Caldwell

Monday morning we made our way over to Caldwell to stay with Darin's brother and his family. I had never been to Western Idaho before. My favorite thing about Western Idaho was definitely the fact that the sun did not come up until 8 a.m. each day. I guess that's the difference between living at the forefront of the Eastern Time Zone and the tail end of the Mountain Standard Time Zone (almost an hour difference in sunrise times!). It was glorious. 

Besides sleeping in the dark, which I clearly loved (and the fact that Shae loved it too)...I also loved being with (almost) Darin's entire family! It was so fun to get to know people better and see the cousins play together. I wish we all lived closer so that we could hang out more often. I look forward to future family reunions.

We got to Caldwell just in time for the BYU game. With the boys ganging up on her, poor Linzy was pretty much forced to let Derek open his Christmas present early. (Thanks Linzy! The TV was awesome to be able to enjoy together :). That night we went to the Orchard House for a family dinner. It was a super cute restaurant with tons of lights and Christmas decorations outside. This is where we got to meet baby Wyatt for the first time. What an adorable baby! We sure do have a good looking family.

Tuesday we took family pictures.  I can't wait to see them! I am such a firm believer in picture taking. I love documenting life through pictures (plus I just have an awful memory and if I didn't, I wouldn't remember anything). I can't wait to get a current family picture up on the wall. 

Here's some of the behind-the-scenes of our photo shoot:

If only I had a picture of all of us on the other side trying to get these kiddos to look at the camera...

That evening we went to downtown Caldwell, which I fell in love with after about 20 seconds. I have never seen so many Christmas lights in one place before! (Darin and I disagreed a bit about whether Temple Square or Caldwell wins as far as the amount of Christmas lights go. I say Caldwell all the way. Maybe it's just because the lights were quite different from the temple lights...and there was a river running along the pathway with decked-out bridges...it was great). My camera didn't seem to know how to handle all of the lights, so I only got shots of the little play area, but trust me, the lights were fabulous. We might have to do another Christmas in Caldwell just to experience them again.