Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas 2011!  Another year has come to an end without our sending out any Christmas cards.  Each year I think I might get around to doing one... and then I don't.  And at the rate that life seems to be speeding up, it's doubtful I will ever get around to one.  But who knows, maybe I'll surprise the world someday.  In the meantime, we'll count blogging as my constant year-long Christmas card.

Like I said before, we were able to go to Georgia for Christmas, but because we had such an early flight, we stayed in Phoenix the night before leaving and we were able to take the girls to see the lights at the Temple. It was beautiful, and we got a few pictures. Of course the clearest picture is the one that nobody is in, but at least we've got proof of the memory!

And then there's always the token family picture taken by a well-meaning passer-by.  Why is it that these pictures ALWAYS turn out blurry?

So we headed out of town and the first full day in Georgia we headed to Grandma Great's house to make Christmas goodies.  This is one of our favorite Christmas traditions, and we've started trying to include Brooklyn and Lydia.  I'm pretty sure more gets eaten than made by them (and us), but it's still fun to do with Grandma Great.  We also made some super cute Christmas mice for the first time.  For some reason I never got to try one, but they looked awesome.

One thing that the girls LOVE doing when we go visit Grandma is heading to lots of different parks.  This trip was no different.  We even spent a day at the park when it was raining buckets.  The girls did a great job cleaning the water off the slides.

Hello Christmas cookies.  I'm not sure anyone else likes doing this as much as I do, so I wonder if they'd get baked and decorated if we weren't there...  but Brooklyn and Lydia seem to enjoy it just as much as I do, so we'll stick with it.  Brooklyn actually did a few cookies this year.  Lydia just decorated, licked, decorated, licked, decorated, and licked the SAME cookie clean, several times.  Classic.

Christmas Eve always includes Christmas Bingo, with M&M's, which has proven to be a little too tempting for a certain little girl.  By the end of the night she was sprawled out with her head in my lap, eyes closed, grabbing handfuls of M&M's and shoving them in her mouth.  It was very Greek.

Our Christmas Eve dinner was Jerusalem feast, a different tradition than we have had before, and it was delish.  This is at the end of our dinner.

CLEARLY, Santa found us Christmas Eve.  I mean, we were good last year, but I'm not sure we were good enough for the stockings stuffed full of candy, and all of the toys.  But it was lots of fun with the girls.  We definitely had a princess theme going on.  Princess EVERYTHING.

Brooklyn was very excited to find that Santa had eaten her decorated sugar cookies, drank the milk, AND wrote her a note back!

It took a few days before we were able to move after the feasting we had during Christmas, but as soon as we could, we took Tim to the bounce-a-rama.  The girls loved it so much when we visited in October, it was definitely worth a re-visit.

 

So yes, if we were up for repeats of our last visit, we decided to go to the game ranch again too.   It just doesn't get old-- seeing and hearing Lydia squealing when she sees the animals.  And she was fearless.  She had no problem sticking her hands in cages to feed animals I didn't want to get close to.  "Cow? Goat? Buffalo?  SURE!  I'll stick my hand in it's mouth!"

All in all, a great year, and nothing really huge to even report.  Tim still loves his job, I have done more cakes than I ever thought I would,  and Brooklyn and Lydia are quickly becoming best friends.

Pre-Christmas

I know this is a surprise, but we went to Georgia again for Christmas!  Every year we say it, "This is probably our last year..." and each year we find ourselves back there!  But of course, with plane travel, Santa has to limit what he can bring, as do we.  So a few days before leaving we decided we'd better open up a few of the bigger presents early.

 

 Lydia didn't seem to understand what all the ruckus was about, so we let Brooklyn do the honors of explaining and showing her that we were now ALLOWED to touch the presents under the tree, and even unwrap them.








Clearly, it did not take long for Lydia to figure out the drill.  Pick present, unwrap, smile for camera, pick another present.  She thought it was pretty great.  And she was super excited to get these books.  She carries the box of them around like a suitcase now.

 

And then, the highlight present for the girls.  Dialogue:

Brooklyn:"Oh WOW!"

Lydia: "You DO realize that's just my old diaper box right?"

 

 

Although diapers would be a perfect Christmas gift, it wasn't really full of them.  The girls got a bunch of Littlest Pet Shop animals and "houses" from their cousin and they LOVE it.

Ahh.  Good pre-Christmas.  Now on to the real deal.

Super Brooklyn

There's nothing quite like the combination of a Super Shurtliff shirt and a pink crocheted cape.  But when these two powerful items are combined, there's nothing to do but become Super Girl.

And then it was Fall

And after snow comes what?  Fall, duh.  Yes, we have strange seasons in these parts.  So exactly 5 days after our snow family, we were raking leaves into a pile to jump into.  Now THAT was fun.  Brooklyn and Lydia loved it. 

Snow Family

Hail follows snow flurries, so what comes next?  SNOW!  Of course it snowed on a Saturday night, it always does.  But we still ran outside after church to make our snow family.  Brooklyn and Tim rolled snow balls as fast as possible, and Lydia tore off chunks and ate them as fast as possible.   Classic.  It's a good thing we have such good snow-family-makers.  

 

Snow flurries

 At the beginning of December, the girls were super excited when we had a few snow flurries.  Part of the excitement is getting to wear gloves and a hat of course, but Brooklyn was sure she could make a snowball.  And so she tried.  And tried.  And tried.  Unfortunately, it wasn't enough to really do anything but frost the ground, but it was still fun to watch the girls. 

Lydia just couldn't figure out why I made her wear a heavy coat.  Since then, she has become infatuated with wearing coats, and having them zipped up, at all times.  But no hat and gloves for her.  Ever.  And don't even think about sneaking any on her.

Not long after the flurries we got lots and lots of hail.  It was awesome.  Not enough or big enough to damage anything, but just enough to make us feel like we lived in a Dippin' Dots world.

 

Winter is fun.  Especially when it only lasts a month or two.  Then bring on the spring! We're ready!

Projects

When we went to visit Tim's family for Thanksgiving we did a little snooping around in the family shed.  The shed is humongous and is where family members typically leave furniture, etc. that they no longer want or need.  So when we're looking for things, or just looking for a project, or even just curious as to what someone might have gotten rid of, we head to the shed. 
But it's not always recent discards that we find.  You wouldn't believe the ancient things we've found down there.  This last time, we found this old trunk full of clothes.  We thought it would make a great toy chest with a little work.  So we emptied it out, just to find an amazing collection of Tim's dad's clothes from when he was much younger.  But the coolest thing in it was a stuffed sock cat that belonged to Tim's dad as a child. 

Anyways, with the trunk emptied, we began scheming.  Here are some pictures of the trunk in-process of "restoring."  (I say "restoring" because Tim and I just pretended we knew what we were doing.  We really know nothing about restoration projects.)









We weren't able to do as much as we had planned.  We wanted to paint all of the metal pieces black, but that ended up not working.  And we aren't really sure what to do about the fabric portions, so we just left them.  Anyways, here's the final product!