It's December!!!

I was late putting up Thanksgiving/fall decorations so I feel like I just put them up and now it is time to take them down to put up the Christmas ones. I'm excited!! Last night we had the annual Johnson Christmas party including a visit from Santa. We had one less crier than last year. It was fun the kids had a great time. There are always amillion kids there. I think the kids are figuring out about Santa and Christmas. Shea knows it all. The little kids....as soon as this year goes by they will have a grasp on Christmas. I had a great idea for our family Christmas dinner this year since we aren't going to pick names to exchange gifts (for the cousins) I'll have to let you know how it turns out!! But you will have to wait. For the party the kids sang some songs and I recorded it but you couldn't hear them so I deleted the video. I'll have them do it again.

Here is a shout out to our newest blogger in the family!! Vanessa. Welcome!! Can't wait to see all your posts. You are such a grown up!!

Love you!!

Happy Thanksgiving

This is our Turkey Lurkey at the kids table.....do you love Thanksgiving kids tables??


I love this entryway buffet and the picture above it. what a great reminder for me every time I come or go.

Here is one of my treasures!! I'm grateful for strong men who could carry it up the stairs to add it along this wall. it is a 12 foot bench. Thanks to the Church of Hope that was getting rid of them for free.

We had a great Thanksgiving!! We had the Zieglers over and we had a house full. It was great to see all the Utah cousins. The boys couldn't wait to see them. We got to see Jon's new baby Cannon. He is a cutie. I'm a horrible picture taker as you can see I didn't take any pictures while they were here. I need a brain transplant!! I am so thankful they were here and that all the little kids (and big kids) get so see each other once in a while. We get to go to Utah after Christmas for a few days we are excited. I think cousins should know each other!!

It was a busy weekend Stacy had her baby on Friday night or was it at the crack of dawn on Saturday they named him Braden they should be coming home on Wednesday. Jake got engaged to a darling girl, Heather, She is also a teacher. We had kids playing inside we had kids playing outside. The weather was perfect. The kids loved to be outside and play on the swing. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. It was good to be with family. We are so grateful to have the family we have been waiting for. This is our year for gratitude to our Heavenly Father for all he has given us. We are grateful every year but we have seen his hand so clear this year in our family. We have been given the ultimate blessing from our Savior Jesus Christ without him all of this would be for nothing. We are grateful for the atonement, restored gospel, for the blessings of the temple. There is so much power in knowing that we will be a family forever. It makes some things so much easier to do each day. We have are grateful for the scriptures especially the book of Mormon. It really is a different book as we look at our little people and know that they are descendants of these great prophets of old. We are so thankful for a living prophet. Who loves us and lead and guides us. These are great days to be alive!!

Happy Birthday to our little lover

Easter 2008

This is Easter morning. What a bright happy face. Her hair is so short.

Nov. 2007 she had such fine short hair. Love her lips!

I'm forgetting her being so little.....I'm glad I have pictures.

can you just gobble up these cheeks. She sure has changed this is the first week in Dec 07 what a cutie.

Look how tiny she was next to the boys. Christmas eve 2007

these 2 are from Easter.....it didn't take her long to figure out how to open an egg and it magically had candy in it.

This is our big girl on our new swing.

This is today. She is trying to get something out of the jar.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY LITTLE MAMA

Today is our little love child's birthday!! She is 2yrs old. I will have to say that every time I think about the time we doubted that we could take another one I get sick to my stomach. She has been so wonderful to have in our home. We can already see that she has a very gentle spirit she cares about her older brothers and sister. She is becoming such a character. She loves to make faces. Her #1 favorite thing to do is sing. I hear her singing all the time either I am a child of God or her ABC's those are her 2 favorites. She loves to have her back scratched which is hilarious to me because she is so little. When I look at pictures of when we first got her I see the biggest change in her. She is such a big girl. She can do everything by herself - or so she thinks she can. She holds her own with her brothers. My favorite thing of all is that she has her daddy's heart. He always says he would take 10 little Samantha's I totally agree with that!! She gets so giddy when he comes home from wherever and she sees him. I love it. I know that she has always been part of our family the same way with all of our slices of heaven. I am grateful for a Heavenly Father that knows us and has a plan for each of us and knows exactly what we need. I could not have picked better children to fit our family so well. We love you Samantha !! Happy 2nd Birthday!!

I VOTE FOR CANNING!!

I hope everyone got a chance to vote or will take the chance before the polls close tonight!! I'm sure if we do our part everything will be OK no matter what the outcome is :)

I celebrated voting day today by doing alittle canning. My first attempt at real fruit. For our girls weekend in Oct we picked the pears off the pear tree at the ranch and brought them home. They look great in the bottle and I hope they are great tasting!! I used apple juice as the juice so it's cloudy I'm gonna do a regular sugar syrup for the next batch. I also couldn't find quart jars I still have to hunt some down. I'll go alittle later tonight or tomorrow. I still have 3/4 of the basket full of pears. Thanks girls for helping pick them!!!

These are my fancy tools I thought as long as I was doing pears I should use a paring knife.

This is our beautiful basket of pears. This is how many I still have left.I just did one bowl and I got 13 pint jars out of the bowl full. Yeah for whoever said you don't have to do amillion jars in one day...this basket may take me all week - Or I'll have to borrow a bigger pot.I forgot to put alittle butter in the mix to keep the bubbles down but they scooped off great!

Someone talk to me here!! I did the boiling everything and turning the jar upside down and the jars sealed. For jam that is enough.....is a sealed lid a sealed lid?? They are beautiful aren't they!!! Actually they look like eggs. Lindy I need to know about doing the butter!!! that may be my next project. Oh I guess I need to finish the pears. I can't wait to see them in quart jars!!

Happy November!!

I sat down earlier today ready to update and I got carried away looking at every ones blog. I am glad that I got back to it today. We had a great weekend! We made it through another Halloween with little people around last week we made a couple of projects to decorate. We also did pumpkins that was a hit with the little ones they weren't so sure about the gooey mess but they went along with it and pulled out all the seeds.

I'm sure you are all looking forward to seeing the grand costumes the kids wore...If I didn't have a digital camera I'd say I didn't want to waste film. I had great costumes figured out Joey was going to be a jail bird, Jordan was going to be a lion and Jesse was going to be a clown and Samantha was going to be Toto (Dorthy's dog) and Shea was going to be some kind of witch. I'm sure it started out with Joey he got some vampire teeth at school and that is all he wanted to wear... so he wore his halloween shirt and his vampire teeth. I had Jordan all dressed in his costume ready to go and looking great and he decided he didn't want to be a lion....so he took the costume off. Jesse didn't want to wear anything so I tricked him into wearing a shirt (which had a batman logo on the front) and put a batman cape on him which is a regular thing for him to do...Samantha had most of her costume on but wouldn't let me put on the head part (hat) that has the ears. Shea well she chose not to so some work at school and got her card changed a couple of times last week so there was no dressing up for her (mean mom) we had a great trunkertreat at the ward the kids got loaded with candy!! It will last a couple of years...seriously... we had a backpack full of candy from last years loot and when we got broken into the rats took our backpack full of candy.. How weird is that??

Fun weekend! Great Conference!! I love the conference broadcasts what a miracle that is. I didn't want it to end. It is so refreshing to hear our church leaders speak and be so optimistic about the times we live in - It is a great reminder to me that we do live in a great time, a perfect time live - we have it all...(except for a couple of things I'm sure we could all use...a Jetson's dryer that folds clothes on it's own and disposable clones so we can be everywhere we need to be and to do everything that needs to be done!) I love this time of year. Why don't we remember to be grateful all year...or is that just me :0 I do get overwhelmed when I think of all the blessing I've received especially lately. There really isn't anything that we are in need of or that we feel is missing in our lives (except for the 2 things mentioned above) It seems like the windows of Heaven have been propped open just for us for along while now. I've really been trying to pay attention to every little thing and to be grateful. This is a great time to be alive!!

These are some of our holiday projects the kids were so funny with them Samantha was so serious about gluing it was great! Jordan got the most excited of all the kids about making our decorations - what a character.

We made a mobile on the light in the entryway for our spiders and skeletons.

vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote, vote!!

I'm thinking...(hoping) this may work out.....

I don't have any pictures for this post but I will have some new ones soon. I'm so excited about a couple of our new things.... 1 is we have decided to start making our own bread. so we got our our bread maker and dusted it off and away we've gone....well James has not so much me....he's been experimenting with bread recipes and I think he has got one figured out. we do the dough in the machine and take it out and put it into bread pans or make rolls most bread. We have also been working on our food storage and using what we have. I was watching one of my fav shows last week and they talked about making their own laundry soap.....now if this is something that can be done why do we pay 20 bucks for our soap???? I looked on the web site of the show and there was nothing about the soap. So I went to my home page msn and typed in homemade laundry soap..... It seems as though I am the last person to be interested in it because there is plenty of sites to go on to get recipes. We purchased the ingredients today which came to just under $13.00 - 12 something. there is enough ingredients to make multiple batches. One of the sites even breaks down the cost ...which is about 1 cent a load.....I'm serious.. I can't wait to try it. It needs to be stirred till it cools so I'll do it one of these mornings so I can stir all day. I don't know how to put an address on here but if you want to find it look up homemade laundry soap and there it will be. I just had to pass that along I'm so excited about it.
tonight we carved pumpkins. I will have to get the pictures loaded soon. They are so great!! It was a gooey mess but the kids really got into it and so did James he cut out all the faces. we even saved the seeds and baked them with salt yummy!! I can smell them they smell great. Well I'll have to get back soon with pictures and more stories....This is a busy - but great week!!

BOOOOOOO!!

I didn't startle you with a new posting did I??
I wrote alittle paragraph to start the blog and then I added some fun reunion pictures and they all showed up before the paragraph and I didn't want to move all the pictures, there ended up being alot of them. I just couldn't stop adding they were all so great. So you can read the beginning of the blog at the end. We had a great time at the reunion the kids had fun and they love to look at the pictures when we have them on the computer. Some of the pictures I'll add comments to and the others you can just have fun looking at.

This was the critter box all the caterpillars and grass hoppers got put in here.

These 3 pictures are so funny to me. There was no one out there she was just going on a walk by herself.

The snow cones were a hit. We will have to do them again!! We had them on the perfect day.

Do you love this mop on her head??

These are the pictures we took for Shea's baptism. They all turned out so great. Leah does a great job taking pictures she drove her all over the place getting just the right shot. She had a beautiful table out with the pictures in white frames for the baptism.

This is the whole clan that attended the reunion. We were missing a couple of brothers and thier families. We would have been double in size!!

These are all the nieces and nephews that live in AZ the other half live out of state. What a group...ps do you love the church pew they are sitting on?? I got them on craigs list for free from an old church we got 4.

These are Shea's paint ball wounds.....

This is the whole paint ball group some of them are quite scary don't you think.

We had a make your own pizza night and Jesse was right there in the mix helping out.




This was a long drive for some of these kids .



I think there may be a law about how many kids can be in a car all at once.


This was a great lunch... it looks like we had sour cream.....


This is just one of our watermellon lovers.

I have really had alot of things to blog about but I haven't taken the time to sit and do it...I don't use the excuse that don't have time because that is the farthest from the truth. I can sit and read blogs all day long. PS. if you have a list of blogging friends on your site you can bet I have visited them. I love to see some of the things other families do...is that nosey or curious?? or neither??? We have had so much go on here since the last entry by my trusted blog secretary. we've been camping, gone to the train park, we got a new swing set, we've had play dates with friends, our recent activity was to make halloween decorations that was fun....we did ghosts, spiders and skeletens. We are still going to make black cats, pumkins, and bats. i will post that one as soon as my media tech downloads the pictures. I have been taking pictures all along so I do have some to go with each entry now I just need to get focused!! For today I'll post some fun family reunion pics of the kids...they are so stinkin cute and they are getting so big so fast...it has been a year and a half that they have been here and we are already doing hand - me - downs....which is great but no fun for me because I love to shop....my favorite mall to go to is the Good Will Mall it has all kinds of name brands (or not) in all sizes and styles. It's a one time shopping stop.