Greetings from Emery County.
No Pics but I should be able to post some later. We had a great Christmas, and I hope everyone out there (in the vast blogger world) did as well.
Lets see...the week...
The Santa Clara and Virgin Rivers Flooded like crazy. I think that flood water is SO impressive but it just sad because it is SOOO destructive. They lost a lot of homes in Beaver Dam. Monday night was the Basketball Christmas Party/Team night it was fun we laughed pretty hard. We played Kanab on Tuesday my kids won by 9 but I never really felt comfortable with our lead and varsity escaped with a win. We practiced Wed and took Thurs off :) That meant I got it off too.
The final 5 days of Christmas were:
5 Fingered Gloves
4 New Shirts
3 Pair of Pants
2 Flip Flops
and 1 Honey Bear! I had fun with that. Then for Christmas Isaac was supposed to get a Levi quilt, which he did, it just still needs to be bound. It's cute though, it has his initials in Levi in the back (and a secret message too) it was fun. But I didn't whip it out as fast as I thought I'd be able too. I had fun visiting with my mom while I pieced it together and Grama Frei while I stitched it.
Christmas Eve dinner at my mom's, then Christmas breakfast (and family pics in our matching pajama's) it was fun having the little kids around. They go to town on tissue paper. Afterwards we headed north. We borrowed Grampa Frei's truck and pulled our truck up and dropped it off at the Salvage yard then headed to Emery County. We've had a good time. Family and Fun! Nathan and Melanie are here, their kids are warming up to us too, that's fun. Today we went to Primary with Ethan, (Isaac thought it was a little long but didn't realize he was missing Priesthood too) We also went over and visited with Grama and Bob, it was way fun we love to visit with them and they both seemed to be doing good.
I'm LOVING the break and the naps!
Bout it.
Oh wait how could I forget??? Isaac totally got the nativity scene for me!!! I LOVE IT! Next year...outside lights to go with :)

Here's our Cute little tree

When we were growing up we had this nativity scene in the front yard we set up bails of hay and stuff for the stable, anyway on the red hill, just to the east of us there is a huge star, I love it and I just want to put that nativity scene up...and have that star off in the east! The problem, my parents left if at their old house, but I grew up with the girl that lives there now, so I still think it is very attainable :-)
We'll see.

Monday was 12 days until Christmas :-) I've had a blast with that.
Isaac got
12 Scripture Markers
11 Hugs and Kisses
10 Durango Dollars
9 Packs of Gum
8 Bags of Chex Mix
7 Pairs of Socks
and 6 Saw Blades
...and the rest is a surprise :)

Santa's got his own little workshop going...so cute! I love this guy!


I love this time of year!! It's just fun, and finally school's out :) I'm pretty happy about that.

Basketball's pretty good, I'm enjoying it, the older kids drive me crazy but the Freshman work their guts out for me so I'm just happy I'm at where I'm at. When I try to think back on the week it all seems like a blur, it was all I could do to get to Sunday, but I made it :-). We had early practice on Wed, so that made it so we could go to the temple and have a little date night, that was fun. Friday our neighbors had a little party for our Sunday School class, I missed it for games but the word is it was great, and the leftovers were great! Saturday was the last day of Thunder Camp (Hallelujah!)
Oh and Isaac got to feel little guy move this week, that was pretty cool.
Word about little guy spread like wild fire at church today. I HATED THAT, I just get so upset and wish people would just keep their mouths shut but I'll complain more about that in my real journal and not the very public blog!

Ison Family Pics

Here's the Pics from the first of December:

WOW it's been a couple of crazy weeks. Where to start?
We had Ky and Kami up for dinner the other day, no toys around here yet but I had a bag of basketballs. I wish I had pics of Ann reaching for the basketball, so stink'n cute, gotta teach her young! Little Green was down in Vegas because Isaac had been down to the auction and picked up a different car so Tuesday, Isaac was taking me into the Dr. then school when the truck died, so he pulled it out of the road and Grama Frei rescued us and we took her car into the Dr. I didn't think the day could get worse but while we were in the waiting room the cops called Isaac, someone had hit our parked truck.
So he didn't come to the Dr. with me and my dad had to come pick me up and take me to work. I'm so thankful that we live by family and they could do it but I HATE being dependent on other people. Oh well it all worked out. Then last weekend we played up north. It was fun to actually play some games. I love those kids! Here's a pic of my freshman:


I left the Orem game early and drove to SL to catch a plane to Boise where Isaac and the his whole family were, our nephew Brandon got baptized. It was such a quick whirl wind trip but it was fun to see everyone and we got some good family pics Sunday morning too. Hopefully I'll be able to post them soon! Then Sunday 10 hour drive home. YUCK, I hate traveling but we made it, oh and that was my first trip in "Goldilocks" that's what Isaac's named the new car he bought. I kind of like this one, he's going to sell it, so I just enjoy driving it while we have it.

This week...more craziness. Monday?? Tuesday our family relations class. Wed-Sat TONS of basketball. I was so happy to see Sunday come. Its going by really fast though. I'm hoping to put our little tree up this afternoon. I plugged in one little strand of lights and I just keep telling Isaac how much I love Christmas lights. Oh and I talked him into the (free) little fake tree that was in my mom's garage because the season is slipping away. I love this time of year!!

So much to be Thankful for!

What a weekend. We've had a good time. Thanksgiving with my family, then the Daniel and Virga Stevens family reunion, which Grama Cottam was so excited about. It turns out none of her siblings came, except Uncle Derral, he lives here though in a home, he's special needs, just older than my Grama and she's always cute to take care of him and include him. But a handful of my mom's cousins were there and it was fun.
I think Grama loved it!

The Frei Guys were in charge of breakfast, it was delicious.

Riley and Grama

Cute little Ann in the outfit her Aunt Kathy bought

Andee's Twins

I guess Gunner was ready to eat!


Isaac loved listening to the stories about my Great Grama and Grampa, then he said "I'm going to orgainize a Ison family reunion! For next summer." I said "Okay, just remember we'll have a little guy by then, so I won't be much help." And I guess that's the other news but I'm not so into blogging about it, not yet anyway, we're excited though. The name game is on...we'll see, we do know that he's a boy though.

This little onsie is how we told my mom we were expecting (I have an Ison 10 shirt, cuz that's the year we got married) and it's perfect because (if I can count) he'll be the 11th grandkid on the Ison side.


I've done minimal shopping over the weekend -too bad thinking about it doesn't count-but I did make this cute sign for basketball. Coach did it when I played for him. We loved it, and now I just think its part of basketball season for Santa to come in December.

I accidentally deleted the pics of my dad playing the Wii after thankgiving dinner, my brother brought it over and it turned out to be quite the family entertainment. TOO FUNNY.

Isaac's thinking about more school again. I'm trying to support him in that and wrap my mind around all it might mean. It's scares me to death, but I want him to be happy so for now I'm just helping him study math and I can support him taking the test...and we'll go from there.

This morning we woke up to a little snow. It's always such a fun thing in St. George. AND Isaac didn't want me to put up a fake tree, "It's not his style." Funny guy, but when I saw this in the back yard I told him he might not have to go cut one he said "I already thought of that..."

No pics this week but basketball is in full swing. Actually I missed quite a bit of the madness with our Jr. League last week while I was in Hawaii. I have the freshman and a few sophomores and they are great. I love it, so far (okay its only been 2 days of practice but...) they work really hard for me. I like planning practice and even laying in bed at night worrying which drills will help us most with certain things, do most people actually SLEEP at night? That's crazy! I miss the being more involved with the older girls, sometimes I feel so disconnected from something I invested so much time and effort into. But I can't really do any more than I'm doing and I wouldn't trade. I have great kids.
As for this week, did something besides basketball happen? I wouldn't know. School just goes by, Isaac is still building fence and actually get to see my family once in a while, and he went to the auction on Friday. He's still adjusting to the married a coach thing but I need to do a better job priority-wise too. Maybe I could cook him dinner sometime...sure didn't happen this week!
We did get to go to the RS dinner together on Friday, and took a plate over to Bro and Sister Birks. We visited them last Sunday, they're great and turns out they like us too. Yesterday we went to the temple so we actually got 2 little date nights in, it was fun. And Uncle Will brought us a book he wrote about with the life stories of all the high priests in our ward, its great, we've had a lot of fun reading bits and pieces about people we know.

ALOHA...

Holy Cow! Perfect Vacation. Generally I don't even like vacationing, pretty much for 2 reasons, it is expensive, and unproductive. But this one was paid for, and I (in a limited time) got to do all that I could to try and help a softball program that I was once part of. I always say I hated it there, but really I just hated losing (still do). So it was fun to share my perspective on what needs to happen to change that. BYU-H is a special place and it was so neat to get to go back. Oh and Isaac and I had a BLAST.

The first morning we got in early and headed over to Pearl Harbor.


We found this old timer there to talk to while we were waiting for the boat (of course we did, it's Isaac) but it was fun. He was 14 when Pearl Harbor was attacked. I'm not sure but that's gotta be pretty close to the same as Grampa Frei.

Standing on the Memorial the "Mighty Mo" in the background.

Isaac read and read while we were there, I had been before and kind of had softball in the back of my mind but it was still way cool to be there.


From there we headed to the North Shore. We stayed at Turtle Bay...nice! Here's the view from our room:


It was so great to just leave the door open all night and sleep listening to the ocean. We loved it.

Thursday we got up and went to the Dole Plantation, we were pretty much on Utah time so we were there pretty early, it wasn't open, which didn't stop Isaac from talking to the real workers across the street. He ended up buying a case of pineapple-straight from the warehouse-of course he made friends with everyone there "made there day" in fact so when the lady was ringing him up he said "You can give me a better price than that if you want." And she agreed and gave him her price. Wheeler dealer this guy.

Here a pic of him cutting up pineapple in our room. It really was delicious.


And the mess...

Which was really only 1/2 of the mess because we tried to save (nasty) coconut water, I don't know, like we didn't want to waste it or something. It was a disaster but whatever.

Since we were up and at'm so early we also had time that morning before softball to go to the Laie Hawaii Temple open house. It was awesome. When I lived there I had done baptisms but it was neat to be back when the open house was going. It was beautiful!


When I got done with softball this day I walked out to find the rental car with a surfboard tied to the top, I should have taken a picture of that but...

Went dinner with Ashley Parry and her boyfriend, that night, it was fun, and later that night went exploring an old WWII bunker with one of his roommates. They were sports to take us.
Too bad my eyes were closed in this pic but I didn't have'm retake it because I figured I was going to close them every time.





Look at my surfer guy! He's happy as can be! One of the days he dropped me off at the softball field and headed to castles beach. There were some other people there taking lessons, so he perked his ears up and was able to get up a few times :)

The next morning we went back, me with camera in hand. But it wasn't quite as successful. The water wasn't as good. But after I set the camera down we had so much fun just playing in the ocean and trying to both catch the waves on the board turned sideways...it was just goofing around but we laughed and laughed I loved it.


Really its taking for ever to make this post. I might have to finish and polish it up later. For now though...here's a start.
But I don't want to leave out my favorite Hawaiian Isaac-isms
"The seas are angry my friend." Apparently that one is from a movie or something.
"Mahalo" and sometimes "Mahalo, I love you" Flying on Hawaiian Airlines he picked right up on this one. And last but not least: Mele Kalikimaka is merry Christmas in Hawaiian but "Mele Kalikamaikoo..."is just part of a song Isaac likes to sing to me, the next line is "I love you" its pretty cute.

One of the mornings, maybe the day we went to the dole plantation...I don't know anyway we were driving back to the hotel and Isaac saw a sign that said "Free Tours" of course we turned around, but what it actually had said was "Free Trees" and he didn't even get to get one because they were only giving them out on Saturdays, of course we talked a good story about going back to get one, but we didn't. Anyway we ended up at Waimea Valley, they were sure ushering cars through there because I guess they were filming some movie there. Journey to the center of the earth?? Something like that. Apparently "The ROCK" who I don't even know who is was there, I of course was unimpressed. When we were driving out we drove through some of the smoke they'd pumped in there for something, that was the extent of that.
But Isaac did find these cool peacocks to feed banana he picked up from the trash, "talk" to, and try to get them to show there feathers. It was pretty dang funny-this little collage of pics doesn't really do it justice.


And supposedly this really old African tree is a big deal...so we took a picture.


And Isaac wasn't so keen on going to the PCC if it was just a "Bunch of Dancing" but he went while I was at softball. He really liked the Samoan village, and then he watched the canoe parade. Then we went back together after I got done and went to 2 more villages. We also got to see my sister inlaws parents who are over there on a mission. That was fun. They recommended the coconut cake on North Shore for dinner so we went for it. Watch the sunset at Sunset Beach, ate, and had cake left over for breakfast (and Isaac a snack to help him survive the swap meet too)
We didn't take a camera to PCC-oh well.

Sunset

Most of Isaac's head and part of mine, we do what we can :)

Breakfast of champions! Those Oh's were pretty good too.



SO SO MUCH FUN.