Christmas 2016

Since we were driving home from the Kenyon's on Christmas Eve, we didn't do anything special for dinner.  We picked up pizza.  :)

Just us hanging out (the Mejia's were at church I think)

Making notes for Santa

The finished notes - not too wordy this year 

Reading a Christmas story with Dad in their Christmas Eve PJs before bed

Enjoying these candies that bring back memories of Christmas time at Grandma Carlson's

Kimber and her kids got in pretty late.  I was grateful Kaitlyn helped me with the monkey bread prep.

Peter also did a more savory monkey bread

Working hard on food prep for tomorrow

Ready for Santa

Santa got everything out and ready.  Max's pile is on the left with the karaoke machine and Emmalyn's pile was ridiculous with a tramp, puppet show stage, puppets and more

Christmas morning all ready to get out and see if Santa came!

Here's the pile of presents around the tree.  With 11 people in the house, there were a lot of presents!

Maxwell's pile

It's here!

Emmalyn's pile 

The whole room

Emmalyn immediately went for the baby doll

Excited about his new toothbrush

Tyler (all grown up) getting a shave kit

Kait getting grown up girly stuff

New tools from the Mejias

He was really excited about his karaoke machine (and the 80's cd he got because "it has all my favorite songs")

Joe is a hot sauce lover!

Kaitlyn helped put together Emmalyn's stuff for her dolls.  It was great having her help!

New remote control cars

Enjoying yummy monkey bread

Karaoke time!

Focused on singing (all I see is the MESS!)

The regular monkey bread was more popular than the garlic one

Playing with new toys outside

We delivered the final "12 days of Christmas" we had been doing for our next door neighbors - the Rays.  We did it in our pjs.  :) (Notice I still had sunglasses on. My eyes were awful.  I spent a lot of time in bed or sleeping on the couch because it was just so uncomfortable.)

Christmas naps - they are hard to resist

Puppet show!

All the boys had remote control cars

Christmas exhaustion

Emmalyn is exhausted too

Yup, more napping

Hanging out, enjoying presents and being together

We had our traditional potato soup for Christmas dinner.  Always yummy. (even if my kids won't touch soup)

3rd week of December 2016

(okay...today is December 15, 2017 and I'm blogging about the third week of December **2016**.  I am now a full year behind.  UGH!!!!! I need to get more committed to taking the time to blog.)

Silliness

Working on her number puzzle with Landen

One of her cute Christmas outfits

Peter and I went to our first regular season Cowboys game!  We had great seats that we had won in the last CROSSMARK Casino Night Silent Auction.  Our friends Tida and Jason came along.  It was a lot of fun (and FREEZING outside!!!)

The Stadium is so big

Cheerleaders

Tida and I went to get some food.  While we were gone, they scored!!!

Later in the game, we hit up some shopping and while we were out, they scored again!  So we didn't spend much time in our seats watching the game after that because clearly they only played well when we weren't watching.  :)

The game went into overtime and the Cowboys won!  It was a fun game to watch.

And yet another Christmas outfit (I am so appreciative to my neighbor who passed on all these adorable clothes from her daughter who has outgrown them.  She has given me bags and bags and bags of stuff.)

One of Maxwell's best friends, Preston, is moving out of state.  They went to preschool together and have remained friends since.  

There were tears and much sadness when it was time for this last play date to be over.  :(  (Tears from Preston...I'm not sure if Maxwell fully understands plus he's not an easy crier.)

Ready with our hot chocolate!  Let's go see some Christmas lights!

We went to downtown Frisco and walked around.

A collage of just some of the holiday outfits Emmalyn has worn.  It took a conscious effort to make sure they all got worn once!

Emmalyn wasn't feeling well so we headed to the doctor.  A year later, I have no memory of what was wrong with her but I'm sure it was just a cold or something like that.

Entertaining himself during her visit.

I took the day off work a few days before Christmas when Maxwell was already out of school and we had a date day.

We started off with lunch at a restaurant with Ms. Mary Ann

Then I took him to Top Golf.  (I had the best game I've ever had!!  I was killin it!)

He loves top golf!

Katherine came over one night and we wrapped presents together and enjoyed some wine and snacks.  It was a fun way to wrap (just a little less torture).

Kid update:

Emmalyn likes to cuddle if I'm sleeping in more  in the morning.  It's super sweet.  She will bring her iPad and climb up and sit next to me and keep watching.  Lately she has been getting up at 5 am, it's a fight to get her back to sleep.  (I sure don't want to up that early!)  She wants either cereal and milk or to cuddle in our bed. I try and keep her in her own bed until 6 and then finally give in and let her come into our bed.  She doesn't want to sleep in her open foot sleep sack anymore so it's just PJs and a blanket.

The kids are really good.  They like to get up early so Peter or I will get up and get them cereal/milk in the kitchen and they will eat while watching things on their iPads.  It let's us get a little more sleep.  :)

Max is usually up at 6 but just gets up on own, gets his iPad in the front room and is now at a point that he doesn't even let us know he's awake anymore   A few times he's come into our room at 4 am to cuddle because he had a bad dream (I got him to tell me the details of one once - he was in a pool that was 36.4 feet deep and he wanted to swim down and touch bottom but couldn't get back up)  He's excited that he has what he thinks is a loose tooth.  I tried it and it wiggles maybe just a little but there were a couple others on the bottom that feel a little loose.

"BUT MOM" is a common phrase out of both kids' mouths and it is driving me nuts.