Merry Christmas!!

I am trying to gather all of your addresses to send your Christmas card/newsletter/picture. So if you haven't heard from me and you have a new address, please send it to me.

Meanwhile, I thought I'd post our newsletter and Christmas pictures. So...sorry if some of you are getting this twice. I'm really considering just emailing it out next year and posting it on the blog--it's a lot of time and money to send out 75 Christmas letters. Anyway, here it goes:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all of our Family and Friends!!

We sure hope this letter finds all of you happy and healthy! I can’t believe it’s already this time of year again. We want to give you an update on our past year (and for a more detailed account you’re welcome to check out our blog: ticklishtangerine.blogspot.com).

This year has really brought some big decisions, big events, and a lot of “firsts”. We started out the year in Florida, until the end of May, when Ty GRADUATED from dental school!! We are done with school once and for all!! It is such a good feeling after 7 ½ years of marriage to finally move on. We moved back to Idaho—it was very bittersweet. We sure think about and miss our friends in Florida. On the other hand, being back by family is priceless. We bought our very first house and are absolutely thrilled with it! We have our first yard, and love working and playing in it. We love our neighborhood and new ward. Ty’s job is fantastic, and we just feel so blessed and happy in our lives right now. Now for a little individual update:

Ty spent the beginning of the year doing job interviews, finishing requirements, taking his dental boards, applying to residency programs, and working nights at the airport so we could have flying benefits. He is so thrilled to be done with each and every one of those things. After much prayer and fasting, we decided to take the job with Family Health Services. Ty loves the challenges it has brought, and has learned a lot. His job has great benefits, and we are really enjoying them. Right after we moved here, Ty got called to be the assistant executive secretary in the stake presidency in our church. It has been a huge learning curve and kept him very busy, but a great experience to rub shoulders with such great people.

I (Kyla) started out the year at girls camp. It was a riot! I did the crafts again for 100 girls for 5 days. I sure love those girls, and have shed many tears over not being with them anymore. Then I was put on the enrichment committee for our last 5 months in Florida. I ended up being over crafts, as it was our most requested class. So we did 2 big craft nights, and although it was fun, I’m a little “crafted out”. I got called to be a primary teacher for the 4-5 year olds soon after moving here—it has actually been really challenging for me, although it doesn’t seem like it should be. I have really enjoyed decorating our new house, building up our food storage, and hanging out with family this year. I love having seasons, being by mountains, and country living.

Marissa is 6. She finished Pre-Kindergarten, and absolutely loved it. She tearfully said goodbye to friends and the only life she remembers (she was not quite 2 when we left Idaho). She enjoyed and excelled in swimming lessons this summer, then started Kindergarten in the fall. She absolutely loves it, and she is doing fantastic. She has made lots of new friends at church and school, and loves having grandmas, grandpas, aunts and uncles nearby to dote on her. She had a dream come true for her birthday—she got a baby kitten! She named it Pinky-pie, and adores “s”mothering her. Every waking moment she can, she spends it with her kitty, and weather permitting, playing in the yard. She had a solo song in the primary program for church, and was amazing! She loves being read to and reading on her own. Her favorite movies are “Tinkerbell” and Barbie movies. She loves coloring, crafts, singing, unicorns, hearts, butterflies, animals, and flowers.

Chandler is 3 ½. His big accomplishment is being potty-trained this year. He was remarkably easy, thank heavens. He loves playing outside, playing with pinky-pie, playing in the dirt, and loves wrestling. He is all boy. He also loves being adored by family that lives nearby. He chipped two teeth recently, and luckily daddy is a dentist. It took some bribery, but we managed to get them fixed. Chandler really enjoys helping mom while sissy is at school, and having her full attention. Then he is always excited to have Marissa home to play with. They play well together—mostly Marissa tells him what to do, and he plays along. Chandler loves singing, reading stories, watching Backyardigans, and anything PHYSICAL and rough. He loves his tool set, train set, and balls. He can dress himself and make his own bed. He always surprises us with big words, interesting insights and analyzations, and his ability to memorize things. His favorite song is “I am a Child of God”. He is very thoughtful and sympathetic.

We want all of you to know that each of us in our family believes in Christ. We rejoice in this time of year that celebrates his birth and life. We are grateful to be part of our church—the church we know to be the only true church. We are grateful for the prophet and apostles that have God’s priesthood and authority to lead us in these unstable and evil times. We truly know that God watches over us, protects us, knows us individually, and guides our lives. We feel His help and His spirit daily. He constantly blesses our lives with tender mercies beyond what we deserve. We love the temple and the blessings of protection and promise of eternity as a family that it provides, and enjoy the convenience of having one 40 minutes away now. We sure love our family and friends, and hope you have peace and true joy in this upcoming year. May God bless you and your families.

Take care, keep in touch, and you’re welcome to visit anytime!!

Love, The Bodily’s

Our new address:
1049 Zion Drive
Burley, Idaho 83318

Our home phone:
208-878-4821

Welcome Baby Hyrum!

The kids got to meet their new little cousin, Hyrum, this past week. He is soooo tiny at 5 1/2 pounds. He is so precious and adorable. Marissa and Chandler had fun holding him. Marissa especially loved it. She is such a natural mother--so tender, gentle, and careful. She wants to do everything--feed, diaper, hold, cuddle. She oohs and aahs over every sound and movement he makes. She talks to him in baby talk. She always washes her hands before she asks Chad or Annie to hold him.Chandler, on the other hand, was done after one minute, but he was curious and kept coming back to check things out. Anyway, he is a little piece of heaven and we are all so glad he's here safe and healthy. Chad and Annie are such good parents. It was so cute, though--Marissa was saying a prayer on our dinner and she said something like, "Please bless Chad and Annie that they can be good parents and know what to do with baby Hyrum." Out of the mouth of babes!!

Brotherly Love

These two can be so sweet to each other. They sure are fun and cute.

Neighborhood Party.

Since our new subdivision only has 8 families in it so far, we decided to host a Christmas Party to get to know each other better. I only took a couple pix in the preliminary stages, I meant to do more later, but forgot. This is the refreshment table before we put out the eggnog, hot spinach dip, little smokies (cocktail sausages in a BBQ sauce), and a veggie tray. I love decorating for parties, and displaying food. It's fun for me. I like to have lots of time to fuss with it. Everything for the party was homemade. So in the pictures, you can see shrimp cocktail with crackers, sugar and spice nuts, and all the candies I talked about making earlier: fudge, penuche, caramel fudge, Hershey clouds, and truffles. It turned out well--we had 5 families there, and we had fun talking and playing games.

Missy's project

I got Miss a magnet board to keep all her school papers/treasures on. Chandler loves it and wants one for his pictures he colors at home, and his projects from church. So Miss made one for him for Christmas. I think it turned out so cute. It will match his blue/red/white sailboat room.
How to make one:
1-sand and paint a piece of wood.
2-glue on a piece of sheet metal
3-make magnets to go on it (use the clear marbles that you use to weigh down flower arrangements. Glue some cute paper on the back of the marbles with mod-podge, a glue that dries clear. Hot glue a magnet to the back.)
It took us like 1 1/2 hours to make--even including paint drying and wrapping the gift. The boys just played cars and watched a movie in the basement.

Christmas Candy

I love making Christmas candy every year--it's such a fun tradition for me and really it's the only time of the year we make stuff like that--although I'm not sure why. Just tradition, I guess. Well, I really felt like a dork this year. I have honestly never had candies NOT turn out well. I think I ruined about everything this year. But there were silver linings and teaching moments. Here's the rundown:
1-fudge--turned out perfect. easy. yummy
2-caramels--looked perfect, tasted great when I licked the spoon, but hard as a rock. I ended up sticking the whole 9x9 glass pan in the micowave to get it soft enough to pry from the pan. I put it back on the stove and slowly melted it back down, and added a cup of milk. Stirred it till it was super creamy, tested it in cold water to make sure it wouldn't be hard as a rock, and it was good. When it set up, it was perfect hardness/softness, but way different--here's the silver lining: I've created a new recipe. Instead of being chewy caramel, it was fudgy. It is delicious, but I would call it caramel flavored fudge, not caramels. So, I eventually found out my thermometer was off (I'll tell more about that further down). So, If you want to make delicious caramel fudge, cook your caramels 10 degrees longer than normal, then follow what I did above.
3-Truffles--I lost my cookbook in the mail when we moved, and tried to remember the recipe, so it was more semi-sweet flavor than I like and it was too runny, and I thought the chocolate shell stuff you use for dipping strawberries would be easy to dip the truffle centers in--well, I was wrong. The truffle centers were refrigerated (otherwise they were like syrup at room temperature), so when I dipped them, the chocolate shell set up super quick cuz of the cold, and it was turning big blobs in the bowl into the hard shell, so I kept having to heat it up. My truffles kept springing leaks at room temp. so I had to keep them refrigerated, but the shell stuff is way too hard like that--it only tastes good at room temp. Disappointing.
4-penuche(also called brown sugar fudge--it's a super creamy mildly caramel flavored melt-in-your-mouth fudge.)It's not that hard to make, but I discovered my 2 small mistakes. I forgot to take into consideration of altitude here--way different then sea level florida. like 8 degrees on a candy thermometer different (which means about 15 extra minutes of cooking, which makes a HUGE difference.) Mistake number 2 was skipping a detail in the recipe--I guess I thought I knew the recipe well enough, oops. So after your ingredients come to a boil, you DO NOT stir it--at all!!! Otherwise, it will crystalize into a hard rock. well, you guessed it, I stirred it the entire 20 minutes. Big sugar rock. Dumb mistake. So I made it again. the 2nd and 3rd times I made it, it was crumbly (then I realized the altitude thing.) so, finally batch #4 turned out PERFECT. Sheesh!! What a waste of time and expensive ingredients.
5-Hershey Clouds-These should be the easiest things to make in the world. All you do is melt hershey bars, stir in cool whip, then refrigerate and then roll in nuts or coconut. How do you even mess these up? Well, I somehow missed the tiny detail to cool the chocolate before stirring it in--so it melted the cool whip, which made it not set up very well, so they were a melty mess to roll, and they are way too soft at room temperature.
Anyway, I'm going to do better next year. The ironic thing too, was that I was making this all for a neighborhood party we were hosting, not just for my family, so it really was stressful and infuriating. I'm including pictures of 3 of the batches of penuche--I forgot to take a pic of the first crystal-rock.

Happy Birthday Grandpa Bodily

You know, I'm not sure, but I think this is the first birthday party for Grandpa Bodily we've ever been to. Where it's just a couple weeks before Christmas, I think we've barely missed it every year. How nice it is to live close. Chandler and Marissa love Grandpa Bodily. He is a very good grandpa. It's so cute--whenever Chandler is playing pretend, his name is Steve. Whenever he has a stuffed animal to name, it's name is Steve--all named after Grandpa. The kids always want to talk to him on the phone, and he's so good to talk with them. He entertains and spoils them--fun tricks, fun toys and games. The kids REALLLYYY wanted to get a gift for him for his birthday. Well, we all know grandpa likes his chocolate--from lindt truffles, to chocolate potato cake, to fudge, to icecream. So we made him some homemade fudge. I dare say he liked it too. (For those with a recipe book of mine--it was the see's fudge recipe--it's delicious.) The kids also spent the afternoon making special birthday cards for him. Anyway, we're sure glad to have him in our lives. He's a great example and teacher to our family and we love him.

It's a Snow Day!

One of the funnest things about winter is the snow. It is absolutely gorgeous. I love watching it fall--piling and covering each leaf, fencepost, tree, road, and house. It reminds me of the songs, "It's a marshmallow World", and "Let it Snow", and "Winter Wonderland"--all songs I love.
The snow is such a novelty to us. The kids haven't ever been in a real winter, and for Ty and I, it's been 4 years without snow.
Going out to play in the snow is quite the deal. It takes some effort, but if you go out well-prepared, you can stay out for hours keeping toasty warm. The snow isn't the only thing looking like marshmallows--the kids are dressed from head to toe in puffy, warm clothes--I think they look adorable.
I love eating snow, and have taught the kids about it. No yellow snow, no dirty snow, only eat undisturbed snow far from roads and footprints. We had this talk after Chandler was eating it off his half-muddy snow boots while undressing inside the house.
The kids lay on the ground licking up the fluffy white snow, they make snow angels, snow men, and Marissa pulls Chandler on the sled. The kids play and play until Chandler gets so cold, he snaps. Suddenly, he'll come to the glass sliding door, and frantically start pounding on it, wailing and screaming that he has frost-bite. I'm not even sure where he heard about frost-bite, be he is always convinced that he has it. So, he comes inside, shedding layers of clothing as fast as he can, bawling when a foot or hand gets stuck. The bawling continues until a steaming cup of hot chocolate with marshmallows melting on top is in his icy fingers. Eventually the kids' rosy cheeks and nose turn back to normal, and he and Marissa end up giggling while they finish their hot chocolate and try to convince me they need another cup. Then Chandler declares his frost-bite is all better.

More Fun Christmas Crafts

It is such a magical time of year. So many fun things to make and fun traditions to do. Every year we make gingerbread houses for our neighbors. In my opinion, the secret to a good gingerbread house is to load it with as much candy as you can. We also made cute trees and tree cards. The popup cards were easier than I thought they'd be. We made some cute little nativity ornaments. The kids want to do Christmas activities every day. They are counting down like crazy.

The Tree

Things we love about our tree:
1-It's real
2-It is 8 feet tall (our fake Florida one was 4 feet tall)
3-It smells delicious
4-Our new tree topper is lighted and multifaceted

My dad owns a garden center and sells potted and fresh cut Christmas trees. So we got a beautiful grande fir tree. It was a lot of fun picking it out and decorating it. It's gorgeous. I love Christmas!!

Dipping pretzels for the Pockets

We also made these cute little pockets for gifts on Thanksgiving. The kids helped make them for their teachers, busdriver, and church leaders. They were fun to make,and delicious too. For some reason I was thinking we could fit 4 in each pocket, but we ended up barely fitting 2. So we had tons of leftovers. We dipped pretzels rods in white chocolate, then Chandler wanted to put green sprinkles on them, Marissa wanted red and white sprinkles, and I liked the crushed candy canes.

HappyThanksgiving

It was so fun this ear to be by family for Thanksgiving. We actually pitched in on the food and everything. Usually, when coming from afar, our families do all the cooking. Now, we can actually cook at our house, and drive over for the day. It is sooo nice. We have been officially named the pie makers for the Bodily side. The kids love pie-making, and so do I. We made 3 kinds--banana cream for Ty, Pumpkin for tradition, and apple pie for me and Ty's sister, Shay. The kids each made their own little ones and then shared them with their cousins after dinner. We ended up with kind of a small party though. Ty's brother, Redge moved to North Carolina a few months ago, so there's 4 cousins missing from them. Then, Chad and Annie (Ty's little bro) had their baby 3 weeks early, and missed it all. So just Shay's family and ours. Even Ty's grandma Lois went to a different daughters house, so we were limited, but it was fun. All the food was to die for; we stuffed ourselves, then crafted for 7 hours, then ate again. All in all a fun day. The crafts we made were so cute. They were these little tins that we put hand-wrapped chocolates in, and a cute floofy bow on top. They cost about $3. Perfect for visting teaching sisters, neighbors, Ty's assistants, etc. Ty's aunt made a bunchand sold them for $10 each. Lotsa time and love into each one.

The Primary Program

Marissa had a solo in the Primary Progam November 23rd. She sang "I am a child of God" while the rest of the primary signed it in sign langauage. It was the very first thing in the program, and she was amazing. It set the tone for the whole program. Her voice was clear, and beautiful, and angelic. She didn't miss a word, or sing a note off key. She wasn't scared either. We still have people complimenting her on it. What a special girl.

Pinky-Pie the Pig

Right after Halloween we spent a long day in Twin Falls. THe kids were so good, I let them pick a little reward. They chose this pig cotume that was on clearance for Pinky-Pie, our cat. They dress her up every few days and then just laugh their heads off while she runs aroung. It really is hilarious--almost as hilarious as just watching the kids laughing that hard.

Howdy Pardner!

I just think Chandler is an adorable little cowboy--galloping on his stick horse and tipping his hat--he is so fun to watch.