Full Moon

These are my attempts at being a good photographer.  Ha ha, what a joke!  

Legos

Uncle Stuart bought the boys some Lego Ninjago sets for Christmas and they were very excited to put them together and play with them.  We've been tripping over the pieces and rescuing them from the fate of the vacuum ever since.  Daddy and I "helped" (read did it all) put together these two vehicles for the boys.  They lasted about an hour or two before they were basically in pieces again.  Anyway, they had fun playing with them for a while and I was glad I took some pictures while they were still intact.  

2011 in Review

I suppose I'm a couple of days late on this post... but I wanted to show you a quick review of what we were up to in 2011. It was really a great year, we can't complain. We had an amazing year full of tons of fun things; a few vacations, some visitors, and the Holidays have been great. We are really looking forward to 2012. We think that there will probably be some changes going on in our lives and in our family. You'll have to keep reading our blog to find out what those might be!

Love you all, thanks for reading!

Jen

Christmas at Grandma & Grandpa's

On Christmas Day, 2011 around noon, we packed up and headed over to Grandma's house.  The highlight of my visit was talking with my little brother, the Missionary, on Skype.  Hanging up this time was definitely more difficult than last year when we had only seen him about a month earlier.  He seems to be doing really well and is quite enjoying his current home-share arrangement.  We spoke with the family briefly as well and they do seem like very nice people.  After we visited with Justin for a while, we headed downstairs to exchange gifts.  

 We got lots of clothes!  I love getting new clothes for Christmas, so does Colin.

 The boys ate lots of sweets.

And the highlight of their day was this Jeep cruiser from Grandpa Ed and Grandma Veva.  They were really excited about giving this fun toy to my kids.  We haven't had lots of time to play in it yet because it's been... Winter. But I'm sure that this spring, my boys will just LOVE it!  Emry had a great time riding around in it at Grandma and Papa's house. 

 After presents, we ate an amazing lunch prepared by my mom.  It was just delicious.  We spent most of the afternoon there and then packed up and headed home to play with all of our new toys.

 Christmas was amazing this year.  We were really spoiled with all of the amazing gifts but it was the time together that I'll remember most.  I can't wait until next year when Justin will be back!

Christmas 2011

We had an amazing Christmas this year.  The kids are so fun on Christmas. They try so hard to be well behaved.  Most days they did pretty well.  Our house didn't have an elf on the shelf but we did have an elf named George who came to put a piece of candy in the shoes of any boys who had been well behaved the night before.  It was pretty motivating for the boys to remember that the elf was coming to visit.  

 On Christmas Eve we took the boys to see the Adventures of Tin Tin which was a pretty good movie.  Then we came home and got to see Stuart, Brooke, Ocean, and Maple do their Christmas morning for a little while.  They live in Singapore so they're a day ahead of us.  Then we called Nana and Grandpa Bruce and chatted with them for a little while.  Afterward we read the Christmas Story out of our family Bible.  Then I had the boys search for a present marked with a star under the tree.  They were allowed to open those gifts (pajamas, pictured above) and then they had to go to bed.  Of course Evan slept a little while in the movie so he was having a hard time getting to sleep but he eventually did fall asleep.

 Then we waited for Santa to come.  In the morning we heard some rousing and at first we thought it was Evan.  We saw someone go down stairs and then come back up to wake up his brother.  Turns out it was Ryan, not Evan.  Ryan has always been an early riser.  He was up at 5:20am (although he told us that he was up at 4- they have a digital clock in their room).  So, we decided to go ahead and get up.  Evan finally woke up and we all went downstairs to check out what Santa had brought and open the rest of our gifts.  

Santa brought Mommy and Daddy a new TV and a Blu Ray player.  sweet!

 Santa brought the boys a scooter.  He also brought Ryan a Light Bright and Evan a set of Lego Duplos.

The boys had angry birds in their stockings.

 Evan was so cute on Christmas morning.  He was super excited about everything he opened.  He saw this tooth brush and was like, "Oh, awesome!  A new Tooth Brush! ".  I wish I had that on video.

 Ryan gave Evan a Doctor Dreadful Zombie Lab.  He was super excited about that too!

 Each of the boys had a video game to open.  Ryan got Lego Harry Potter years 5-7.

 And Evan got Ratchet and Clank All for One.

 The major gift that they got was this game called Skylanders.  It's a video game that integrates toys into the mix.  You take the action figure and put it on the "Portal of Power" and that character jumps into the game.  It's pretty cool and they've spent a lot of time playing it.

Here's the boys on their scooters.  Evan is a little afraid of his I think but Ryan has been loving his.  I wish we had a flatter driveway but they're doing okay learning how to ride them.

I'm waiting on pictures from Christmas at my parents house.. stay tuned!

Elf hunting

Ryan, Evan and I met up with our friends Amy, Jackson, and Kara at Gardner Village to search for all of the Christmas elves.  We had a fun time looking at all of the cute elves and the different things they were doing throughout the village.  Ryan did a really good job reading the clues and writing down the locations on the Elf hunt page.  The boys got a free candy stick at the sweet shop so they were, of course, excited about that!  

All of our cute kids: Ryan, Evan, Kara and Jackson