Christmas Vacation

We were able to go home to Utah for Christmas! This was such a fun time for us to be able to visit with Family and a few Friends. Thanks for everything Family and for being SO AMAZING! I am blessed to be in such a wonderful family as well as in law family. I could not ask for anything more. It is times like these that when we are away we truly realize how blessed we are.

Thanks mom and dad for letting us stay with you and for making us feel SO COMFORTABLE! My mom and dad were so sweet to think of everything we would possibly need or want, from taking a lot of time to paint the guest bedroom in my favorite color Yellow.. to buying a new bed for us to sleep in (yes I am still thinking about how soft the blankets on that bed were).. to having our favorite food stocked in the pantry... to having hand sanitizer every where. :D Thank you Mom and Dad SOOO much! It truly made our trip great!

Here are just a few of the many pictures of this trip...



One of my most favorite pictures! Abi and Grandpa Cutler!!


Lunch at Chuck-A-Ram-A with the Harrops


Abi enjoying her meal at Grandma Cutler's


Em on Santa's Lap at the Barker Family Party.


Most of the Harrop Side Grand-Kids.


Sophie, Sara and Abi


1st Try on Santa's Lap at the Clegg Party.


2nd Try on Santas Lap at the Barker Party... Not any better...


Carter, Hallie and Abi playing in Grandma Cutlers make believe house.


Kris being a sweet man and shoveling the walks for my parents.


Abi enjoying her first candy cane at the Clegg Family Party.


Liz, Kris, Abi, Tyson and Melissa waiting for Santa to come at the Clegg Party.


JJ and Abi playing with toys from Cousins.


Aunt Em and Grace. :D


Cousins hanging out at Grandma and Grandpa Cutlers house.


Jonny and Abi already playing together. They are going to be good friends.


Grandpa Harrop and Abi just looking at each other.


Now Grandpa Cutler and Abi looking at each other. She always just wanted to take everything in.


I am so glad that we were able to go to Utah and see family. When I go to Utah I realize how much my family means to me. They do so much for my little family and I am so blessed to have such great sisters who do so much for me!! I miss you all and look forward to the time we can come back and visit or when you can come see us here.

One of the most sweet things happened as we were preparing to leave. I was holding Hallie to take her out to the car she turned to me and looked me in the eye and said something to me. I made her say it 2 or 3 times because I could not understand what she was trying so hard to tell me. So I turned to Liz her mom and asked what is she saying? As she told her mom her mom translated to me that she said "Em dont go to Georgia." I have to say after that I lost control of my tears. What a sweet thing for me to hear from my niece. I love you Hallie (my little princess) !!!

Now we can start the count down till we see you all again! I love you all so much and THANKYOU for being such a wonderful family!!

Picture only Post

Uh oh this is how we found Abi one day. She has learned how to pull herself up to things.


Abi is mommy's great helper!


Abi loves giving Kisses. :D


Here is a video of Abi just talking away. Sorry she only has a diaper on.

Look how fast she is!!!!

Look at my little baby go!!!

Fun Thanksgiving Week

Yeah for Kris being out of school for a week!!! It has been so fun to take this week and just do alot of fun things. I can't believe the week is already done and he is back to school tomrrow. :( But then it is only 2 more weeks until he is done with his first semester of pharmacy school and until we fly into Utah! YEAH.. HAPPY DAY! We are excited to be home again and get refreshed with being around family and friends. So in this post i think I am going to show you the fun things that we did this week for our little familys thanksgiving.

Today to Friday (working backwards)

Kris woke up at 2 a.m. on Friday to go shopping to get us a external hard drive at Target. I bagged out of shopping this year because I came down with the 24 hour stomach flu. I thought that maybe it was just something i ate on thanksgiving but on Sunday morning we woke up to Abi throwing up as well. Guess it was the flu and she caught it. I felt very blessed on Sunday because I had to give a talk in church but i was so worried about Abi at home that I said a prayer and with other prayers from family my talk went better than I was thinking it would. I am so grateful to Heavenly Father and him helping us through things.

Thursday:
Happy Thanksgiving Day. We truly missed being around family on this day but were very blessed to have the Hammonds invite us over to Thanksgiving at their home. This was a fun time to get to know a few people in our ward. We went and had dinner at 11 and then we came home to look at the Ad's and get ready for After thanksgiving shopping.


Puppet Show with the Hammond's



Kris, Abi, Eliza and Aaron after we ate.

Wednesday:
Kris told me that he really wanted to venture out and see what there is to see in the north Georgia mountains. So he found this place on the Internet called Helen GA and a couple miles past this town was some awesome waterfalls and hiking paths. So off we went in the car, this was a really fun day for us. We drove for an hour an a half and got to Helen. When we drove around a corner we noticed this little German town. It was a really fun place to walk around. It reminded me a lot of Heber Utah. Here are some pictures of both our hike and the little town.

Cool Buildings in Helen GA.

Driving towards the North Georgia Mountains.

Us at the top of the water fall.

Bottom of the Water fall. Yes we hiked down to the base of the waterfall.

Kris excited to come back and fish this stream!

Kris pulling a cool move on one of the trees.

Kris showing what the trail looked like.

Abi and Mom conquered one of the hikes in GA.

Tuesday:

Tuesday was the day that i wanted to take Marta (their public train system) downtown just to walk around and look at what there is. It is crazy that we live so close to such a large town. I told Kris that i felt like we are on vacation but really we were maybe 20-30 minutes from our home. We first decided to walk around Centennial Olympic Park here are a few pictures of this park. After the park we went for a walk outside of the coke factory and the Georgia aquarium which we plan on going to when we have family come visit. :D After we went to these places we walked down the road to underground Atlanta which was a little scary within 3-4 blocks we had 3 people ask us for money. :S I don't think we will walk that route again. Silly us. Downtown Atlanta was cool but there was just a different feeling there so we didn't stay to long and so we walked back to the train to come home. Overall it was a fun outing for us.

Kris acting funny with an Olympic guy outside of the Georgia Dome.

That is the Georgia Dome.

Me sharing a coke with Mr. Coke Man.

Kris and Abi inside the Olympic ring fountains at centennial park, and no they are not getting wet.

Kris and Abi standing in the park.

Abi and I in front of another statue thing.

Abi hanging out with Dad before we left.

Monday:

We were able to go and have a Thanksgiving dinner with some of Kris' Mercer friends. This was a fun night and unfortunately I did not take any pictures. Sorry.

Sunday:

On this day our ward boundaries got reorganized and so we had a 2 hour meeting with two of the wards in our stake. It was hard to not have some of our friends in our same ward but that doesn't mean that we cant stay in touch. We will just miss seeing you on Sundays!! We are happy thought because our church now goes from 10-1 instead of 1-4. It makes Sunday so much better. The other good thing is that our church is now 10-15 minutes away instead of the 25-30 minutes it took to get to our old building. Oh yah here are some pixs of our mushroom burgers.

We made a creation, these are our portabello mushroom burgers. They were pretty good. just a little to wet.

Saturday:

We thought that it would be fun to go back to Stone Mountain because they had all of their Christmas decorations up. I was telling Kris that I was having a hard time getting into the holiday spirit because it just still seems like fall to me here. So when we went to Stone Mountain it made me feel like the holidays were here because they had lights up and we were able to go into a 3D show of The Polar Express although Abi did not last long in there it was still fun to see. Kris left with about 5 minutes left in the show with Abi and I stayed in the theater to watch the rest of the show. Then we walked around to a couple more buildings where they had some concerts going on. One we went to was Elf's singing different cultures Christmas songs and then we went to one more concert and it was just a group signing. They had one act though that was way cute! they had a black background and then these giant florescent reindeer's came out and sang a song. It was way cute I wish I took a picture of it but I didn't, silly me. Anyways here is one picture of Abi before we went into the 3D show.

Family Pictures taken by the Wonderful Lori