Christmas Day 2024

 Christmas day was a great day of visiting with the kids as we went from house to house as usual.  We started out by picking Anna Lou up from her place at BeeHive Homes and then having a nice breakfast and opening presents at our house with her and Bean.  Bean was down for the holiday from his place in Cedar City.  Jay and Brynn gave us cool gifts they got for us while on their Ireland trip - a sweet hat for Paul and a lovely plaque for me.  We miss seeing them on Christmas day, but we enjoyed visiting on the phone and getting some sweet pictures from them of the holiday!  

Then we went to visit Supe and Beacher and kids.  This is the only place where there are still little ones, and it was fun to see all of their excitement over their new toys.  So cute! It brings back memories of times past!  Jem was super excited about his new Ninja Turtle electric toothbrush.  Kaia had a cute duck with babies that would follow it and they had a brand new Hungry Hippos game to play!  

Next we went to Moss and Christie's and enjoyed visiting with them for a little while.  While we were there we opened our gift from all of our kids...an amazing helicopter ride over Zion Park gift certificate!  Christie was able to put the opening of it on a zoom call to Jay and Brynn and Moss put it on Facetime to the rest of the family to watch us open it.  Cool things can be done with technology if you just know how!  We are so excited to go on the helicopter ride! After that stop Anna Lou was ready to go back to her place.  She's not an early riser and gets tired easily too.  (She said she hopes this is her last Christmas. She's pretty tired of being here.)

Next up was Derek and kids.  We had fun here with Trigg showing us his funny mini microscope gift.  There's always some sweet nostalgia of Weed there as well.  They talked about finding gift bags that they have used for years that still have Weeds cute nicknames for everyone on them.  There are ornaments from years past that remind them of her, etc., etc.  It is wonderful to know that because of the gift of Christmas we all know that Weed will be there waiting to welcome us home. It's good to see these kids doing well - Tasia at BYU and loving her classes and work, Kaebri with a wonderful job at Design to Print where she has a great future in a field of work she really enjoys.  Zade and Trigg are doing well in school and at church.  Derek has a great job doing what he loves as well.  They are blessed and it feels like Weed is always watching over them.    

Ferf's house was next.  All of her kids, except Gaige, were there along with Brynnli's boyfriend/fiance, Ryan. (Gaige was on the phone with them when we got there and we got to talk to him.  He seems to be doing really well on his mission!) They all seem to have a lot of joy in getting together.  The divorce has left some big scars on this little family, but they are working through and pulling together. Ferf is blessed in her work as well, which we are grateful for.  

We headed home for a little nap and after that Juge, Lance and family dropped by.  They always come down to go to Lance's folks for dinner, so we do our Christmas with them at our house.  It's always fun to visit with them.  Juge made all of them the cutest Calvin and Hobbs PJs this year!  

We ended the day at the Randall's in Cedar City.  They are always so nice to let us come and join them for dinner.  We enjoy visiting, opening presents and usually playing a new game they got for Christmas.  It was the usual fun evening! Then we took Bean back to his place and headed for home and called it a  GREAT CHRISTMAS!  

This year we gave every family a copy of our Storyworth personal history books.  They all seemed excited to get them.  We also gave a Broadbent Family cookbook that had family history stories as well as recipes.  It actually had a recipe for how to cook a ground squirrel that gave everyone a big laugh.  We gave most of the kids Conscious Step socks. The older kids got the traditional family car blankets which they also seemed to like.  It was kind of a stressful Christmas for me.  I don't know why I let it get to me, but I hope I can do better.  One of the big stresses was that I ordered all of the kids socks early, November 5th, and felt so glad to have so much of the shopping done.  And then they lost the order and didn't know it for a few weeks and by that time most of the socks I had ordered were out of stock so I had to reorder the whole thing with socks I wasn't as excited to give.  It finally all worked out with a lot of stress and back and forth.  I'm just getting old and big events kind of stress me out.  But in the end it is all worth it and I love them all!!!  Merry Christmas 2024!!!