Est. 2000

A few weeks before Christmas was our ward Christmas breakfast, and Santa came to visit. Cohen asked for 'a truck, a scope, and lots of awesome toys.'



On Christmas Eve, Julie and Melissa came over, and we were supposed to go with my parents over to a retirement home and take some treats. . .but thats another story. Ha! No good cheer spread by us on Christmas Eve, but we did wrap some presents and we had fun waiting for mom and dad all night. Oh well, we had good intentions.

After they all left, we lit a fire and read some Christmas stories. Here are the boys watching the fire. Perfect.
Then we continued a tradition that comes from Jareds family, that we all open a present or two, typically the ones from us to each other. Cohen had been waiting for weeks to open the present from Uncle Davids family (it was the only present under the tree for a long time, so he was really anxious to open it!), which was a package of 'Zubbles' which are high-tech bubbles that are awesome. They are colored, and the package swears that the dye washes out of anything, but we're going to wait until spring to use them!! We did a few outside on the back porch, but now they are safely hidden away until warmer weather!!

Evan opened the doggy from Cohen, and he loved it, and continues to love it!! He really has attached himself to it, and likes to cuddle with his puppy at night. This is Christmas Eve night, right after he got it, sleeping soundly with his arms wrapped around that new puppy.


I don't know how we made it through the morning without taking any pictures INSIDE the house. . .duh. . .but here are a few of the boys in their awesome new Jeep Power Wheels (are they brats now? Who didn't want a Power Wheels when they were a kid? And we were all jealous of the kids who had them, weren't we?!!).



Evan got behind the wheel and basically drove around it circles, he's still getting the hang of steering, but Cohen was so funny trying to get on with that Jeep going!! And Evan took full advantage of having the upper hand and didn't let up on the gas at all! It was hilarious!!

We waited until the Monday after Christmas to do our traditional Nativity at moms house because we wanted to wait for Chantelle's family, and they didn't come into town until after Christmas. Here's Evan being an Angel with Hailey. He was really cute, leading all of the singing, just like any good angel would, right?!
. . .And the whole cast. Cohen was one of the 3 Wise Men.
New Years Eve we all got together at my moms for another party. We basically kept it up the whole week!! We're getting old, because by 10:30 all of the adults were ready to go to bed, but we didn't want to be party poopers! We made it all the way to midnight, and blew horns and wore hats and stomped on balloons and bubble wrap and made a good ruckus for about 5 minutes, then shoved the kids out the door and into the truck so we could get home and go to bed!!! We were home by 12:20!!!! We're so old!!!!

Here's my niece Hannah partying it up!!
Me and Julie. And no, we weren't drinking. . .well I know I wasn't, I can't speak for Julie!!
And cute little Evan. He was in a good mood all night long. What a party animal!!

We spent Thanksgiving at Ray and Bev's this year. Everyone from around here was there, as well as David & Kathy from Moab. It was good food, and good company, and we only had 18 pies!!! I love that we love pie. Lots of kinds to choose from, and lots of leftovers!!

Jared, Andrew, Sam, and Ben were playing Around-the-World ping-pong, with a mean little twist: if you were the one that made the playing stop 3 times, then you had to stand at the end of the table and let everyone else take a free shot at your back with a ping-pong ball. You would think that a little ping-pong couldn't do much damage, but you would be wrong. Especially with Jared playing. Hecks sake!!! I don't know if you can see it in this small picture, but if you want to see a ping-pong welt, just as it appears on my nephew Bens skin, click on this picture so it's bigger, and look right above his left bum cheek, and you'll see it. He's about to start crying. Ha!

Evan wanted to play too, so they let him start trying, and he was so good!! He could hit that ball over the net almost every time!! It was crazy! Heaven knows he didn't get his hand-eye coordination from me!! That all comes from his daddy!

While Julie was in town for Christmas, we went out and did a little photo shoot just for fun. It was freezing outside, so we didn't stay too long, but we got some good shots, and we had fun.

We started helping my mom rake her leaves one Saturday, well, blow them with our awesome leaf-blower, and here are the results!!!

This year for Halloween, Cohen was Batman and Evan was Robin. Cohen likes to play a few games on the Wii (he's actually really good at a few of them, it starts so early!!) and the character he always plays is Batman. So I figured that was an easy and obvious choice for a Halloween costume, and I wouldn't have to stress over finding something creative and cute only to procrastinate the whole thing into never happening, right?! And then that made Evans costume easy, he'd just be Robin and I could call it done!! So I ordered some costumes off of Ebay, and they were supposed to be here a few days before Halloween. Cohen's Joy School class had a Halloween party a little early on the 22nd, and the costumes hadn't shown up by then so that morning I was stressing about what to do. I told Cohen that he'd just have to be a cowboy for the party, but he was having NONE of that!!! Then I came up with a brilliant idea and just put some black clothes on him, and cut an awesome mask out of construction paper, tied some string to it, and ta-da!!! A batman costume!!! He didn't know the difference, which made me wonder why I had paid for the real one!!! Oh well.

So, this is a picture of Cohen and the 2 other boys in his Joy School class. T.J. is a ninja and Big Evan is a skeleton. They did a costume parade, sang some Halloween songs ('I'm a mean old witch with a hat'), and served sugar cookies to their guests. It was a lot of fun.
Then the real costumes came in the mail, and we went to our neighborhood Halloween Carnival. A few ladies organize it, and then everybody pitches in, so it's not a lot of work for anybody, and it's a lot of fun!!! Cohen loved his muscle-filled Batman costume, but Evan would not wear his. It was freezing outside, so that turned out to be OK, all of the kids ended up wrapped up in their parents coats!!! Here they are eating donuts off a string. Evan's got the right idea!!

We went to Blanding to see our Rich & Wendy, and Alan & Camille and their families. Richard had a big old pile of yard clippings from the whole summer, so we had a 'little' bonfire. . .yea. . .it was pretty awesome!! You would think it would burn the whole field down, but it stayed right where it was supposed to!

Here he is folks: The Batman

And the only decent picture of Evan, of course eating candy. At least he wore most of his costume to go Trick-or-Treating!! I think there were some threats on his life made in order to get him to wear it, but I'd spent real money on that thing!!!

Here's Cohen and Toby, the dragon, his favorite cousin, who is just 5 months older than he is. They had so much fun together.

Brigham the 'Boo-boo Ghost', Jared as Harry Potter and Emma as Hermione. Notice the books she's carrying. Alan and Camille made them, and they say "Charms" and "Hogwarts, A History".

And here are the two amazing Alan creations for the year. . .Elijah as the Headless Spectre (a guy carrying his own head), and Ammon, who's only 1/2 in the picture, sorry, as an Alien Abduction (fake legs in front, and a fake alien head in back make it look like he's being carried away by an alien) . Alan spent weeks creating these costumes, and as amazing as they are, they made it hard for all 10 kids we had with us to charge up people's stairs and knock on the door!!

We had a lot of fun, and Jared got to go 4-wheeling with Richard all day on Saturday, so now, we have 4-wheelers in our future. . .

They let one of the moms put on a fireman's uniform, and Cohen wanted to try it on too! It was so cute! The boots were so heavy that he couldn't even pick them up with his feet, he could only drag them about an inch at time along the floor.

Proof that I was there too.

In October, my niece Makenzie ran in the State Championships for girls track at Sugarhouse park. She ran 3 miles in about 22 minutes, and took 11th place, but her team took 1st place as a team! She's only a Sophomore, so she's still got time to win it all!!

Here's Cohen and Evan and their favorite cousin Toby watching the race in our TRIPLE stroller!! Ha!

Cohen loves to race and was so excited to cheer Makenzie on. He would scream and yell with the rest of us every time she ran by and when she wasn't running by, he was asking where she was, and if each girl who did run by was her. We waited in the bleachers for the trophy ceremony for a while, and the boys raced up and down the walkway the whole time! Notice how Cohen is really going for the win!! No 'give-the-little-brother-a-break-because-he's-smaller' from Cohen!!

When Cohen heard that we were going to watch Makenzie race, he wanted to race her, so she was nice enough to race him across the field a few times. He loved it!!! He's a dirty racer. . .he does this in the backyard at home, and you can see the start of it here in this picture. . .you say 'go' and he runs right in front of you so he's in the front from the start! What strategy! You can even see him measuring the shadows to make sure he's ahead!!

Here's what you get when the boys want to play outside, but it's raining. Cohen was really cute out there with that huge umbrella.

"Look Mom, I'm a dalmation!" - Cohen Haddock

Ha! This was fun. I took my boys and the neighbors Braydon and T.J. to the park one day when I was watching them while their parents went to a funeral. I sat down to read my book, and the next thing I know, they are splashing their Light Sabers in the one tiny little mud puddle and getting each other all muddy!! Ha! One would lean over the puddle and the other one would splash. Ah, to be a kid again. It wouldn't have been a big deal, except for their parents were coming to pick them up to take them to the cemetery part of the whole thing, and they needed to look presentable, right? So we had to come home and stick 4 muddy little boys in the shower real quick so they would be clean in time!

Here's Evan and Papa with the Antelope he shot in Wyoming at the end of September, 2009.

And Jared and Cohen with 'Therm II". . .I guess not really because this one didn't get mounted and placed on my basement wall. . .thank goodness!!