Christmas 2012

Annual Bretzke nativity. 

With Dan and Sam away serving missions, 

the 3 brothers were temporarily replaced by the "three little girls"

...who sure showed a lot more dramatic enthusiasms then the boys usually do.

We had a cute couple of angles.

Britney was coming down the stairs and we asked her if she was gonna be Mary 

and she in her perfect divas voice replied, "Probably."

 She really does play a perfect Mary.

Well i thought we were getting a cute picture of the shepherds...apparently one of the shepherds was super pumped about the angels announcement. Oh Benny.

Late Christmas Eve we did the sibling gift exchange. I had Curtis and he got a Canadian Orientation packet, complete with toonies and loonies to go buy poutine with! 

Christmas morning.

I've been super excited about giving McKye Beatles rockband, he unwrapped the first rockband and was ecstatic...then he pulled out the Beatles one and made <<<< this face and said, "what the..." (My kids always say what the... they never fill in the blank thankfully.)
We explained it was still a rock band game and he decided to be happy about it.  Really happy. He played it most of Christmas with whatever member of the family he could convince to play with him.

Had a great week chillin' with the bretzkes (after Christmas morning i got lazy though and didn't take any pictures)

Bowen Christmas

Sledding

They were so cutes with their rosy cheeks and toque hair, playing with their cousins after.

My mom in her sparkly Christmas sweater 

I bought her. 

And my sister with her rad purple low lights you can't really see in the picture.

Looking at Grandma's new grandkids calendar, finding all the McKye's

Levi and Kamber giving us some tunes.

McKye basically worshiping his cousin Josh, wanting to do everything with him,

 including sit on the same chair to et their pie.

Evanny maybe a little bit done with Aaron playing with his pigtails.

I know how ya feel Ev.

  Speaking of grandkids, here's the impromptu "all the grandkids" picture we tried to take. Baby Cassidy pulled Levi's hair so he bawled the whole time. Aaron was pulling Evanny's hair, Josh was being a little too wiggly on grumpy ol' grandpa's lap, and Kamber just kept walking off.

Regardless, there they all are! Getting to be quite the group. 8 in 8 years. 

(Someone better pop one out for 2013, we're on a roll!)

Merry Christmas...

til next year!

Bahamas 2012

Twas the week before Christmas and I was frantically wrapping presents so everything could be done when we got back... from the Bahamas!

 Now where on earth was I gonna stash presents and NOT have them found, and ripped open prematurely for a whole week??? Into my sister- in-laws car trunk they went.

And off to the sunshine we went.

Ben's company full on spoiled us this year. 

We stayed at Atlantis Paradise Island. The place was HUGE!

We'd been there 4 days, walked everywhere (we thought) 

and still discovered a whole other pool!!! 

There were aquarium and pools with tons of aquatic life everywhere! You'd just walk through tunnel and caves and see sharks and massive manta rays...its was crazy!

And turtles.

 And dolphins! We' decided we should do the swimming with the dolphins thing at least once. it was way cool. One of the dolphins name was McKye! (well Machai)

We get along real well with the Idaho regional techs 

(The one wife, Nikki has always been in my favs books, because she's just a super caring person. I'll always remember the very first time we went to Hawaii with the company and I had 6 week old baby McKye,  and she just came on up and said, "OK so I'm taking your kids one afternoon this week so you two can go snorkel or something just the two of you, ok?" how do you not love a person that generous? And Hannah and I discovered this trip that we both served on temple square!

Lots a self portraits

It's always nice to dress up every once in a while.

Such pretty white sand and blue water.





















And then there were the water slides!!!

Like the one off the mayan temple that went THROUGH the tank shark!!!! Can you see the tubes in the tube?

This one was cool cuz you could race and it had your times displayed.

Tube rides were the best though.

The last day was pretty windy. (flet like home!)
We hung out in the private Cabanas and played cards.
(Yes, those cards do say Vivint)

It was way fun to have Trevor and April along this year.
they actually managed to NOT talk work the whole time!!!

 I LOVED how colourful all the little buildings were!

As beautiful as it all was...as always I was excited to get back to my boys.
It was nice to contemplate about them (once I'd slept a bit!!!)
Heck, the greatest highlight of the whole week was meeting Dallin,
and yes while I believe in taking the time to regroup I still maintain a lot of the sentiments from the end of this post-vacation post.

It's opposition in all things I suppose. The cold made me appreciate the sun,
but in the end I was ready to trade in the palm trees for twinkly lights,
to say goodbye to the water slides and have just as much, if not more fun,
on a little tiny slope sledding with my kids.