"Fiddler on the Roof"...

TRADITION....TRADITION! I feel like Tevye grasping at what few familiar family traditions I have left in my ever changing life. It's like you get married and the tide comes in, washing away most of your own footprints you managed to leave in the sand over the last 20 years, unless the prints were deep enough that the waves can never completely cause them to disappear--just reshape them a little--forcing them to fit better into the new mold that is married life. We continue to implement our favorite familial past times as our children grow older, finding ourselves full of nostalgia and wishful thinking this time of year. Oh to be a child again!

Back to Tevye--one of my favorite traditions has been for our family to head to Salt Lake City each Christmas and spend a weekend attending some Christmas concert (which has recently evolved to include college basketball games at the Delta Center), eating out at a favorite restaurant-usually the Lion House-and wrapping it up with a magical walk to see all the lights on Temple Square. It is always accompanied by evenings as a family sipping hot chocolate--to which I am totally & irrevocably addicted--and eating Mrs. Cavanaugh's Mindy Mints. (can't remember when those came into play but I can't remember a SLC Christmas weekend without them--little melt-in-your-mouth morsels of creamy mint chocolaty goodness, I'm drooling again already!) Ever since my brothers and sisters started college & serving missions, our Christmas weekend has not quite been the same. Someone is always missing and I subtly tear up a little looking around the dinner table or sitting around chatting at 2am, when I realize one of them is not there. I can't wait for the time when this busy part of life is over and we can all be back together again. This year we had two extras join us, my brother David's girlfriend Summer and my sister Lisa's boyfriend Spencer. It was refreshing to watch them interact, holding hands, opening doors for each other, not wanting to be apart for even a second. It made Scott and I a little more sensitive to how we treated each other--but we also wanted to shout "just give it 10 years and then we'll so who's more in love!" ha ha.

Nevertheless, to write the obvious, I love my family--enough to want to have 6 houses right next door to each other and one big fence around all of them. I want our kids to play in the yard together and eat meals together (actually, the others can fix the meals--I'll do dessert!) and not miss one more second of growing up without each other. That's what my heaven looks like, 6 houses, one big fence, lots of kids and Mindy Mints.

Dinner at the Lion House

Ryan--sick the whole weekend--poor boy!

Go Cougars!

Dave & Summer

Lisa & Spencer

Temple Square!