Meagan's Birthday Bash!

For Meagan's Birthday she enjoyed her annual "Better Than Anything" Cake and making Haunted Houses out of gingerbread and candy!

Here's Meagan and her friends making the houses. The girls had lots of creativity with them. Regan even made a cool abstract one. The neat thing because they were supposed to be "haunted houses", the girls had fun making the roofs and sides crooked etc. They even stuffed the houses full of marshmellow ghosts and candy worms etc.

Afterwards they had fun opening presents and just hanging out!

Here's Meagan and Regan!

Here's Kaitlyn and Meagan!

Shayla's Joined Cross Country Team

Shayla joined the cross country team at Rock Creek and competed for the 4th grade girls team. Here are some photos and videos of her events.






Shayla has really enjoyed running and hopes to someday get a medal. She also is busy with being on her School Student council, violin lessons and piano.

Gold Rush Days

Where has the time gone? I have been finding myself so busy between taking care of kids, teaching piano, doing geneology, and working in the RS presidency for our ward. I'm giving up catching up on the past and thought I'd start with our most recent family outing.
Over labor day weekend, we celebrated gold rush days here in Sacramento. The city poured tons of dirt on the streets and everyone dressed up like in the old days.

Here's Shayla and Jaden panning for Gold. They were so excited to receive they're gold certificate, thinking they could buy lots of things in the store until they found out that they could only buy a dollar's worth.
Here's Joanne Taylor, teaching kids how they use to make dolls back in the gold rush times.

A view of the decorated streets.


My cousin John Taylor, the pyromaniac who had fun loading and helping fire the cannon. It was a hot and fun day with the kids!

Twitchell 2008 Family Newsletter

Twitchell Family Newsletter 2008

Wow! I can't believe Christmas is almost here! This year seemed to zoom by! We had a wonderful family trip to Disneyland this year. The first time ever! The Gifford's were there too! After five days we were exhausted yet Jaden kept wanting to go back and go on Star Tours!

Andrew our youngest, is a wonderful delight! He keeps mom so busy!! He's active and loves getting into everything! He loves to golf (which consists of using a plastic bowling pin as a club and hitting the golf ball ) He also loves balls of all kinds! He enjoys kicking the ball, throwing the ball and playing catch! He has such a cute smile and laugh! And of course, he loves chasing and playing with Jaden and Shayla.

Jaden is enjoying going to a new school and is in 1st grade. He is at the top of his class in math. His teacher says he gets done quick and keeps telling the other kids to hurry up so they can correct the problems. He is big into golf! He love Tiger Woods' 09 on the xbox. He also enjoys playing baseball and is excited to play pony ball little league this spring! And like all brothers, he enjoys torturing Andrew.

Shayla is in 3rd grade this year. Her teacher says she's and excellent student and enjoys her in class. Shayla has also been involved with brownie girl scouts, activity days and a Sing and Dance group. She does 2 big performances one tomorrow and another in June! She enjoys reading, cooking and lately is big into weaving potholders,knitting and cross-stitching. She was also baptized this June by her Daddy.

Meagan is enjoying junior high. She's made some new friends and had a fun birthday sleepover party! She still loves reading and has been big into the Twilight series and movie. She loves writing to and posts her work on some of the Twilight fan fiction sites.

Tami is very busy being a mom on the go! With the kids at 3 different schools across town she does lots of carpooling and chauffeuring kids to activities and school. This year with Joanne Taylor, she made around 40 pounds of chocolates this holiday season. She still enjoys scrap booking and card making whenever she gets a chance and is busy teaching Jaden's primary class of 8 boys and 2 girls!

Larry is staying with Chrysler and opted not to take the buy out package. He has performed well and hopes to continue to move up in his career. He loves playing xbox with Jaden and spending time with our family whenever he can. He is also busy as the Ward Missionary assigned to the Elder's Quorum.

We wish each and everyone of our friends and family members a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

Love,

Larry, Tami, Meagan, Shayla, Jaden and Andrew Twitchell

As of Today, Jan.4 ,2009, Tami received quite the shock as she was called to be the 1st Counselor in the Rocklin 3 ward Relief Society Presidency. Especially since she only was able to go to RS once, because she was called again to Primary when the ward boundaries changed. She's excited to go back to Relief Society once again!

Happy New Year!!

For New Year's Eve, we (The Twitchell's) celebrated with Grandpa Luker and John Taylor and his family. We had a lot of fun!

Evan had a lot of fun with Jaden's new remote control Firetruck! He kept wanting to squirt everyone with the fire hose and kept moving the ladder up, down, and all around!

Kelly brought Prince Caspian for all of us to watch! We really enjoyed it except Shayla and Jaden fell asleep!

During the holidays, we went to Johnny's Incredible Pizza where Shayla injured her fingers bowling. She tried really hard to stay awake but succumbed to sleep.

Jaden didn't make it to New Year's either but fell fast asleep around 9pm. After the movie we had snacks and got ready for silly string fights and celebrating.

Oakland Temple

On December 27th, the Twitchell family and Grandpa Luker drove to Oakland California to see the visitor center and the lights.

After 3 hours of driving (due to lots of Traffic) we arrived! We were excited to see Angela Johnson's special display of sculptures. This is one they had out that we were allowed to photograph.

Her work is so amazing! She came and told all the Sister Missionaries about each sculpture so they could share her and their testimony of each piece and of the Savior.
Sister Hui was the sister who took us for our tour. She was really cute and asked Shayla what language her name was in. Shayla said Chinese and was right. The sister asked her if she knew any Chinese and Shayla promptly did the polite bow and said hello to her in Chinese! Aren't kids tv shows great! That's where Shayla learned it from.

This is a view of the Bay Area from the Oakland Temple, Isn't it amazing!

After the tour of the sculptures, we went outside to see all the lights. The kids had fun checking out all the lights and the Nativity!

Christmas 2008

December was a hectic and busy month in the Twitchell Household as Larry had to be in LA the last couple of weeks in November and all of December until Christmas. Boy oh Boy did we miss Daddy! Although Larry was gone an awful lot we still did some fun things like viewing the lights on Strand Road, going out for hot chocolate and doughnuts( the kids favorite I think) Making goodies and treats for all of our neighbors. Grandpa Luker even flew in from Utah for Christmas! We were so excited to have him visit because he hasn't been to our new house in California! Jaden was really excited for Christmas this year and his favorite present was the new Red Xbox controller that he got!


Shayla was excited to get her Bratz hair magic color set and promptly set up shop in the bathroom and opened her own salon and invited us all to get hair do's.



Andrew's favorite part was his new alphabet choo choo train and Diego ATV. He's really excited to have Jaden and Shayla back in school so they will stop playing with all his toys!

All in All we had a wonderful Christmas day! We were just so excited to have Grandpa here and Daddy home!

Mommy has been enjoying her new computer and hopes to be more consistent with her blog this year!