Being a Grandparent at Christmas is just the best! Last week we celebrated one year home from our mission and attending that anniversary was Audrey's one year birthday and Alyssa's one month birthday! What wonderful little people these are and how happy they make our hearts!

Alyssa is growing more each time we see her and is feeling more at peace with her own body. Still has gorgeous, very dark eyes with little eyebrows that often knit together as though she is really trying hard to figure things out! She loves to be cuddled.

Audrey obeyed my challenge to her to be walking on her own by Christmas. She toddles all around the living room with tummy stuck out and real pleased with herself....especially since she can reach so many more things now. There is an "Audrey line" on all the trees, where we naively suspected she couldn't reach the ornaments. On the family tree we put a lot of soft, harmless ones on the bottom branches which she plays with every day as part of her search and destroy mission. She got to have her very own birthday party and do the gooey, fingers-in-the-cake thing.

We have succumbed to the usual Austin excess. Victor and Becky created the tree forest inside the house (25 trees - only 4 decorated) and Charles did an excellent job of creating a front yard light display that dazzles! I went through all my nativity collection and put up most of them, sifting out the ones I didn't just love, love, love. When you don't put them up for several years it is fun to actually find out what you have. I gave several away and put several in a box of things for Deseret Industries. We even actually had friends from California make a special trip up to Vegas just to see our lights!

Winter Wonderland

Who would have ever thought that here in Las Vegas we would actually get to have the real feel of Christmas. What fun to sit by a toasty fire, watch it actually snow and to have the snow stick for a few days!

Audrey loves the walker. She pulls herself up to it as quickly as I do!!

Bionic Grandma

This is happy me! Nice flowers, treats and friendly visits during my recovery from hip surgery. At 4 weeks I am almost not dependent on the walker, can pop up out of chair with no knife-searing pain and have an already healed 8 inch scar. What an amazing thing a body is....even an old one....to be able to go thru such trauma and repair itself!

There is hope that soon I shall be able to leap tall buildings with a single bound!

Renewing our life in the Utah Mountains

General Conference Weekend arrived and we decided it was time to get up to the cabin and check out conditions. In January Mammoth Creek area had experienced record snowfall so we didn't know if we could get in or what we would find.

The day was sunny and warm and most of the snow surrounding the cabin had melted, making arrival easy, which, of course, added to the joy of opening that door for the first time in nearly two years and seeing and smelling all that was familiar about our little piece of heaven away from home!
Becky came up with little Audrey and we were also joined by her friends Kennedy Hymer and Kallen and Emily Kidder! Peter and Jill were also there before and after their trek to S.L. to Peter's missionary reunion.

No community water yet, of course, so we trucked buckets of water up from the river to flush toilets until our wonderful Mammoth Creek neighbor Glen Barker arrived and helped us get some well water into the house. By Monday we actually even had warm water (after fixing the only pipe break we could find!) and showers!! How wonderful to be in this magnificent setting to watch Conference, sustain a new Prophet and Counselors and spend time together.