Shooting the gingerbread houses...

We've had this tradition for almost 10 years now, of taking our rock hard gingerbread house, the day after Christmas, void of all candy, out to use for target practice.  Everyone always looks forward to it and we have a blast (pun totally intended)! :)

We drive out into the Arizona desert, and set up.  Mark and Josh both brought a bunch of guns.  They usually start everyone out with the small caliber stuff, shooting out the stained glass windows and smaller stuff on the houses.  Then they move up to bigger caliber stuff, taking out entire walls with one shot.  After the houses are leveled to sugar dust, we start up with the shotguns and throwing clay pigeons (I like this part the best).  Then they setup clay pigeons to use as targets.

My friend, Sarah, with her son, Carter...

 

Fun things from April...

Kyle ADORES holding Carter (Sarah's baby)!  Colton and Bryan do too!  Bryan will hold him until he goes to sleep, snapping pictures with his phone, posting them to Facebook, and enjoying how all the girls swoon over this cute teenage boy who loves babies!  Carter gets LOTS of attention at our house...

These girls crack me up.  They dressed up and performed one of their favorite radio songs - with singing and actions.  It was too cute!  I love Morgan and her friends.  They are so fun!

Kyle's flag football team pictures a shot for them...

Another fantastic Cub Scout pack meeting!

Kyle earned his Wolf!

pretzels and a gingerbread house!

One of our favorite traditions is making caramel wrapped chocolate dipped pretzel rods...YUMMY!  It's kind of hard to give them away because we all love to EAT them so much.  Each year we make about 150 of them.  Just wrapping the caramel takes about 1 1/2 hours...but it is SO worth it!

One of our other favorite traditions is making our gingerbread house and decorating it...stained glass windows and all!  Sarah, Josh, Jace, and Carter also bring their house and we do it together.  This year Morgan's friend, Savannah, also joined us!

 My sister, Brittany, was also there.  SO glad to have her!  Grandma and grandpa Bybee also came (they are the ones who started this!).  We LOVE it!

Colton LOVES taking care of Carter.  If Carter starts crying, Colton races to comfort him.

C'mon Morgan...give me a kiss!

After gingerbread houses, Kyle and Jace curled up to watch a Disney Christmas special.  Those two are like brothers.  Kyle relishes the opportunity to be a big brother (being the youngest, he's never had that opportunity).  He is SO good with Jace.  They have a BLAST together.