Family Reunion Day 1

So I am not one for writing a lot of words when I have a lot of pictures. For the first day of the King Reunion we went to a park, had a BBQ, a snow fight (snow brought from Flagstaff compliments of the Despain family), played kickball, dug in the sand and had lots of fun playing games. :)

Cactus Anyone?

So a couple of days after Christmas, I was feeding Gunnar in my parent's living room and asked my mom to check on Tucker and Hunter who were playing outside in the front yard. When she checked on them they were hiding the neighbor's rocks. She asked them to put the rocks back in the neighbor's yard. When I finished feeding Gunnar I decided to make sure that they had returned all the rocks. I found them collecting pieces of the neighbors prickly pear cactus! "Don't worry Mom. It isn't pokey, It brushes right off" says Tucker as he puts a piece down and then brushes his hands on his pants. Right, no  big deal, NOT! Hunter was crawling through the cactus looking for the broken pieces. 

Well I brought them in, and my father and I tried to pull the long hairs out of their hands before deciding to send my father to the store to come home with some white glue. They thought it was lots of fun to be covered in the glue. Who wouldn't, right? Unfortunately, and surprisingly, it hurt a lot to pull the glue off of the arms and legs. They did not even want to consider a second coat of glue to ensure that we got all of the cactus off their bodies. Thankfully, the cactus was in its "soft" stage, everything came out, and they did not ever touch their faces or eyes with their cactus hands!

 And thank goodness for my mother taking care of Gunnar!

Christmas

We love being in Arizona for Christmas. It is so warm. We missed a bunch of snow falling and below zero temperatures! Plus we get to see all of our family and some friends :)

Sunday before Christmas, we had our traditional Christmas Eve dinner with the Whiting. I pulled the camera out while we were getting ready, but totally spaced it later so you don't get to see everyone that came

Here is Gunnar with his Aunt

 Here is Brylee

 Here is Bryant chopping up the plantanos for fried bananas

 Here is Tucker building with Tinkertoys with his Cousin Weston. These two had lots of fun together. Thank goodness Weston is still young enough that he did not need to be involved in all the grown-up games

 Hunter loved being outside as much as possible. I had to keep an eye on him to make sure he didn't knock all the fruit off the trees and only played with the ones on the ground.

 On actual Christmas Eve we got to see my Brother Isaac, his wife Juli, and their son Clark. This meant lots of fun at the retention basin by Grandma Wendy's house playing frisbee. Tucker tried really hard to explain this park to us not remembering what it was called but also not calling it a park because it doesn't have a playground. He used his hands to draw in the air a big rectangle, and then used them to show the trees coming out of the ground, he demonstrated that the park had hills on both sides, and then tried to describe the little bit of dirt that is along one end of the basin that you can dig in but not really dig it. It was super cute!

 Uncle Isaac still knows how to climb a tree :P

Christmas Stockings! I still don't know how I feel about them. They get me to spend too much money and they don't focus on Christ. When my kids are asked "What did Santa bring you?" I want them to be able to respond that Santa isn't real, but that we celebrate Christmas to remember Christ, or something like that. We'll see how I feel about it come next year.

Tucker

Hunter 

Brylee 

Brylee loved to rip of a single small piece of paper and hand it off while opening presents. It sure took forever:)

 Here is baby Maelee, Aunt Emilee's little girl, the youngest in the family and sitting on her Aunt Natalie's lalp

 More Brylee

 More Hunter

 And Tucker

Here is most of the gang :)

Apparently I didn't get any pictures at the Whitings, I'm not sure where the camera was but I was feeding Gunnar

Here we are at Great Grandma Cooley's. We had a wonderful lunch, and enjoyed sitting with Great Grandpa. Then everyone went to open presents. I was amazed (and received several comments) with how patient my children were waiting for their Christmas present. They sat on the fireplace and watched everyone get one and didn't complain about it taking a long time or whine when the gift pulled from under the tree wasn't for them. I didn't get a very good picture because I was trying to inconspicuous. 

I only have a picture of Hunter with his gift : P