Karen's Dangling Conversation

We had a banner year for Christmas at the Beagles' house this year. It all started around October 25th when my mom fell and broke her hip. This started a series of unfortunate events that were the beginning to our strange but fun Christmas season! Long story short my mom flew home with me after Thanksgiving to recover and recuperate at my house. As much as I would like to think that I am the center of the universe and that all of the many family guests we have had in the past 3 weeks have all come to see me....I know it isn't true, they have been coming to see Mom! So here is the short version of all of our house guests and the fun events that followed. My sister Carol flew in for Christmas so she wouldn't be all alone in Seattle for the holidays. We had a lot of fun and she was super helpful with mom and filling in for me while I was working or doing other things like Christmas shopping and generally getting ready for the holidays. Brad's parents with Brad's b...

So here's the thing. Family Christmas pictures...it shouldn't be that hard to gather everyone together and snap a picture in which everyone looks reasonably good, reasonably happy and reasonably resembling a happy family.....should it? I mean other families do it, right? So we attempted it on Sunday! First of all I had strolled up Battle Creek Canyon earlier in the morning and it was a beautiful day, sun was shining, the streams were all frozen over and gleaming, the path was strewn with patches of snow and even a few fall leaves remaining. Perfect I thought, as soon as church is over I will have my brother-in-law grab his camera and come over and we will take a nice stroll up the canyon and snap a few pictures of our happy little family and check it will be done! So as soon as I came out of church it was way clouded over, looked like snow was on it's way, hurried home and everyone was supposed to be dressed in dark colors and ready to go...of course they weren't ...

Oh we had some fun for Halloween at my work! Big Partay for the cute Expectant Parent Group that we have every week! All the workers dressed in costume and I got to be the fortune teller......I'm so psychic I handed out fortune cookies to tell the future and everyone got a laugh! I loved Katherine's Power Ranger Costume....custom made...it was awesome and Adrienne our resident cheer leader....you go girl. Loni was our demure pirate and Melinda joined Adrienne as her co-cheer girl! What a fun group! Happy Halloween! Oh and don't forget Adrienne's thriller dance....she is amazing!

Have I ever told you about my cute little Primary class? I love them all so much! At the beginning of the summer when I became their teacher we decided to earn a Bowling Party! They are sooo good they get points for all of their good behavior and it added up to one really super fun Bowling Party! We decided to split up boys against girls! The boys raced through their games and I saw a few strikes and plenty of spares. Braxton even got a bonus strike when the automatic scorer screwed up and that was 3 strikes in a row for him! He was very worried about it and Amanda and I said just go with it! Cute little Sydney was so shy and said she hadn't bowled much, she would roll the ball down very, very slowly and she would get spares almost every time! Way to go Sydney! Jenna was a great little bowler and she decided to follow Amanda's technique of laying down and rolling the ball so she could eyeball that single pin better....ha, ha, it was funny! Max and Joseph kept everyone...

Celebrating 4 birthdays in one month can be exhausting! So we did our best! Mackay and Brad celebrated their birthdays in Hawaii! Can't get much better than that. Chris celebrated his in Iraq. We decided to have a family party on his birthday just to celebrate everyone's birthday and hey, it was a great excuse to get together. We invited the Stout's who turned out in force and Courtney and Kevin came up from BYU and what do you know they discovered that they live almost right next door to each other! It's good to know where your cousin lives at BYU! We had a delicious dinner of Lemon Chicken, mashed potatoes and green beans...yummmy and for the party a great big delicious old fashioned world famous Martenson ICE CREAM CAKE! Whoot, whoot! We had a very BAD chorus of Happy Birthday......my kids always do their best to sing out of tune and it was especially horrible this year! No worries...it's alllll goooood! Chris we love you and we did our best to celebr...

We had a ton of fun at the Niece's Reunion in October. The agenda was well planned and no shortage of treats, fun & good conversation....you might even say JUiCeY conversation! We started out with dinner by Jeanette.....always a good thing and followed that up with a carmel apple making demo.....for which Mindy turned out to be the pro! We are still waiting for that recipe Mindy! The apples were delicious and diverse with many flavor combos in the mix. Some of my favorites, carmel followed by white chocolate and cinnamon and sugar. Another favorite was carmel followed by chocolate and rolled in toffee bits. But some people got creative with reese's chips and baby chocolate chips and I saw at least one apple rolled in crushed oreos! On to the crafty part of the night with super cute bracelets by Dodie. Noelle turned out to be the expert here with everyone consulting with her on color combanations. They all turned out so, so cute and totally fashionable. At any mo...

Kaua'i is an amazing Island in the Hawaiian Chain. We arrived just after a storm had blown through and the first few days were amazing calm seas and beautiful skies. It did rain a little on the third day but we didn't mind because it was still warm. We've been to Kaua'i a few times so this trip was really relaxing without a list of things we just had to do.....we've done the helicopter trip....we've done the napli coast trip (twice).....we've done the Waiema Falls tour and seen the Grand Canyon of Hawaii. We highly recommend all of those things but this trip we've been able to spend more time on the beach and more time exploring on foot. Yesterday we took the hike from Shipwreck Beach over to Manaulepu Beach. It is a beautiful 45 minute hike up over the cliffs of Keonlia Bay, right up onto the golf course and past a ranch and then down right on to the beach. It was very fun and a nice easy hike. Brad met us with the car and had drinks and snacks ...