Leinberger Christmas card

Seasonal Chic 2010 Christmas Card

Create beautiful photo Christmas cards at Shutterfly.com.

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Living Nativity, an SLC Christmas Tradition

This week was time for the annual Living Nativity at Bonneville Glen Park put on by local churches including our church, Wasatch Presbyterian.  It is an amazing event, from the Roman centurions standing guard at the start, to the town of Bethlehem, the live camel, the herd of sheep, and of course, the stable complete with live Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus.  It's always one of the highlights of the Christmas season for us.  This was Tessa's first visit, and luckily it was much warmer than usual this year, the last couple years have been very snowy and cold. 

That also meant that there were far more people than usual.  We stood in what we thought was a long line, stretching across the parking lot, but when we left, the line was down the street and around the corner, up the hill.  I've never seen it like that before.  If any of you haven't seen it, make sure to watch out for it next year, it's located at 1500 E 1050 S in Salt Lake City.  Merry Christmas!

I'm sure many of you who are reading this have gotten either a photo card or a photo book from us in the past few years.  Wendy has been using Shutterfly for all of these projects for over 5 years now and we love using them.  I thought I would write about it since right now they have a promotion that gives you 50 free Christmas cards for blogging about how much you love using Shutterfly.

As you can see from the photos above, we have done Christmas cards for years like this one of the boys, this year we did a Shutterfly baby announcement when Tessa was born, and every year Wendy does a photo book for our parents, chronicling the kid's year in photos!  We love all the different styles that are available.  Wendy likes how easy it is to try out many (she has about 13 pages of saved projects) and how she can work on them with her sister who is in Wisconsin.

The one thing that we've been thinking about but haven't done yet is a calendar, but I'm sure we will do that soon.  Look out Zach and Scott, that might be what you're getting for Christmas!

Thanks for the FREE Christmas cards, Shutterfly! You will be making lots of bloggers happy this Christmas!!!

To get your own free cards, check out http://www.shutterfly.com/ to browse their holiday card collection. Pick your faves and blog about them, then fill out this form:

http://blog.shutterfly.com/5358/holiday2010-blog-submission-form/

Tessa Laughing at Noah

Here is Tessa playing a game with Noah, she loves playing with her brothers as you can tell.

Will Wedding Dancing

Will's first wedding dance experience was at Abby's wedding when he was just 2, but still managed to dance all night. Maggie's wedding was his chance to take it to the next level. He started out kind of shy, I was surprised that he didn't want to go dance with us. But after warming up to it he couldn't stop himself. He just got right up in front of the band (who was great by the way) and started busting some moves. Even the band commented on his dancing a couple of times, saying "awesome dancing little man" and "we're getting tired just watching this kid!" This video is of him dancing with Maggie and Abby to the song "Hey, Soul Sister" by Train.

The Start of the New Garden

While I had some time off this year I decided it was a good time to start cleaning up the large unused area behind the garage and start doing making a serious garden.  I was inspired by our success this summer with our sweet corn and sunflowers, and we always grow decent tomatoes.  I was also inspired by our neighbor Jack and his extensive gardening for selling at the farmers markets and all the people that he works with in the area who are really creating a network of locally grown food and using it at home and in their products.  As you can see, even after some work this fall, the space has a long way to go, which is why I wanted to put these photos up.  The space is about 33'x33' and has good sun (especially since I have done extensive trimming to the tree in the back.)  I have started clearing weeds and removing some of the pea gravel, with which the whole space is covered.  Hopefully we can have good growing conditions despite the gravel and weed problems.  Once I can till it next fall, I will try to level it some more too.  Current plans are to have tomatoes, at least 4 rows of sweet corn, some giant sunflowers, and a good sized pumpkin and cucumber patch.  I'm going to stick with things that I know grow well here in Utah.  I don't expect any more progress until next March, since everything got covered with about 6" of snow the day after these photos were taken.  Next step will be ordering seeds!

Bowling!

On Friday I took the boys bowling at Orchard Lanes, it was a great time.  The presure was on since Noah had beaten me last time, so I made sure to concentrate this time.  Noah picked up a couple tough spares and Will and I each had a couple strikes.  The boys' favorite part was playing the games in the arcade and winning tickets I think, ski ball and "Deal or No Deal" were a big hit.  I don't know that I have any junior PBA stars here but they do love going bowling and gaming!  It was a great time!

Favorite Videos

Here are some of our favorite recent movies of the kids, you can still check out the rest of the videos on youtube and vimeo. Enjoy!

Snow's coming...

There's not much that excites the whole family as much as snow, and we could be in for a good storm this weekend. We always love to hear a forcast of "feet" in the mountains, and some significant valley snow as well. I can't wait to hit the snow with the kids soon. Brighton has been open for a week already and it's killing me! Let's ride!

The new blog about the family

Here is our new blog to follow the Leinberger family in Utah. There is a link on the right to see all the videos that are on YouTube and there will be more to come. For those of you who have followed us on the Bradford Leinberger Photography blog, that will now be devoted to photography and this will be exclusively for the family. Follow them both!