Doll House

My mom drove up here several days before Christmas to get my brother. Since we were going to Greg's parents for Christmas we had a little Christmas with her while she was here. We opened all our presents from my mom. She had been working on "remodeling" this doll house she got at a thrift store for Jaelee and this thing is huge! The twins loved it. Jaelee is usually into something for 5 minutes and moving on to the next thing but she played with the dolls in the doll house all night. Jaelee also got a cooking set and I happened to have a smaller box of brownies so we let her make us brownie muffins. After we opened all our gifts, made brownies and played for a while my mom read them The Night Before Christmas. Then I had to get a picture of my brother and induct him into our silly Christmas balls photos.  It was a great night!

Random December Stuff

I have always loved the Holidays.  We always get a tree pretty early in December and decorate it but I have never gone full blown into decorating the house for Christmas like I do for Halloween.  I decided this year that since the kids are getting older I would make the house a little more Christmasee.  I brought in a palette from our garage to put the little tree cone advent Calender I made out of paper on.  If I can find the link for where I got the idea I'll post it later.  I also created a banner to go around our kitchen, used more pickle jars to create a lighted Happy Holidays sign and made a Merry Christmas sign to go between our media center.  It looked pretty festive.  Below are some pictures of our decor and random pictures of the kids.

Lights at the Botanical Gardens

Greg got some tickets to visit the Botanical Garden light show for free.  Love when things we all ready want to do are free!  After seeing Santa we went to the food court in the mall and ate some diner.  Then we headed over to the Botanical Gardens.  The lights are really amazing and each year it's more fun to see the how much the kids enjoy it.  We stopped and got some cookies & hot chocolate and then walked through and looked at all the lights.

Silly Pictures & The Trip to See Santa

It all ready seems like this was so long ago.  I can't not put up a post about our trip to see Santa this year.  We had been talking with the kids quite a bit about Santa and how if they sat on his lap and told him what they wanted for Christmas he would bring it if they were really good.  They both actually seemed really excited to go see him.

We had a whole day planned of fun.  We were going to go to the mall to see Santa, go to dinner and eat and then go to the Botanical Gardens to see the lights.

We made sure we didn't go until after the kids had their naps.  While they were napping I was sitting on our floor working on some Christmas projects and I looked over at our tree and saw my face in a Christmas ball.  It was distorted and really funny so I told Greg to grab the camera and take my picture in the ball.  It was too funny so I had him put his face up the ball and I took his picture.  When the kids woke up we had to get one of them and of course a family picture as well.

Marsing

I went to Marsing to take a picture of a family that just got a horse.  They wanted the horse to be in their family pictures for Christmas.  I took the kids with me and they had a lot of fun.  They liked the horses, the dogs and running around.  After we were done we went and had pizza at a local pizza place and it was DELICIOUS.  I would go out there again just to have pizza. There are also a lot of fruit orchards out there so on our way home I stopped to take a few pictures of the kids.  Here they are, just so darn cute.  You can tell it was super cold.

 Jaelee did this all on her own.  She posed and told me to take her picture.  I am training her well.

Catch Up - Getting Our Christmas Tree

Wow I am behind on blogging.  The time has just flown by since the first of December.  I was looking forward to a slow down at work in December like it usually does but that didn't happen and it just seemed like we have been so busy.  I'm going to catch up and start with getting our Christmas tree.

We got our Christmas tree after we took our family pictures.  We went to the same place we did last year because you can't beat $25 for a real tree.  This year the tree guy remembered us and threw in a free wreath.  It was freezing and really windy so we picked our tree really fast and then Jaelee and I got back in the jeep and waited while the guys put the tree on top.

We came home and put it up.  Greg put the lights on and I waited until the kids were asleep to put the rest of the decorations on it.  I think they are still just a little bit to little to help with most of it so I just wait until they are asleep.  They have pretty cute looks on their faces when they wake up in the morning and see the tree all decorated.

Here are a few pictures of our tree adventures:

Is it already December?

I can't believe how fast the time goes lately.  It's amazing that it's all ready December.  I am so far behind on Christmas compared to where I usually am.  We don't have anything done.  I have several projects half done but can't seem to find the time to finish them.  Usually this time of year it slows down at work but I have been so busy there I am working overtime.  I did find the time however this weekend to do our family pictures and they turned out so cute.  I typically have those done before Thanksgiving so I can do my Christmas cards and hand them out at Thanksgiving but not this year.

I am skipping over a Thanksgiving post.  We went to my moms and had a nice time but I want to get to posting our family photos because I don't have much time these days I am going to skip somethings and post the really awesome things.

I found other photographers pictures that I liked and they were taking their photos in Star, ID so I wanted to go there and find the cute barns and old cars they were taking photos in front of.  So we headed out to Star.  We got to Star and it was not what I was expecting.  There was a lot of new homes and subdivisions.  Where are all those cute old barns?  We drove around on some roads for what seemed like forever until I finally saw this old falling down house and decided we would just settle for that.  I was hoping that it would help block some of the wind.  It was FREEZING cold outside and windy.  Of course we couldn't wear our coats because that would ruin the color coordination I was going for and not look good.

I brought my tripod but realized I had taken off the part that connects my camera to the tripod and was not about to go home for it so I had to balance my camera on the tri-pod then set the timer and hurry and run into the photo.  It's pretty amazing we can get any photos that look good with this method.  The one we had the most problem with looking at the camera was our dog Bo.  He wanted to run around and we were having a hard time just getting him to sit.  He made it into 1 photo and then went back into the car.  Jaelee was so cute we would take a photo and then she would run and get into Greg's jacket and cover herself completely and lay on the ground.  I'd like to thank my family for bearing with me and letting me drag you all the way out to Star in the freezing cold.  Without further ado here are our photos.

P.S. I'm saving the best for the cards so you'll have to watch for that in the mail - when I can find the time to print and mail them that is. LOL

This picture almost was the Christmas card.  You can see in Jaelee's face that she was freezing and behind her Greg is wiping and getting boogers out of Jayse's nose.  LOL  LOVE IT!