One of the best things about being a Petersen is that we have SO many ridiculously fantastic traditions.

• Every Valentine's Day, my mom door bell ditches our house and leaves us a special Valentines cards/a small gift for us.
• All of us really do wear green on St. Patrick's day.
  
• Every Easter, my parents will hide our Easter Baskets, so the first thing we do on Easter morning is look for them. Then we all gather in the living room and trade candy. Derek always steals everyone's Reeses Peanut Butter Eggs.
  
• Also, We do not only do chocolate Easter egg hunts, but money egg hunts! :) yay!
  
• Mama and Papa always make a delicious breakfast for us to eat during General Conference.
• While the men are out for Priesthood session, the girls go to Ladies Night at Desert Book, and then do some bonding shopping at the mall. and then we go for dinner and ice cream. If there's time, we'll come home and do something girly like scrapbook or puzzle.
• Birthdays are a VERY big deal.
• On the 4th of July we have a BBQ, play croquet, and do fireworks.
• Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday filled with at LEAST 1o pies. no matter how many of us are actually attending dinner. {and I can bet you one million dollars that my mom's apple pie is better than any apple pie you've ever had.}
• During the Christmas season, when everyone is home, we have one night where we play Deal or No Deal, one night where we have a family competition of who can come up with the best talent/skit/act thingy, one night of gingerbread making.
• On Christmas Eve we dress up and act out the nativity as my dad reads it from the scriptures. This activity always makes for great family home videos. :) Which we also watch every Christmas Eve!
  
• Every Eve of New Years Eve we play Monopoly. EVERY year. haha. And we write down who won on the inside of the box. Nathan won last year, and he received a trophy! We have 14 different versions of Monopoly, too. It's great. :)
• and one other tradition is that EVERY Sunday we play games as a family. It's something that I'm really going to miss when I move away to college. I've always loved automatically reserving my Sunday nights for family games. It's really gotten us close over the past few years and I've always looked forward to it.
  

Today is my last Sunday at home. Me and my parents played NUTS, since it's one of my favorite games. And seriously..this game is nuts. It's basically group Solitaire, only it's super fast paced and a lot more fun than Solitaire. When we have my entire family home, playing nuts is one of the funnest things we do. We're all mostly pretty good at it and it can get pretty crazy. I always look forward to a good game of nuts. Today, I won!see that pretty score? Almost a good 40 points above the parentals. :) I'm just a little proud. Cause you just have to be good at this game to fit in with the fam.

Maybe my future roommate will play games with me on Sunday?
--Kalynn.