It's beginning to look alot like Christmas...not

We hope you all have a great Christmas!
This was at the Maritime Museum here in Gulfport. We saw dolphins and then Santa.

 We have Blair's parents in town, so that has been a lot of fun. We had nice weather yesterday with a stroll down the beach on Christmas Eve, and went to our favorite doughnut shop. It's a little different Christmas than the Utah Christmases we've been used to! The boys couldn't get enough skiing in Utah over our Thanksgiving break, but that will have to last them for awhile, because there won't be snow here :)

Can you believe this was Christmas Eve?

Our favorite doughnut shop in Ocean Springs.

In Utah over Thanksgiving:

Xander is pretty amazing on those skiis! He went twice this season and is pretty much faster than I am now!

Claire all ready to face the Utah cold in her moon boots.

Christmas celebration in Utah, over Thanksgiving. You can never have enough Christmases!

Here we were last month at the disc golf course on base in Mississippi. Lookin like fall. Wrong season!

  Much love to all of our friends and family!

1st Place

...and 1st place goes to Alexander Curtis for his reading fair poster, out of all the 2nd grade! Woot woot. I think I know how it might feel to have your child win Sterling Scholar or the Olympics or something, because boy am I proud of him.  

oN HaLlOwEeN (& Baton Rouge zoo)

May the force be with you.

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At the ward trunk or treat, Xander found Darth Maul from Star Wars 

We have been having a great time celebrating Halloween this year!

We went to Boo at the Zoo up in Baton Rouge with some of our friends. All the kids have 2 costumes this year, due to the fact that we found screaming deals, & Xander really wanted to be a ninja.

Claire was not so happy for that pic.

Claire as Tinkerbell... a little more girly than Yoda.

Here some friends were over playing.

We made lots of Halloween treats to enjoy with some neighbors.

Hope you have a great Halloween!

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter

Two weeks ago we went on a road trip to here:

and it was so fun and magical! We went on all of the rides, and some twice. We got magical beans that included (besides the good flavors) bogey, earthworm, grass, dirt and vomit flavor ewwwww.

We enjoyed butterbeer, and pumpkin juice with our food at The Three Broomsticks.

Here is a view of the back of The 3 Broomsticks from across a bridge.

Check out Ollivander's! 

The boys got selected to help with the wand demonstration. It ended up that their wands shared a feather from the same tail of a phoenix.  Hmmm, sounds very familiar.

Here's Hogwart's castle behind me.

There were moving and talking pictures inside the castle, magical plants, falling snow, and here Harry, Ron and Hermione were even up top discussing something.

We met some friends on the other side of the park.

and we can't forget to mention Captain America.

Claire in the ball pit.

Xander on a raft ride.

End of a day.

Out in front of the Hard Rock where we stayed.

Fun!

On the drive home we stopped to see a 13 ft alligator, like the signs said.  Too bad it was stuffed.

We also stopped in Pensacola to run around a park and the pier at sunset.

Here's mommy's little "helper."

and daddy's favorite baby girl.

Birthdays

Guess who turned 7 and 5...

Xander's party at our house.

Complete with a cotton candy machine.

Do you like the spongebob pinata I made?

Guess where Will requested for his birthday party to be?

Good old Chuck E.

There have been a lot of festivals going on right around the base, and this was one a few weeks back:

facepainting, crafts, ice cream cups, games...

and don't forget the pony rides.

 As for the rest of this month, it's been pretty annoying having Blair gone up to Jackson (over 3 hours away) with only one day off a week.  Each month changes, so he's back in October luckily.  We decided to go up two of the weekends, and visit him.  One of them happened to be over that weekend when there was a big tropical storm down here, so that was nice to be gone for it.  We went to the Museum of Natural Science up in Jackson with Blair:

Playing with a turtle.

They had a big frog exhibit, which was fun to see so many different kinds.

This frog had fun flashing us. He's in between a tadpole and a frog still, as he's in water. It was the funniest thing, because he'd swim all fast looking for a hiding place, and then just freeze right in front of us for like 5 minutes.  He wasn't even touching the glass, just standing perfectly still like 3 inches away from it.  he did it twice!

Claire's favorite thing right now: birds. Her voice gets all high pitched with excitement and she points and says "buh, buh!" whenever she sees one.

They had some good aquariums there.

...and fun hiking trails.

...until I looked up and saw this HUGE SCARY spider like a foot above out heads, and noticed them all over the place!

So tropical storm Lee left it's mark up in Jackson too.  A whole bunch of the trails were still closed a week later.