Christmas 2010

Time for the obligatory Christmas post, I suppose. We had an absolutely fantastic Christmas and Christmas Eve, and the rest of the month has been alright as well, but I'm not sorry to see it go. Get out of here December, I'm done with you!

(I've been a little grumpy the past few days, so this post might seem a bit bitter. I apologize.)

This year I tried harder to focus more on Christ and giving, and less on Santa and gimmes. It's hard to strike the perfect balance with young children, but we did a little better than last year. And hopefully next year will be even better. Even if the kids don't notice it as much, I know I'm a lot happier when I cut back on some of the unnecessary aspects of the holiday and spend more time reflecting on the birth, life, and death of Jesus Christ.

We took video of the kids coming down the stairs Christmas morning, so we didn't take as many pictures. But here's a few worth sharing:

Tyler opening "How to Train Your Dragon" DVD. They did get Pillow Pets, you can see his dolphin in the background.

My sister-in-law and brother-in-law made this present for Tyler. They used that spray insulation stuff, an old hard top suitcase, paint, trees, etc. to make a dinosaur landscape for all Tyler's dinosaurs. This suitcase sat under our tree for weeks and the suspense was KILLING Tyler. It was worth the wait, it's a perfect present for him!

Here's Jeremy pretending to be surprised about the drill he got.

Proof that Ryan and I (and Ryan's other chin) were there too. Alexis gave him this chicken. You squeeze it and it looks like it's laying an egg. Ryan's saying, "What the...?"

This is the present I was most excited for. I had several things I wanted to make for people this Christmas, but this is really the only one that got done. I bought some Fancy Nancy fabric awhile ago with the idea of making something out of it for Alexis, but I wasn't sure what. I finally decided to make her a messenger bag because she likes to take stuff everywhere we go, so I found this red corduroy fabric to match and drew out plans for what I wanted it to look like. But since it's a Fancy Nancy bag I had to make it fancy, without being too annoying. So I added a cute button on the front, all that red fringe (which was pretty annoying to sew with), some blue ric rac on the back, and that blue sequined ribbon that's down the middle of the strap. I LOVE how it turned out and was so excited that she LOVES it too. She was happy to get it and has since taken it everywhere we've gone.

Later that day we went to my parents house to celebrate with my family. Jeremy took a nap and Aaron and Tricia's dog curled up right next to him. We thought it was funny because Jeremy is definitely not a dog person (or an animal person in general).

And because he amazes me every year, here's what Jeremy made when my family got together to make gingerbread houses:
Of course, every year he gets mad at himself because he spends too much time constructing something, then he always runs out of time for decorating.

December 21st

In case you missed the memo, today is the First Day of Winter.

Five and a half inches of snow fell last night, according to the Garfield ruler (the most scientific measuring tool there is).

the wedding

In an effort to put off all the millions of things I have to do today and tomorrow and the next day, I'm going to share some pictures with you.

This past weekend my sister, Rachel, got married. We're very excited for her and are happy to welcome her groom into our family--I think he'll fit well. And because I happen to be married to a talented guy, and our labor is very cheap (very cheap=free), Jeremy and I tackled the project of the wedding cake. They wanted a cupcake tier cake with a small cake on top. Jeremy built the tier and it turned out beautifully (of course). Rachel and Nick baked 137 cupcakes and froze them a week before the wedding. Then with the help of YouTube and with the encouragement of a friend who makes awesome cakes but lives in Denver, I tried my hand at frosting them. Another friend, who lives around the corner, also saved us by making the top cake (which looked beautiful!) for us and came over and helped frost the cupcakes. We definitely could not have done all of this without their help!



And this is what my Christmas present from Jeremy looked like (still looks like...) after making at least 4 batches of frosting. I definitely broke that thing in!

We didn't pull the camera out much, their photographer was walking around taking pictures so I didn't worry about doing that. But I'm wishing now that I had taken pictures of my kids with Rachel and Nick, and maybe a picture of me with Rachel. Oh well, too late now. This is the only picture we did take of them. Jeremy took it when Rachel and Nick just happened to be standing over there, and I thought it was pretty clever.

But I did make sure we took a family picture since we rarely all look this nice at the same time. But just because we looked nice doesn't mean we can take a decent family picture--these will have to do.

Also this weekend we discovered Ryan has an ear infection--the first of my kids to ever get one. Unfortunately we didn't discover this until after a VERY long night of a lot of crying (mostly his). I'm learning that it is possible to function on very little amounts of sleep, it's just really painful to do so. Hopefully we've turned a corner though, and things will start improving!

upgrade

I think this year's tree is going to give last year's tree a complex.

P.S. Look at what the little man has been doing recently:
You know what that leads to.

And, isn't he cute?
I suppose I can forgive him for never letting me sleep...

Ryan's new girlfriend

Lately I've sat down to write several blog posts and I get almost done but then I'm interrupted. So I leave it sitting up on my computer for several hours until I can come back to it, and then when I come back to it I don't like what I've written anymore. It always happens to the posts that are more personal and share some of my feelings.

Feelings.

Feelings!

I always tease Jeremy about not having any feelings. I am 93% sure he has some, he's just really bad at sharing them! But lately I've realized I'm not much better than him, I usually like to keep things light and fluffy.

Anyway, this was one of those posts. I started it, got interrupted, came back to it and didn't like it. Basically what I was getting at is that I have lots of good friends in my life. Friends from the past who I know I could still feel comfortable with, and good friends in my present life who help me and sustain me and keep me sane. I don't know why I'm so blessed to be surrounded by so many good people, but I'm thankful for it. And I have feelings about it, but I guess I'm not going to share them!

What spurred all this is the little baby in the picture below, holding Ryan's hand. Her name is Emmy, and she was born two days after Ryan. Her mom is my good friend Karly that I met at BYU. I've written before (and shared some feelings) about my group of friends from BYU, here and here.

This is Karly's first baby and I think it's really cool that our babies were born so close together. She lives in California, so I was really excited to find out she would be in town for Thanksgiving, and I pestered her until she squeezed me in at the last minute for a visit! Oh and in case any of you are familiar enough with Ryan's wardrobe to recognize that Emmy is wearing his clothes, she had a blowout within minutes of getting to our house and thus had to wear boy clothes.


I tried my hardest to hate Karly because she's even skinnier than she was before she got pregnant and I'm...not. But I like her too much so I was unsuccessful. Also, she threw up A LOT throughout her whole pregnancy and it's hard to hate a person who has to deal with that. She has some pretty good throwing up stories though, and that's another reason I'm glad she's my friend--she keeps me entertained!

Lastly, I've been trying for at least a month now to write a post about an experience that has shaped our year, but the whole thing about my feelings is getting in the way. I can't seem to write about it to do it justice without getting too personal on this public forum. Hopefully soon I'll be able to handle it.