Merry Christmas from the Z Family!

Merry Christmas Everyone!
In an effort to become more green, we have decided to make our yearly Christmas letter online!

As many of you know we have had a crazy year, as usual!
Last Christmas I was hospitalized with complications from my 4th pregnancy, so we kinda missed out on our 1st Christmas in our new home. However, we received a fantastic late Christmas present, in the form of Clare Marie Zitzelsberger. She was born on New Years day 2009 and though she was born 4 weeks early, she was healthy and perfect. We were all super blessed to have Granny Thorne fly in the day before she was born and take care of us for two weeks. It was a little harder to recover from this delivery, so we loooved having Granny here!

David ,especially, has had a busy year. He is the Cub scout master in our ward, in addition to working on his Masters degree and being elected the HOA president. He still works for Microsoft and has continued to enjoy his job. I think he enjoys all of the things he is involved in and we get to see him now and then.

I've spent most of the year just trying to keep up. Four kids has definitely been a challenge for me, but I have managed to keep making some jewelry here and there, as well as keep up with my two callings in Enrichment and the Activity day girls.

Sammy is as vivacious as ever. She is forever making things. Just like her mom! She is in the 2nd grade this year and loves her teacher Mrs. Meeks. She is doing very well and continues to work hard and enjoy school. Sammy is excited about her impending baptism and is looking forward to turning 8 years old. She played soccer again this fall and is still a day dreamer on the field. We might try gymnastics in the spring!

Jake is 5 years old and doing great as well. His speech continues to improve by leaps and bounds. He works hard to practice and make himself understood. Jake is still his father's son and loves all things Star Wars, computers, soccer and Transformers. He loves his preschool and is learning sign language and spanish. His is a very smart boy!

Josh is my sweet little flirt! He loves to flirt with all of his babysitters at church and is definitely a Thorne boy! He loves to play catch and race cars and is such a good helper. He helps his siblings with all of their chores. He is two years old and definitely mischievous, but he is so sweet that he really makes up for any struggle.

My sweet Clare is fantastic. She is such a mellow little gal that she plays nice with everyone and is always the object of much sibling affection. She has struggled with some of her gross motor skills, but she is doing physical therapy and progressing much more quickly than we expected. She has truly been a blessing in our family!

We hope that you have been as blessed as we have this year. We love you all and hope that the year to come is wonderful for you all!
Love, The Zitzelsberger Family

September Fun

September brought the beginning of school. Yaaayyyy! I was so excited when school started and I think the kids were too. Thank heavens for school. The kids were bored and Mom was going crazy and salvation came in the form of school.

Here are the first day pictures!

We had some fun visitors in September too! Uncle Charles and Aunt Erika came for Labor Day!
We went to Chuck E Cheese for Jake's early birthday celebration. Here he is with his new
Snake Eyes mask and his green frog cupcakes.

Erika and I also took a little trip out to Forks, WA. We had a great time tootling around and taking pictures. Erika is a huge Twilight fan so we experienced all of the Forks goodness.

This was Jake's actual birthday! We had a great time. He got a new
Razor and bike for his special day!

Our wirl wind tour of California!

Sorry it has been so long since I blogged and I now have a back log of pictures to share and tell you about. So lets begin with the high light of our summer. Our trip to California was fantastic! We had a really great time seeing our friends and family!




This is Josh with his cousin Basil having a great time at Granny's house. They were born 2 months apart and had a fantastic time playing together. Below is a picture of Sammy at the beach. We took a couple of beach trips. This one was at Carona del Mar with friends, but we also spent some time at Santa Monica beach with Uncle Steve!













We also went to the Santa Ana Zoo with Aunt Erika and Aunt Stacy! We loved that day! It is such a great little zoo and we had a great time there with our cousins Tom and Ben.















We also went to the Circus with Aunt Stacy and cousin Ben and Uncle Chris, Lauren and Granny. Our cousins Jacque and Azure came too. The kids loved the elephants and tigers the most and had a really great time at the show.













































































One of the big high lights of our trip was Uncle Chris coming home from his mission in Baltimore, Maryland. It was super fun to hang out with him and play rock band all the time. We love Uncle Chris! We also got to spend some seriously overdue and splendid time with our best friends the LaRue family, who now live in Idaho. We partied with them in the pool and celebrated Daddy's birthday. A fun time was had by all and we were ready to come at the end, which means it was good! Thanks to all our friends and family in California for playing with us this summer! We love you!

Clare and her Aunt Erika. Do they look alike or what?

Experience the Music & Science Fiction Museum

So today we went to the Experience the music project and Science fiction Museum. It was super cool! Not only is the building beautiful and designed by Frank Gehry (love his metal goodness) of Disney Concert Hall fame, but the kids totally loved it. Lots of really interactive kid stuff with a large quantity of cool adult stuff.

Here is one of the cool adult things. For those of you who love the recently deceased Michael Jackson, here is his original diamond glove and shiny jacket. Totally awesome 80's pop goodness. They were doing a tribute to him and showed a concert of him wearing the glove and jacket--- singing Billy Jean. IT WAS GOOD!

They have a ton of interactive instruments with kid friendly tutorials that show the kids how to play. Here are Sammy and Jake both taking their turns on the drums. They loved it!

They also had this cool Jim Hensen exhibit. The kids loved seeing the original muppets and Sesame Street characters. They had a cool theatre there too with muppets that the kids could play with while the audiance watched. Very fun.

My kids love Fraggle Rock, so here they are with some of those puppets.

This is a monter fur wall. It was one of 4 or 5 walls covered with fur. The kids had to feel each one. I'm sure they contracted several deseases from this, but what are you gonna do.

The Sci-Fi protion was fun for everyone too. They had a bunch of Star Trek and Star Wars stuff. David was getting totally geeky with it. This is everyone with the original robot from The Day the Earth Stood Still. David was lovin' this stuff!

We all were excited to see R2-D2. It was definitely a fun family event! We're gonna have to take Chris here if he comes to visit. He's gonna love it!

The Father and Sons Campout

As you can see we had alot going on in the month of May. The fathers and sons campout was a big deal for the boys. They all went this year but I think some enjoyed it more than others. Here is a picture of Josh, clearly not enjoying it.

Jake was having a great time!

Jake met some fun new friends to play with and spent a large amount of time playing with them.

They had a great time and when they finally got home Jake did not want to leave the car. Mommy had to coax him out and he wanted to leave for another camping trip right away.
Boys will be boys!

Catch up with Clare

As you can see Clare is loosing her luxurious hair! She now has a mohawk and a pinwheel around her cowlick and that's about it. Luckily she has hair growing back in but it's super blond so she just looks half bald anyway. So she's going to be wearing alot of big hair does from now on!

Here we are on the couch after her late night feeding. She's not very coherent but you can see a front view of the mohawk.

This was Sammy's little Piglet outfit. I just thought it was a great picture. There's Clare wearing Piglet with her tummy hanging out and showing what a piglet she is. Cracks me up!

This is her fashion statement picture. It had finally warmed up enough to put her in some of her new and super cute summer clothes. So her she is sportin' her cuteness.

Clare had an eventful month in the food department. She began eating baby food. This is a picture of our trial run and she did pretty well with it. You can tell she really liked it but just couldn't get her tongue organized enough to swallow. She is freakin' cute!

Josh's 2nd Birthday

Josh's Birthday was an intimate affair this year. We had some gourmet pizza, that wasn't very good and some wonderful cupcakes, that Sammy found in her cookbook, which look like frogs.

As you can see, Josh thought those cupcakes were the best!

Josh received some great birthday presents, as you can see from the victory dance he's performing above. He loves balls and cars and he got plenty of both!

Granny and Papa sent him this yellow soccer ball and a cool batman car! He was vrooming that all over his new cars and trains rug.

Overall, it was a great day!

Catching up!

Ok, in an effort to catch up and appease the family members who hunger for pictures of my sweet children, I am posting some rather belated pictures.

This Easter was hard, fun and miraculous! Clare came down with RSV a couple of weeks before Easter. She would cough so much and throw up her food. She turned blue several times when she was coughing and the doctor simply told us that we couldn't give her any medicine and to just wait it out and she'll get better in a couple weeks. Well forget the doctors! I gave my baby cough medicine, rubbed her up with vicks and I also gave her breathing treatments. We had a few nights when David and I took 4 hour shifts to watch her sleep and make sure she kept breathing. Needless to say it was scary for us. Clare is so sweet and she got so sick and she was only 3 months old. The miraculous side to the whole fiasco was that while I was taking my 4 hour shifts, I was sewing Easter dresses. My mom always made my sister and I matching dresses for major holidays and I thought it would be so fun! So I actually did it this year. The dresses turned out great and the girls looked adorable!

These next few pictures are just some cute ones that I snapped now and then. Ya know everyday kinda things. Josh sucking his finger, Clare showing of her super sweet ginning skills, Sammy with a normal smile, and Jake just as sweet as ever! Dang it, I have cute kids!

This picture shows Jake wearing the much loved Dragon costume. We first acquired this costume for Sammy's 3rd Halloween. She loves that costume still and when we first got it she wore it everywhere. Well she talked Jake into wearing it this time. He is only a year older than she was that first Halloween, but he is substantially larger than she was at 4 years old. You can tell by Jake's face that wearing that costume is just a little painful. He took it off shortly after the picture was taken, but I thought it was pretty funny. Jake will do just about anything Sammy puts him up to.