Christmas Eve and Christmas Day

On Christmas Eve we spent some time wrapping gifts and then we went out to The Village to see Santa and meet up with Grandma and Grandpa to watch a movie and have dinner.  The line was pretty long and we had tickets to see Sing, so we decided that we would see him after the movie. When we got out, Santa had already left but we did run into The Grinch which to our kids is almost as good as Santa.  We then went to dinner at the Twig. We wanted to do a Random Act of Kindness like someone did to us last year on Christmas Eve so we checked out tables around us and asked our waitress to help us.  It was so fun!  After dinner, we went to visit  Sarah's refugee family and brought them some gifts.  We came home and the kids opened their traditional Christmas Eve present of pajamas, read the story of Christ's birth and put cookies out for Santa.

Nonnie gave the kids a pizza box with "dough" inside. They all loved thinking of about 50 ways to spend their "dough"!!

Aunt Katie and Uncle Rob gave all of the kids Colorado hats and so we sent them a "Thank you" picture!

Nathan got new Hunter rain boots for Christmas and this is Sarah and Andrew trying to help him take them off.  

Our fabulous sister missionaries came over for lunch and to be able to call their families.  We played a few games with them and loved having them.

We had a very memorable Christmas!!

November

At the beginning of November we had our family pictures taken for our Christmas card. Sarah's friend Brooklyn took our pictures and I was pretty happy with how they turned out. We took them in a field on Pierce Park road near our home. It always feels good to have the Christmas card photo done before the busyness of the season!!







We decided we needed a change in our home, so we put in a couple of windows, put up a brick wall and added some shiplap to our family room and entry. Everyone helped with cutting the hundreds of bricks, gluing them to the wall, getting the shiplap sanded and prepped to paint, painting shiplap and moving everything so we could get new carpet. It was a lot of work but we love the finished look!!

One evening Levi and mom went to a Harry Potter party at the library. Levi loved being able to wear his robe, cast spells and hang out with other wizards.

We went to Bend for Thanksgiving. We went on a hike along the Deschutes river, shopped Black Friday sales and hung out with family. It was a wonderful week of fun, relaxation and yummy food!







We went out to pizza one night. This is a picture I took from our car following Sophie driving hers with our boys in the backseat. So silly!