Christmas with Friends

The Sunday before Christmas (Dec. 23rd) was a busy day for us.  We had church, Christmas with the extended Hahn family back at church, and then Christmas with the Davis' and Frye's at the Davis' house.  We look forward to the annual Friend Christmas every year.  The kids get to decorate cookies for Santa and then the adults get time together to talk and play games.  This year we played Battle of the Sexes.  Somehow the boys won (twice!).  I think the ladies may need a rematch!

And yes, I did HIGHLY recommend that that kids change into their play clothes, but they insisted on wearing their fancy clothes!

Amazingly, NO frosting was found on their "fancy" clothes!

Everybody concentrated so hard on getting their cookies just perfect!

Miss Kenna enjoyed just eating the frosting.  Look at that face!!

We had such a great time getting prepared for the Christmas season.  We are so thankful to have such wonderful friends and kids who enjoy being together!

Christmas Angels

This year at church, the kids performed in "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever."  They are both too young to have any speaking parts, but they did get to be in the small angel choir.  Landon and Emerson both did a great job singing and doing the motions.  Landon asked when he could say some words...maybe next year buddy! :)

Landon had a bit of an issue once his halo started to fall down.  He is super ticklish and did NOT like the tinsel around his neck! :)

Tyler did have some speaking parts and did a great job!!

 Great job to all of the kids (and adults) who put in a lot of time to make the CHRISTmas musical a success!

Christmas Posts to Come

Update: Well, I upgraded to Google + (I honestly don't even know what that is!:))  But with that I guess I have more storage for photos.  Because now instead of being at 98.9% full, I am only at 17.8%.  So, if you have the same issue, try upgrading too.  As far as I can see, nothing is different in blogger...

I am a bit behind in my Christmas postings.  Mainly because lovely Blogger told me that I had reached my maximum capacity in photos and I couldn't post any more.  And I figured, it's not that fun to share about Christmas without pictures.  So if anyone has any suggestions to me adding more pictures without paying a per month fee or deleting pictures from my older posts, I'd be happy to hear it!

Birthday Celebrations

We had the pleasure of celebrating 2 wonderful people this last week (and my mother-in-law today! :)). Matt turned 35 this year and we celebrated by going to Hacienda and ordering dinner and a mudslide. Yum! Then we came back to the house to open presents. Emmy is starting to become more aware of others and asked Daddy if he wanted some "dar woars dies" (Star Wars guys) for his birthday. She ended up picking him out some and I think she plays with them more than her Daddy, but it was a nice thought! :) 

Playing in the box with Daddy's birthday present from the Clark's!

For Jess's birthday, she had the awesome idea of going to a Wine and Canvas event at Papa Vino's.  We each got a canvas, paint, and an art lesson to create a "masterpiece"!  I think they turned out pretty good (although it does kinda bother me that my vase is not symmetrical!!).  We had a lot of fun and even tried out some peach bellini's!  Thanks for the fun girls night out!  I'd definitely do it again sometime!!

Thanks to Jessica bringing her camera, we got some great pictures of our work!

Happy birthday to 2 of my greatest friends!  We all love you both!

Christmas Traditions: Old and New

We LOVE going to search for the perfect tree every year!  This year, we had to change our venue since Wilfong's is going out of business.  We traveled a bit farther and ended up at Eby Pine's.  We were not disappointed.  There were so many trees to choose from, a horse drawn wagon, and popcorn.  We also got to visit with Santa.  The kids BOTH did a great job talking to the jolly man in red and sitting on his lap!  Apparently Landon wants a race track that he saw on tv and Emmy wants something that Mommy has: a jewelry box (even though she already has a jewelry box! :)).

Our tree is behind Emmy

Our new Christmas tradition has to do with a little elf the kids named "Tricky".  He is an elf on the shelf and he watches the kids during the day.  Then, at night, he magically flies back to Santa to report what he's seen.  Each morning, then, he appears in a new spot.  The kids, especially Em, LOVE trying to find where Tricky is hiding each morning.  So far he's been in the Christmas tree, wreath, the lights, and in a packing box (see below).  We've really enjoyed seeing the kids' faces light up when they find the elf.  They're at a great age to REALLY believe in the magic of the season!  They've also had fun changing the numbers on the days till Christmas chart and adding something each day to our Advent calendar until we finally get to Jesus on the 25th.

Winter Wreath

I'm ba-a-ack....after being down and out with the flu for a good week (well actually a pretty awful week), I finally feel almost back to normal.

Before I got sick, we had a lovely Thanksgiving.  It was our year to be at my side for Thanksgiving, so we spent the day at mom and dad's.  We had a nice day.  The little ones are pretty much able to play by themselves, so it's nice to be able to catch up with the adults and play a rousing game of "Logo" and "Trivial Pursuit."

I also worked on a project that Cathy and I saw when we visited House of Holly this year and thankfully I finished the morning before my first night of sickness!

I kind of combined two ideas and I think it turned out pretty cute.  The wreath I saw at House of Holly (not quite so over the top as this one:  tulle christmas wreath).  I originally wanted to do a red, green, and white one but I couldn't find those colors at Michael's, so I went with a winter theme instead of Christmas. The letter could use some more twine, but an H is a hard letter to wrap! twine letter  I think the secret is to really USE that glue gun to get the twine to stay.