while we were in New Zealand and now here it is!

We bought the furniture from IKEA so we gave the boys 63 boxes and put them to work. Seven hours later, Josh and Caleb had assembled our furniture! Hey, all those years of legos paid off!

Now I needed to add some color and decoration! I found our Atlas and a globe and added things we have gathered from our travels...

Romney found a cool idea online...an alphabet wall. We loved it and started gathering letters and things that looked like letters...

We collected all the letters and painted and papered them to add color and fun and then Clark painstakingly hung them on the wall. Really, he measured every letter and spacing until they were just right! My favorite letter is the X--a scrabble tile, and we even paid tribute to our two in town universities--Utah Valley and BYU!

And now my office is done! Everyone loves it, no more books on my fireplace and I have an extra closet in the kitchen I can use for storage!