Okay... take a good look at this picture and tell me two things that you find "wrong" with it. It should be obvious if you look DOWN at my two oldest girls' feet. Before the reception began, a professional photographer was on hand to take pictures, but I also wanted some pictures taken with my own camera, which were taken "off in the distance" so we weren't in the way of the professional. Imagine my DISMAY when I noticed later that Morgan and Carly had taken off their shoes. AHHHHH! WHAT WERE THEY THINKING?!?! Their response was... "But mom, the reception hasn't started and our feet hurt." I gave them the "motherly glare" that I am so famous for and said, "I don't care if your feet hurt, you need to look GOOD for the pictures and wear your shoes! How old are you?!" AHHHH! But now that it's past, I look at it and sigh.... and chuckle.... ;)

The three younger girls LOVED holding the dress for their Aunt Brooklyn (my sister) who got married 3-6-09 in the SLC temple.

We had a mini Cottrell family reunion where the majority of the grandkids were there. Carl's parents are sitting in the front and are surrounded by 16 (out of 22 possible) grandkids and 5 great-grandkids. What a fun time we had!

In February, we were thrilled to see our nephew Desmond return home from his mission to Cambodia. He gave all the male members in the family a tie with elephants on it. (He's wearing one of the ties in the picture.) What an amazing young man he is and a great example to all of us.

This is a funny story about how desperate sports fans can get... Carl had optometry meetings in Indianapolis in September, so we turned it into a "couple's" getaway. The Indianapolis Colts (Super Bowl winners) have just built a brand new stadium. We were dying to see what it looked like, but their first game in the stadium was Sunday night. We flew out Sunday morning, so how could we get in? There were no tours or ways to see inside. Then, we heard through the grapevine, that there were two high school football games being played in the Colts stadium Friday night. The tickets were $20 each (we've never paid THAT much for a H.S. game) but we were determined to see what this stadium looked like. We were not disappointed. The retractable roof was amazing, and the stadium was ENORMOUS. It seats 65,000 and is over 1.8 million square feet. It has the only moveable window in the NFL. We spent Friday night watching H.S. football inside this stadium and had a great time! Oh the things sports nuts will do for fun?! Carl and I make a great couple, huh?! :)

One of the girls' favorite activities is to create Polly Pocket houses out of old shoeboxes. By getting scrapbook paper and cutting out pictures of furniture from magazines and gluing them on, they can get really cute and creative! Here's a sample of Mackenzie's rooms and her change of Polly Pocket clothes. We store all the rooms under the girls' beds.

I needed to take this picture as this was our life this past spring. Morgan and Carly played AAU (club) volleyball while Mackenzie and Caitlin were on different soccer teams. Maren, of course... was our little cheerleader and tagged along to all the different games. During this time, I think I spent my days sitting in a corner in a straightjacket rocking back and forth and mumbling as I could hardly keep up with all the girls and their activities!