Winner Winner Chicken Dinner

I take part in Coupon Sense. It's a fabulous way to save money on my groceries. I've been doing it since June and it has been great on the budget. My coupon sense rep had a fun contest in November. You could submit your receipts into a drawing to win $100 cash. The rules were that you had to purchase more than 25 items and save more than 60%. I submitted four of them and I WON!!!

This one was kind of cool, because I saved so much they had to have a manager come override the register. Booyah! Too bad I can't think of anything to spend the money on this month...

Thanksgiving Week/Black Friday Extravaganza

Back in August, or so, I logged on to Facebook and saw that I had been invited to an event. Said event was Arizona Thanksgiving at the Woodards! Hey, that's me! My brother had a great idea to have all of us Bringhursts congregate in warm and sunny Arizona instead of cold and gloomy Utah. So we were 19 strong this year for dinner. And it had been 6 years since I had had Thanksgiving dinner with my entire family. We were certainly a full house, but I was very thankful that everyone was able to come down. Especially since Mother Nature was having a bad week and decided to dump a heck of a lot of snow from St. George to Salt Lake.
My dear sweet hubby prepared the entire meal. We feasted on two turkeys, one smoked on the BBQ, and one done traditional in the oven. We also had a ham and all the other good stuff. Luckily the weather held steady and we could eat outside.

After dinner we plotted our shopping trip for Black Friday. We were to start at midnight. Usually I wait until 3 am, but wanted to get an earlier start. We started at Wal Mart and went all through the night. We spend an hour in line at Kohls and a girl behind us passed out. Probably from boredom. My sister and I got in line at Michaels at 5 to try and get a cricut machine. They had them on sale for $60. And they had SIX of them. We were first in line and went rushing in. Those ladies were Carazy! I was almost murdered. Someone knocked me down as I got the last one, but she didn't get one. HA! We did good and got everything we set out to do. I was up for 26 hours before we made it back to the house. But with 19 people, it's hard to sleep. It took me about a week to recover and get over the grouchiness. But well worth it. That's just the price my family had to pay for cool Christmas presents.

THANKS everyone for coming down and making it a great weekend!

Savvy Sadie

My dog may not be the brightest crayon in the crayon box, but I love her. The other day I went to open the blinds in the front room, so I moved my curtain to the side when something caught my eye....some scattered dirt. So I moved the curtain a bit more and saw this:

That's right, it's a pack of Halloween M&M's. She found them in Sam's room and knew they were something yummy and forbidden, so she thought she would hide them. I have a potted tree in the corner, so she dug a little dirt out, covered the candy and pulled the curtain over it. Too funny!

Halloween 2010

This year I got to dress up for work again! Yay me! Lucky for me I have a very talented friend and she made my costume for me. So then I had a costume to wear to the church trunk-or-treat.Megan was the Mad Hatter and Sam definitely did not want to be a princess this year. So she was a goth fairy ;)

Ummmm, this girl is almost as tall as me!

And boy oh boy did we score! Cuz I let them trick or treat on Saturday AND Sunday! And then I took them to my work where they sold all the candy they didn't want. Candy and money. The perfect storm.

Pumpkin carving

There are a few really important reasons I got married. I enjoy having someone parallel park for me and to carve pumpkins with my kids. Well, this year it didn't work out for me. Nate had to spend 2 1/2 weeks in Houston for work so it was up to me to make sure the pumpkins were murdered. Ugh.

I took the girls shopping for pumpkins and they picked out the ones that were "just right". Mine cost .80 because I didn't want to spend all night scooping junk out of mine, Megan's and Sam's. Their pumpkins were significantly larger.

We made a fun night of it, I made soup and rolls and we had a cozy night in.

I have to admit, they did great. I helped very minimally. We missed having Nate here, and not just because of his muscles. :)

Wedding Bells

The true reason we went to Salt Lake this October, (even though we go every October) is my niece got married! Very exciting! We headed to the Salt Lake Temple a little bit early because a very good friend of mine took our family portraits on the temple grounds. It was so much fun to see her and she is incredibly talented, I cried when I saw our pictures.
Anyway...the girls had a lot of fun hanging around and exploring while we were waiting for things to happen.

It was a beautiful day for a wedding. I wish I had gotten pictures of the newlyweds, but I guess after they came out we were getting all of their pictures done and I didn't think about it. It was fun for my girls to see Shannae come out of the temple and I'm so happy they have that good example. They had a lot of questions about what it looks like inside and what it's like to get married in there. It's hard to put into words the peace and beauty that I feel in the temple. I hope that my girls will make good choices in their lives so that one day they can go to the temple with a great guy and start their own eternal family.

Lovely October Days

I lurve October in Utah. The first year we lived here in Arizona, I really really really missed fall and changing leaves and sweater weather.
The girls had fun practicing their cartwheels in the front yard. Unfortunately they do cartwheels like their momma. Yeah.

My dad has a beautiful yard and his flowers were in full glory. While he was working hard, I lazed around and took some snapshots.

And hung out with my dog. She loves sunshine too. And I love my converse.Don't you think she looks like the Grinch dog?

And on this absolutely perfect day, grandpa had a big box of tulip bulbs to plant and a grand-daughter willing to help. Love it.

An afternoon where all was right with the world. Perhaps we'll make it up in the spring to see how those bulbs turned out.

Hatch Family Chocolates

If there was one thing Sam wanted to do while in Salt Lake, it was go to the Hatch Family Chocolate store. I just know she had visions of being on the TLC show. So up the the avenues we went.

We didn't get to see the stars of the show, but I got to see this smile, so it was definitely worth it :) And when we got home we figured out that grandpa had beat us home. And this is how we knew....
Silly Grandpa.

THIRTEEN!!!!

Megan turned 13 this year. Really? How? Why? Anyway. She always scores because we head up to Salt Lake and she gets parties with both families...poor Sam ;)

Party with the WoodardsWe gave her a new i-pod. Her old one wouldn't let us add or remove music, so she was listening to High School Musical and Disney songs. Hahahahahaha!

Fun to celebrate with cousins!

And a party with the Bringhurst side.






*crickets*

Guess I didn't take any pictures of that event.



And finally, a slumber party with a few friends. She wanted Angel food cake with strawberries. Yum!

And she reallllly wanted the Fushigi levitating ball, so Sam got her one. And would you believe it isn't like the commercial? SHOCKING! I secretly call it the Fushitty ball. Scuse my french. Because it cost me a lot of money and it sucks.

Happy birthday Megan! Hope you've recovered from your month of celebrations!

Tornado's a comin!

The day before we made our annual October trip up to Salt Lake a tornado hit Flagstaff. And wouldn't you know...it hit Nate's sister store. It was even on the Today Show. So we decided to take a quick detour to see the damage. I guess they were finding trailer parts 1200 yards away. Luckily no one was killed and I believe only 1 person was injured.All the windows in those houses were blown out. Nate's boss said they couldn't even tell how many campers were destroyed, they just had to count the axles they found.

While Nate and Sam were inside, Megan and I decided to go on a walk. They didn't have power so it was really cold in the building. We came across this huge tree that the tornado ripped right out of the ground. I had Megan stand next to it so you could get an idea...She is probably about 5 foot 3. And of course, she had to strike a fierce pose.We were right by some rail road tracks and Megan wanted me to take this picture. She was cracking me up. While I was trying to take it with sun or shadows she was freaking out! Like I was going to let her lay there and get hit by a train.It's pretty sobering to see what Nature can do with no warning.

Daddy Daughter Night

We had a stake activity for all the girls age 8-11 for a Daddy Daughter western night. Sam was shore excited to go out with her favorite buckaroo! They double dated with Claire and Kyle.

They had a great time with fun activities and classes on modesty for the girls and classes for the dads on how to be a good influence in their daughter's life. Nate and Sam had a great time and both came home with new perspectives.