.Christmas Parties + the best Air moment ever

The parties have begun and we are pretty much ready for Christmas to come in a few short days!

Family parties (involving games, Tessa getting a little thing called her Patriarchal Blessing!, delicious dinners, and frosting cookies):

Air’s Work party (involved us dressing fancy and going out to the Moose Factory for 4 1/2 hours! Air has the best work buddies):

Ward party (wherein there was an amazing program with lots of talent, including Air. He was the finale. It was a hit. My most favorite Air moment ever):

My favorite thing has always been whenever Air sings Elvis songs to me… he has such an amazing voice... unless it cracks during that one high part of the song. haha

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in other news:

1. Air lost his wallet at a gas station and the next day it was turned in at an elementary school... after we had canceled his cards. But he was still so happy it was found he did a celebratory dance! So lucky!

2. I'm suffering from acute Michaels-stress-mares every night. It is definitely not easy to have my job at this time of year... 'bad news everyone, your frames will not be done for Christmas'. It's breaking my heart.

.Anthro

I love Anthropology for a lot of reasons, right now it's their Christmas theme.

I mean, would you LOOK at all of these cute little ornaments?? And the fun gif’s they made!! I love them so much I thought I'd decorate my blog with them.

Enjoy! :)

.a tree!

We love our happy little tree. It glows all day and all night long, whether we’re here or not…

We can’t bear to turn it off to be honest. One month of constant glowing couldn’t be bad for anyone, right?

It brightens my life.

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Air made a delicious meal for the missionaries last week and I thought he deserved some blog recognition for his efforts.

Hun, I loved your stuffed peppers! You are an amazing chef.

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It's been a very productive week so far. Visiting teaching. Young Womens. Relief Society social. Work every day. I just got home from the post office to pick up some Christmas packages waiting for me (And to send off a package for my family in Utah!) (It’s coming your way Mother-dear!)

GAH! I just love this time of year!!

And I love all of you.

.cake

I finished another cake decorating course.

Also a friend of mine took it with me this time. Yay for not being alone!

So awesome to know someone in class.

This one was all about making flowers. We only made one final cake.

button flower:

apple blossom:

pansy (mine didn’t work out too well):

primrose:

violet:

daffodil:

rose:

lily:

basket weave:

And for the final cake we got to choose any design we wanted and we could use any of the flowers we made.

I loved the daffodils!

.The Best Game on the Internet

In July of 2007 my big brother sent the family a link to a humble little computer game that he and some of his fellow designers had been working on. He wanted us to test it out and tell him if there were any problems. This is a pretty normal occurrence with my brother Jordan, he's always creating something new and sharing it with us. And we always love whatever it is. We started playing this game and were stunned by this little world and how much fun it could be!

My nieces and nephews all became instant addicts (that was OK since it's an educational kinda game).

Since then the game has grown and grown. There are now 23 different WORLDS within the game and 10 million kids playing it every month. They have memberships, and they even have action figures and toys being sold at Toys-R-Us and in kids meals at Carl's Jr. Plus, t-shirts!

*we went to Carl's Jr. in Utah just for the toy

Jordan was even featured in their local newspaper.

Oh yeah, and on Time's 50 Best Websites of 2011. nbd

It is amazing to see the growth that's happened in just over 4 years. My brother is amazingly talented and genius. And I'm sure that the other guys working on it are ok too.

Have you heard of Poptropica? Here's a little video tour with some cheesy music:

My favorite world? Reality TV Island. But that was not an easy decision to come to. Here are some pics I took playing the game:


I'm pretty excited for the next world to come out too... here's a preview for Ghost Story Island:

You know what else is cool about my brother's job? His boss is Jeff Kinney. Author of the popular "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" book series. I even met him once!

I know, right?