Happy Birthday, Sweetie!

My sweetie's birthday was last Thursday, but we decided to put off the celebration until today so we could have all of our children with us. Oh I just love having all 12 of them home again!! :)

Teach and the Dog Walker are singing with a combined Institute Choir for a CES Devotional on the 14th, so they had rehearsal until about 7:30. That put us pretty late getting started. I wanted to be the one to do most of the cooking, but I did have my sweetie help a little so the food would be especially good.

Princess made wheat sourdough bread and we had BBQ chicken and steak. I also made creamed peas and potatoes and corn on the cob. Then I sliced up a watermelon that turned out to be a particularly good one. I have to confess that I'm not much good at picking a decent melon, but this time I hit the jackpot.

Gym Rat and his cute girlfriend (love this girl!)

We loaded my sweetie with some fun sweet treats for gifts and this awesome Utes hat I also made his favorite cake, chocolate with coconut-pecan frosting.

Me and Crafty

The Drama Queen had a really fun gift idea I want to share. She bought this book with sayings on each page about a dad. The pages were mostly blank so the book could be written in or filled with pictures or whatever, so she assigned each kid a page and they were allowed to draw whatever they wanted. I believe this is a gift he will cherish forever. I don't know when I've seen such love and thought put into a gift for him before.

We are going to the Ogden Temple Open House tomorrow. The kids just love touring these beautiful buildings before they are dedicated. Hope you are having a great weekend too and having some fun family or friend time.

And don't forget to watch Newsies tomorrow!