Thanksgiving Pilgrims and Indians

I haven't had much time lately to blog, but I couldn't NOT put this adorable picture of Brooklyn and Bella. Brooklyn made pilgrim and indian costumes in her kindergarten class for their Thanksgiving Feast. She was so excited to bring them home and wear them on Thanksgiving. She decided to let Bella be the Pilgrim and even picked out the apron for her to wear. I snapped the picture that morning. I am blessed and THANKFUL for such wonderful and cute daughters.

My little DIVA

I was going through my camera and found these pictures of BROOKLYN. They made me smile and gave me a chance to really think about her for a minute and how blessed we are to have her in our family. First as you can see by the pictures that Brooklyn loves to look glamorous. She loves bling as you can tell by the hat and jacket jewel. This is one of her favorite jackets because of course it is hot pink fur! She is no shrinking wallflower! Brooklyn loves to pose for pictures. She is our own little "top model". Her smile is so adorable and I always want to stick my finger in her dimples. As you can see she doesn't take a single bad picture. Brooklyn is a middle child and so she struggles to find her way with her older and younger sisters. She is also very sensitive and will cry at the drop of a hat if she thinks you are upset or angry with her. Nat and I have struggled recently because she also tends to cry when she doesn't get her way. With those two combinations we usually have 1-2 crying episodes a day. With the bad there is amazing amounts of GOOD. She is so funny and loves to perform. Tonight we were treated to a show about Ariel the Mermaid. Although she intended to take the lead role, she kindly let her older sister Bronwyn have the lead and took the supporting roles of Flounder and the Prince Eric statue. I must say it was the best performance of a statue I have ever seen!

GLASSES

A few weeks ago, we recieved a letter from Ridgeline Elementary that Bronwyn had failed her eye exam and needed to see an optometrist. We questioned her immediately and found out she had been having some problems. We took her for an eye exam and found out one eye was 20/100. She obviously needed some glasses. At first she didn't seem to excited but quickly got into the fun of picking some glasses out. Nat and I got pretty "excited" when we found out our insurance didn't pay for any glasses, contacts, etc. She picked out this cute pair and we think she is more adorable than ever. She can also see much better! When I asked her why she didn't tell me about her eye and that she had failed her eye exam, she thought that I would be mad at her. Go figure!

FALL.....and family pictures

I love this time of year. Some of my favorite colors (orange especially) are abundant and in all their glory during the fall season. The air is crisp and winter is just around the corner. I always love to get pictures done this time of year. We met a friend up here in Traverse Mountain who does wonderful photos and we have used her the last couple of years. Of course having 3 girls I like to coordinate some pretty cute outfits. This year I was inspired to make these cute flower hats. I love hats myself and use to collect quite a few vintage ones. Luckily the girls like to wear hats too! We shot these pictures at a old mill in American Fork that has been turned into an antique store. It was such a fun location and I had many ideas of different shots that I wanted to do. Unfortunately the girls (and Nat) did not want to stay the many hours I would have.:) Oh Well!! I think we were quite successful considering we had a 3 year old among us. The photographer is Robin King, and I highly recommend her. We got a few Christmas card worthy shots. Have you ever seen cuter girls?

The Reed Sisters Halloween Debut

It is hard to believe that Halloween has past us by. Time seems to fly. This year I wanted to do something fun with the girls costumes. They love all things vintage (just like their mother) and we decided to make 50's girls outfits. I even created a little scenario around the costumes. They were making their debut as the singing "Reed Sisters" with their recent top ten hit. We had to make sure they matched and Bronwyn came up with the idea of the "R" on the sweaters. Everyone thought they looked adorable and some friends even snapped a picture or two. I was grateful that the weather was so nice (warm) so they didn't need to wear jackets to cover up their cute costumes. I love the pictures. It is so fun having 3 cute adorable girls.

OKLAHOMA-I can't get that dang song out of my head!

The Reed family has been busy working on Lehi City Arts Council production of Oklahoma. Nat designed the sets, Jennifer did set dressing and props and Bronwyn and Brooklyn are in the production. Bella has her hand in everything since she tags along with us to the theatre most every night. I sometimes wonder if she thinks home is the theatre. We are doing our production this year at Thanksgiving Point in the Barn which is the perfect venue for this show. It also is a more well known venue and is much more in the public eye. Thanksgiving Point has a lot of marketing tools that we have tried to take advantage of, ie. a big billboard, newsletter, etc. Once again Nat had outdid himself and built a beautiful set. Of course once again he lost many hours of sleep and did not have as much help as we had hoped, but he pulled it out of his magic theatre hat. This year the council splurged an hired a really great lighting designer who teaches at the University of Utah. I was skeptical and not sure it was a good use of the budget, however I was proven wrong. He lit the set wonderfully, and in a somewhat difficult space to light. The girls have really enjoyed being in the show and I think they have both been bitten by the theatre bug. This is the second show this summer for them both. Bronwyn had one of the leads in Suessical Jr. (I plan on posting about this eventually) and Brooklyn did a produciton called How Does Your Garden Grow? I had told the Arts Council I really couldn't help on the production since I just directed a show for them, however somehow I ended up doing props and set dressing. I also wanted to help Nat make his set look awesome! So this has been life for the last month. I am hoping that after labor day things will settle down, but we already have the next project lined up!

We want to live there.....

We just returned from Bear Lake yesterday. My cousins all have blogs and so my sister Amanda and I decided to be "cool" and blog as well. Our goal was to start our blog today. What better way to start than to post fun vacation pictures. First, I must tell you that Nat (my husband) named our blog. We love the fact that we have three wonderful, talented and amazing daughters. He thought wouldn't 3Dotters be a great name for a publishing company? Well, since I don't see any publishing company in our future we decided to name our blog 3Dotters. I guess we are publishing something.

Back to our vacation.....we spent 3 fun days with our family. It is somewhat of a tradition for our family to go to Bear Lake for a reunion. My grandparents (who are 82 and still alive) started taking our family to Bear Lake when I was about 14 or so. Since those humble beginnings of 20 or so our family has grown to over 50. Each family rents a condo at Ideal Beach. We have tried other places, but Ideal Beach (formally Sweetwater) is our favorite. Now each of my grandparents children (my mom is the oldest of 5) rents a condo for their family. So this year in my parent's condo there was me and my family, my sister Amanda and her family, my sister Melissa and her family and my brother Ryan. We would do our own thing during the day and get together with our aunts, uncles and cousins to share dinner and have family home evening. Each night a different family did dinner. Our night was Sunday and we did taco salad. We have done this for the last 2-3 years. Any new ideas let me know! Remember we need to feed 50 and be cost effective.

This year our family home evenings centered on our ancestors and each family was assigned different parts of our family. We were assigned my grandparents. I specifically had to talk about how my grandpa proposed to my grandmother. It was fun talking with grandma, I really didn't know the story. I will probably post that story in our blog later this week. I also brought fun pictures of them from the 40's when they were so young. Sometimes it's hard to believe how young they once were. I really love my grandparents and can't imagine them not being on this earth with us. I have never had anyone in my family really close to me die, and it's hard to believe that someday they will be gone too. My uncle's families talked our our pioneer ancestors who came over from Europe as young members of the church. The stories were fun and really inspiring. We also had a family auction that we have been doing for 3 years to raise some money for our family fund. I think it is really fun, but I'm not sure everyone in our family is into it. Time goes by so fast up there and before we knew it we were ready to go home. We have decided that next year we will stay a whole week. Well, I titled this entry because on our way home Bronwyn said "Mom can we buy a condo and live at Bear Lake?" It is truly a joy to be there, surrounded by the most beautiful lake in Utah (I think) and be with the people we love the most.