beard growing contest

yes, that's right. a beard growing contest. one of tyler's first year friends decided to start an annual beard growing contest. the contest began right after the thanksgiving break and continued until the end of finals (december 19th). i admit i was not that excited about this from the start. sure the contest part sounded like a lot of fun, but kissing a guy with a beard sounded gross. but tyler was excited to participate and actually kept up with the best of them. i was surprised how long his beard got by the end. i was also surprised that i secretly starting rooting for tyler and was excited that his beard was so long.

on december 19th all of the participants, the wives and the children met at Bigg's Roadhouse for some steak eating. there the wives voted for the longest beard. the winner would receive a free steak dinner, courtesy of jeff and sarah nance.

here are most of the men that participated. take a look at how hairy some of them are!

i posted this one so you could get a good look at who won. taylor, the one with the baby, won the contest.

and on a side note...look at all this snow. this is in wauwatosa where we live. i guess it got dumped on since i've been in utah. i guess the people from wisconsin weren't lying when they said the winters were bad.

p.s. thanks sarah and byrdie for letting me steal pictures off your blog.

lovin' family and lovin' vacations

this vacation definitely goes down as one of my favorites so far. why you ask? because i was with my family. my complete family. every single sister, brother, brother-in-law, sister-in-law, neice and nephew were all there. and we all get along and have fun together. sure it's a little crazy sometimes, or maybe very crazy all of the time, but that's the only way i would have it.

we started off the vacation with my youngest sister getting married. both of them were extremely happy and my sister looked beautiful.

the women spent the morning making thanksgiving dinner while all of the men played in a flag football tournament. then we ate our delicious dinner. this year we had three tables set up to accomodate everyone. this was the first year we had a designated "kid table." they loved it. of course they would...no adult supervision! i don't think they realize that the adults loved it better. then the women happily turned all of the cleaning duties over to the men.

spending quality time with each other.

spening some quality time with the kiddos.

spending some quality time with the adults.

spending some quality time feeding the ducks.

and not spending enough quality time spleeping.

this year we left with only 1 er visit, 6 people throwing up, 5 upset stomachs, a couple of colds and tons of great memories.

and for your viewing pleasure-mike joined our family this past august. he was obviously holding out on us because we never knew that he had this cool talent.