I am obsessed with OWL HATS!

I have but a minute to blog this afternoon (and wondering when I am going to fit it in with a 9:00 Church meeting schedule....I have always loved the 9 o'clock block......always is before I had 5 kids to get ready!  Thank Heavens that only one of those children has hair that I must do!  My mother is a SAINT!)

I would like to report that Christmas was a SMASHING SUCCESS.  I took Julie B. Beck's talk to heart and thought that "being brilliant in the basics" included buying Christmas presents.  Surely shopping is BASIC!  I had a couple of goals.  Each kid would get something that made them SMARTER (most of them got a really cool game from Amazon.com - I LOVE AMAZON).  Something that increased one of their talents. A BOOK (I got 4 - Jared did AWESOME this Christmas)!  A Scrapbook!  And something really fun, that I knew they would LOVE!  My number one goal was to not buy any JUNK (meaning that it won't fall apart, and I wont hate myself for buying it in a month)!  I think we succeeded and we have a whole year to use all of our fun, not junky stuff! 

We got to see ALL of my family.  And to top it all of, Jared surprised me with a Jon Schmidt and Steven Sharp Nelson Concert in which we heard 3 solid hours of things like THIS:

Life is good!  Judge for yourself from the pictures below.  Oh, and Happy New Year!