I'm back ....with my Sunday Six

Hello again dear blog friends. I am back into the world of blogging. My Dell had a motherboard transplant and has recovered well. I am glad to have her working again. I have missed posting and visiting your blogs.

...

1. Having my Dell fixed and working makes me smile.

It is nice to be able to start out by wishing you a Happy New Year and tell you about some of the other reasons I have been smiling this week.
...

2. Starting a New Year makes me smile.

It is always nice to have a fresh start with a chance to improve our lives, work a little harder, love a little more, be a little more charitable and grow closer to our Heavenly Father.

I will make a New Year post later and tell you all about the exciting things we did to celebrate. We were really a wild bunch here... we even stayed up until midnight....whoopee!
...

I have truly been blessed and have had sooooo much to smile about this past week. I will tell you a few of the reasons this week and then I will continue it next week. I've saved up a month worth of smiles.

...

3. Having our family together was my biggest reason to smile.

Here we are with our 4 children...Mindy, David, Lynell and Erin
This is the first time that we have all been together since Erin's wedding two and a half years ago.

It was wonderful... My cheeks were tired from smiling all week.

There were 19 of us together. We really missed Dathan and Jordan who could not take off work, but we were thankful that everyone else could come.

We just couldn't get enough of these sweet grandkids. Next May Marla will give us one more grandson which will be our 12th grandchild....are we blessed or what!!! Smile...Smile...Smile
...

4. I'm glad that we all get along so well and have so much fun playing and working together.

We played in the Jacuzzi

We sang karaoke style....

We danced

(Like father like son...what can I say??)

We created works of art...

We danced some more while Patrick and EJ sing for us.

We loved being together

We played hours of wii and had fierce competitions. (David and John ski jumped until after 12:00 last night.)

We rocked the house and had a great time.

Everyone took a turn with the microphone.

We may not be the greatest singers but we are surely the loudest!

I am smiling just thinking about it.

All of this playing made us work up big appetites. We had to take a break from all the playing and fix food for this gang. We worked together well. We found that the old saying that "Too many cooks spoil the food" was not true in our case.

Grammy loved having her girls helping in the kitchen.




Feeding 19 people for a week is lot of work. Everyone pitched in and helped. Even the little girls had jobs to do.... and they did them with a smile.

Of course....after all of the work...we got to eat.

...

5. Eating together was fun and made me smile.



We ate....




and we ate...

and we ate

and we ate...

and we ate..

and we.... well you get the idea.

Our good friends, Sil and Ron joined us for our belated Christmas dinner.

...and then we ate some more....

...of course we always used our best manners!

...

...

6. We got to have a 2nd Christmas....

We spent Christmas eve and Christmas day with Mindy and her family and had a wonderful time. I will post a slide show at the end of this post to show highlights of our 1st Christmas. Our out of state kids all arrived Dec. 26th and Dec. 27th. That is when we had our belated Christmas dinner and our 2nd Christmas gift exchange.


We gave Erin and Patrick a wii game and accessories. .. they are our wii champions you know.

..
Erin and Patrick gave us a wonderful gift. They took all the old movie camera reels we had made of the kids when they were small and put them on DVDs for us. What a treasure to watch those old movies of our family when they were tiny and John and I were young. Boy have we changed through the years!

Jalen created and designed this tee shirt for Grampy.

David gave him the cool hat.

Of course eating candy went well with the gift exchange.

The very best gift of all ....

.... Was the gift of love we shared.... Our 4 grand-daughters made us this poster.
...and the joy of being together.

I hope that all of you had a healthy and happy holiday week too. I am anxious to get caught up reading your posts and hearing from you. I appreciate all of you that made comments on my last post. Thank you so much for taking time to say hello. I always love hearing from you.

...

I will post a scrapbook slideshow below of our 1st Christmas that we had with Mindy, Ernie and their family before our out of state kids got here. Have a good week. Love, Grammy Lura

Make a Smilebox scrapbook