Ward Christmas Party

Aloha everyone! Christmas is fast approaching, we've had a couple of Christmas parties each of the last two weeks. This week we had our company Christmas party it was held at the local country club. It consisted of team members from our three offices. The head count came to just about 100 people. It was a pretty big event. We ate, played games, and socialized to our hearts desire. It was a lot of fun to see everyone that helps make the practice grow. That party was on Thursday night and Friday night we had our ward party.

 They planning committee wanted everyone to dress up in biblical attire and you had to bring a can of food as your tax to be able to come to the feast. They had made some pretty cool decorations and props. They had a live nativity set up. We all dressed up and brought a family blanket to sit on the ground and eat on. We had borrowed some costumes from our friends the Kings. They were actually Book of Mormon characters but basically from the same time period.

 Dax wanted a costume with some of the leopard print fabric. He quickly associated wearing the leopard print with having hunted and killed the leopard. His costume was for King Benjamin a prophet from the Book of Mormon. He said King Benjamin was a BAD guy! (he said it with excitement, he was excited to be the tough bad guy). Dayna and I said no King Benjamin wasn't bad but he was good and helped a lot of people, he responded, well.....he killed leopards. So I learned something, if you want to be bad, I mean a really bad man you kill leopards....according to my three year old son. It was fun, but hard after a long day of sitting at work my back doesn't tolerate a lot of sitting on hard wood and trying to keep track of a few kids while eating with a plate on my lap, you get the idea, we're pretty spoiled to have chairs and tables. The food was really good there too, we had beef or chicken pitas with different cubed cheeses and fruits. They did a really nice job with the whole thing. Unfortunately it got late quick and we had to leave before they did the nativity story.

 The open market where we got our food!

Saturday morning came and Janelle was out to continue her Christmas shopping, she has coordinated the adoption a family for Christmas along with two other moms from Dayna's kindergarden class. They are doing everything anonymously, everybody is being so generous and I think that the family will have a wonderful Christmas. Yesterday afternoon it was warm enough to take the kids out to get some fresh air, so we took them to the park. They had a good time as always, it was pretty warm and sunny but with the wind chill it had to be in the 40's. Then to top the night off we took the kids for a drive through on of those Fantasy of Lights set ups, where they have a bunch of characters set up in lights and you drive around looking at them while blasting Christmas music in your car. We all had our hot chocolate in the car while we enjoyed the lights. The kids got out of their car seats to come sit on our laps to be able to see everything, well when we had finished going through the whole thing we asked the kids to get back in their seats. Dayna was having a little trouble with her seat belt so we slowed down to a stop to try to help her, just as we did that a 4 point buck came running right at us from the other lane of the road it quickly darted to the side and just missed us by a couple of feet. He probably would have ran right into us if we were moving in our car at all, but luckily we had stopped. Dayna got a kick out of it, I was just happy we wouldn't be taking the car into the shop next week with dents and scratches caused by a run away deer. Well that wraps up our weekend, we're counting the days till we make our journey up to the NW to see you all. We're excited, we love and miss all of you. Hope you have a great week!




Jon, Janelle, Dayna, Dax and Alana