Babies, Books, Blogging, Boys and Exchanges!

Here we go again.  Its been a great week for family time.

On Monday I working on organizing my scrapbooking supplies, Emily and  sweet Baby Becki came up to say hi.  They were getting ready for their trip to Texas to spend time with Sam's family, while Sam stays home and misses them! (BTW we found out that Sam's Dad was made first counselor in their bishopric this past week.)

Spencer came back from picking up Seth in Virginia, and now I have two big tall, and very nice Boys living here, how cool is that?  Don't they look like a pair of missionaries giving a discussion?  (The pic was taken today when we were visiting with Davin et al)

That night Dad went home teaching and we babysat J. Scott, Eva and Baby Elle.  Lets just say Baby Elle is nothing if not determined, and just as fun as she is determined, and J. Scott is getting to be a very good Scrabble player.  Eva spent the night so that ....

On Tuesday Eva and I used the pictures we took on our last visit to Aunt Cheryl and make her a Smash Book. Here we are working on the book.

And here is Eva showing off the Smash Book, and also her ruffly skirt (and my glasses)!

Next it was off to Salt Lake to deliver the book and to have a nice visit with Aunt Cheryl and Grandpa.  We even ran into Aunt Karen there as she came by to visit with Grandpa Carlo too.

That night I went to the temple to do an endowment and got to be on a session for which Dad was acting as the officiator.  How cool is that?

Wednesday I blogged, and went to work, taking a Book case that Dad had helped me restore, it sold the next day, hurray!!

On Thursday I worked again, and then Dad picked me up after work and we attended a marriage enrichment fireside at Robin's ward, which was very good.  Of course it was fun to visit with Robin as always.

Then on Friday I got to go junquing with Cathie Cox, and we met Jenn, the other flea.o.logist, for lunch at Cafe Rio.  That evening, after Dad took his Dad to dinner, we met at Becca and Brady's where we got to Baby sit Baby Titan, who was fun and adorable, as you might have suspected!

Since I had a cookie exchange the next day, I also made cookies.  It was very cool to get to watch Mama Mia and Neverland, while baking and fooling around in the kitchen.  I love the set up!!

And then here I am at the cookie exchange at Jennifer's house in North Orem.

As always, you can see Jenn's amazing decor for the party.  I will be blogging later on my Pollyanna site if you want to come and see more pics.  My friend Wendy was also a guest.

Next I ran up to King's English Book Store is the Harvard-Yale area for a book signing by Shannon Hale who has just published a sequel to Austenland.  She is LDS, local and one of my favorite authors. (In fact after reading her Newberry awarding winning book, Princess Academy, I looked at her name and thought "That sounds like a Mormon name.",  Who knew?)  The line was enormous, but they had a little 'murder mystery' going on, and I loved that.  I was one of only two people who really 'got into it'.  Above you can see me with the two male characters, and the one on the left is Mr. Shannon Hale.  Very nice people and a lot of fun.

This is Shannon with her fan who won the drawing for this calendar ...

We finished up the evening with another exchange, this time a Christmas gift exchange, sad eh?  Of course we followed up with games and had a good time, as always. I thought it was kind of funny to do a Christmas exchange and a Valentines exchange on the same day, don't you?

"Oh look how sweet, he's playing the piano"                                      "Hey, Who ya callin' Sweet??!!"

Then this morning we had a nice surprise.  Davin and Bri had come down his friend's baby's blessing so they stopped by to visit.  Baby Elias really got into playing the piano, actually with very un-baby-like restraint.

We enjoyed a nice day at Church, then had dinner afterwards before heading to Davin and Bri's to play games in the evening. (BTW We found out that her brother Brock has recorded a song that is available on i-tunes, hopefully Bri will comment here and leave the link!  Its very good!)

Its been a great week for Babies, Books, Blogging and Boys .... we loved almost every minute of it!!