We enrolled Eli in indoor soccer.
Lined up practicing kicking the ball in the goal.
Listening to the coach.
Eli’s first goal! He didn’t know what he was doing, but he did it!
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American Fork Canyon
Since the valley doesn’t have snow, we had to go up American Fork Canyon to go sleigh riding. Look at those mountains! They are beautiful.
Eli had fun.
Eli is my brave little boy with no fear. He went down the hill by himself! And this was a big hill!
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I love to see that smile!
Lunches at the prison
Went to our usual lunch at the prison and this sign greeted us. New always means increased prices.
New menu and new prices.
They took away the breakfast items. Not a lot on the menu that is vegetarian. We had grilled cheese sandwich with french fries. Not very original and very greasy.
With the prices up and now the menu being just like any other burger joint, we agreed that we may not be frequenting Serving Time. Pretty sad. We really enjoyed coming and looked forward to the beginning of the week. We will have to find some place new.
Working late
This picture was taken at 3:58am this morning.
Count the boxes…. Yup, 47 of them. 47 3 feet sandwiches. That is 141 feet of bread that we had to bake!
We started at 4pm yesterday evening.
We kept feeding the oven and proofer with bread.
We had bread everywhere! This is only a little bit of what we baked. Every counter had bread on top. All the bread cabinets were full of either bread ready to go into the proofer or baked bread.
Every time the oven timer went off I heard, “George, where am I going to put bread this time!” 
We worked as fast as we could throughout the night. We did have a dinner break, and around midnight we had to take an hour or so to take care of an emergency. I cut my finger quite severely and had to find band-aids. I’m not up this late very often…ok…never up this late. We had a hard time finding a store that was open 24 hours.
My dad kept up with the box making and rearranging the fridge to make sure we had enough room for 47 boxes!
He wouldn’t smile for me.
Around 2:00am I was getting pretty tired. My feet hurt even with wearing my old woman compression socks.
Always keeping a full oven and proofer.
Cutting bread. Again.
Sandwich after sandwich!
We do work well with each other. My mom kept the bread coming. As soon as one sandwich was done, more bread was on the table waiting to be assembled.
3:00am. We still had more sandwiches to build!
Still no smile
3:58am and we are done!
I forgot to take a picture of the walkin. It was stuffed! My dad worked hard all night trying to get every box to fit.
Happy Birthday
Paul wanted to celebrate his birthday by taking Eli sledding. A quick trip to my parents for a sledding inner tube and we were set.
It snowed very little yesterday, but we had enough to make it down the hill several times.
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It was 14′ out there. It was frigid!
Eli had a great time and even let us have a turn.
We came home and put Eli to bed. He was exhausted running up the hill 80 times. So, it was just the two of us for birthday apple pie and homemade ice cream.
Happy Birthday!
Yellowstone Bus Ride
The next two days we went on a tour bus around Yellowstone Park. The freshly laid snow was beautiful. We enjoyed having a driver and they provided lunch for us as well.
The buses had monster tires that Eli loved!
It snowed quite a bit while we were there.
The only wildlife we saw was this wolf, which was amazing. I haven’t seen a wolf in the wild.
Oh yeah, we saw some elk. But we see Elk a lot so this doesn’t count.
Lunch. He was entertaining us.
He has the cutest smile.
This could be a Christmas card!
Dog Sledding
Today we went dog sledding.
When we arrived, the dogs were excited. They were jumping around and couldn’t get hooked up to the sled fast enough.
We quickly loaded onto the sled and a few seconds later, the owner gave the command to go. We were off. In silence. The dogs immediately quieted down and were happy to pull the sled.
Saw some more beautiful country along the way.
We took turns driving the sled.
The runners on the sled.
Eli and my feet
Eli’s turn to drive!
That was a fun venture. Hopefully, we will have the opportunity to go dog sledding sometime soon.
Yellowstone
Paul had a fun idea that turned into one of our best get aways.
We jumped into the truck, and a nap later we were in Yellowstone.
This boy didn’t nap! He stayed awake and enjoyed his movies.
We arrived that evening.
The roads were snow packed which made for a fun drive around town.
The temperature was a little nippy. -4! Being that cold, it was a bit miserable at times, and it felt like wherever we went, the heaters couldn’t keep up.
We at dinner at the hotel and requested seating next to the fireplace. The warmth was delightful!
We went swimming every night. Every. Night.
That’s my boy!
We stayed in Yellowstone for four days, so we ate out a lot. Our favorite restaurant was the Slippery Otter. Okay, it was my favorite restaurant. The vegetarian burger was excellent. We I had to go back for another one.
I’m not sure what is happening here. I guess we need to get out more. Ha!
Christmas Eve
This year, we went to Bryan and Shayna’s house for Christmas Eve. Her house is always beautifully decorated.
After dinner, we opened Christmas crackers.
Always need an uncle to roughhouse with.
We wanted something different than decorating gingerbread houses, so we decorated trees.
They all looked great!
Eli took this photo. Not bad!
On our way home we stopped, I mean… drove through, ha! a place with many lights.
We went home and opened our pajamas. This is one tired boy
Left cookies and Jarritos? Yep. That’s what he wanted to give Santa this year. Jarritos.
Eli fell asleep almost immediately, which was good because we had stockings to stuff.
We quickly covered the bare tree with a bunch of presents and jumped in bed. Can’t wait till tomorrow!
Spelling and writing skills
Eli is improving on his writing skills and today he surprised me on his spelling. He told me he wanted to write CAT. So he did! He sounded out the word sound by sound and wrote each letter.
So we continued on with other words.
Eli missed the cut off date to get him into kindergarten so he will have to wait two more years. I’m going to have to work harder to find a school that will let him in early. He is doing so well academically, I don’t want to slow him down. I’m going to have to bake a turkey for the school admission people. Hmm… I need to start learning how to bake a turkey… Or bake any type of meat…