Christmas 2014 Memories

Our Christmas days have been filled with lots and lots of fun memories! Let's start with Christmas Eve.  That morning a kind friend offered to have the kids over, which was so helpful because Steven didn't arrive home from work until after 2pm! The kids had a great time with friends and I was able to get quite a few things done, like last minute errands and cleaning. Later that afternoon, a carpet cleaner arrived (rescheduled from the day before), to clean our full house of carpeting after our naughty doggie visitor from a few weeks ago!

Then we ended up having two families over for an impromptu dinner party! It all fell into place at the last minute, and we were grateful to have a little Christmas Eve Latino night, including Mexican appetizers and posole.  It was a short gathering since we needed to head downtown for 9pm mass. 

That afternoon they opened their traditional Christmas Eve gift of new pajamas!

Most of the gifts were wrapped on the 23rd, 

and Katie's stocking was finished :)

And some photos of the Christmas Eve dinner...

Godsisters

iPhone photos...

after Mass

Thomas slept through the entire mass.

Santa was here!

Waiting in line in our room before we all go out together.

The aftermath...

NeNe and PaPa arrive with more goodies!

Katie and I retreat to the bedroom for a little siesta!

And I took a picture of these adorable picture books! These are "Chatbooks" of Instagram photos, one of my favorite finds this year!

After a relaxing morning and afternoon, we loaded up for an evening with Steven's side of the family!

There was an ornament exchange...

Lots of games like Dirty Santa and Silly Santa!

lots of baby lovin'

and the Two Thomases being their silly selves!

a Secret Santa poem and surprises topped off the evening!

and a few more snapshots from my good camera...

Cousins!

I guess this was the Christmas of the iPads for cousins. The boys were much less rowdy than usual. 

Screens everywhere!

Here's what MC made for her cousin. She wants to sell them too ($8.50 each, if anyone is interested)!

Another fun Christmas with family and friends! So grateful for all the gifts the Father has given us, especially the gift of His Son!  Merry Christmas to all! We will keep celebrating, because the season has just started!

Happy Birthday Steven Joseph and NeNe

(on the 20th!)

Steven Joseph turned 7 a few days before Christmas, the same day as my mom's birthday. Steven took SJ and a few buddies to Incredible Pizza a few days prior, since the friends were all leaving town on his birthday. On their actual birthday, we went to TopGolf with my parents and then came home for a little cake. December (and early January) birthdays are hard, but we're glad we found some time to celebrate Steven Joseph as well as both my parents who have December birthdays.  Here are some photo memories...

Merry Christmas 2014!

Last Week of Advent!

This month is flying by! I can't believe Christmas is in four days! Our next few days will be filled with lots of fun, including a cousin outing, Christmas gift preparations, a big Christmas Eve Dinner and Mass, and of course the Nativity of The Lord and a day with family. We'll also have some playdates and mom's nights coming up, and I look forward to seeing lots of smiling faces during this joy-filled week:)

We had a few playdates this past week and got a lot of things done. We celebrated SJ's 7th Birthday, and my mom's birthday too, at TopGolf yesterday! We have some small house projects beginning and a new year to look forward to! And hopefully we will be closing on the sale of our old house in just over a week. We are so grateful for all our blessings, big and small.

Here are some iPhone photos of events of the past few weeks...

Top Row: Katie and the Little People, Thomas and his buddy Andrew at the neighborhood Christmas Lighting, the boys on a camel, and all our kids with Santa at the lighting party.

2nd row: Ninja Turtles (Thomas was fascinated with this and Katie could not stop giggling at them!), Tommy loves blowing out the Advent candles, Katie ripping up a page of SJ's school book (just the title page), and our house with lights

3rd row: backyard fun at a friend's, St. Nick goodies, setting up the tree, and T teaching himself to read.

4th row: the girls at Marshalls (they always try on heels), me with Copper day in and day out trying to get him to "go," all SJ wants for Christmas is his two front teeth, and Ellie on her last Latin class for the year.

Top Row: Blue Knights at the park, night walk with Copper (before he was returned to the foster home, so sad), Katie standing, and a friend's baby shower

2nd row: friends ice skating, T and E at the ice rink, T and K with early morning smiles, and kids helping NeNe with decorations

3rd row: SJ found his trains in the garage, K sleeping through a playdate (18 kids!), K trying to get to the tree, and SJ cutting sugar cookies...for breakfast!

4th row: The new furry friend we are pet-sitting, a trumpet player at the dollar store, SJ and my mom on their birthday, and singing to SJ and my mom

So many fun memories to capture...I hope you and yours are having a joy-filled season and capturing many memories in your heart (and maybe by photo too so we can see!).

Two Weeks!

Wow! It's been two weeks since I've blogged. That hardly ever happens, but here are some reasons why...

Copper the Dog

We tried so hard to accommodate that sweet dog and I was spending about half of my day walking him around the backyard, cleaning up his messes, and stressing over getting home from outings in time to care for him. It was an incredible amount of work for all of us. He was a sweet and happy dog, but he just had so many issues we didn't know about.

What we learned were a few things: 1. You can never fully know the background of a rescue dog, and there is a very high likelihood that even with an adult dog you'll have to deal with things like house-training issues, crating issues, chewing, barking, escaping, and in our situation carsickness along with all of those other issues. 2. You need to ask VERY specific questions to the foster family.  You might not be able to count on what they say about his habits in their home, especially because the dog might behave differently with your family. 3. Having a high-maintenance adult dog requiring extensive training from old habits might not be the best idea for a big family with a baby.  4. It might be best to have a trial period before officially adopting a dog. Some of his behaviors surfaced right away (puking in the car) while others didn't surface for a few days (peeing around the house), but we might have saved ourselves such an emotional decision had we waited a few days and realized that he wasn't the right fit for our family.

All that to say, we sadly had to return Copper back to the foster home after two weeks.  It was an agonizing and tear-filled decision.  We are considering some other options now.  We miss his happy presence here though, and I'm sad I didn't have the ability to make it work.

House Sale
Our Corpus Christi home is under contract, and we are hoping and praying that we will close by the end of the month. Inspections went well and now we're just looking forward to the day we can close the door of that phase of our life and move forward with our life here, and maybe begin some renovations on this home in this coming year.

I also spent a night or two putting together a video to apply for some HGTV shows! No response yet, though, and Steven reminded me after it was done that they are mostly looking for outgoing families and I should've focused on our personalities rather than listing the things that need fixing around our home. Oh well, maybe I'll apply again with a lip sync or crazy song!

Christmas Cards
A few nights of possible blogging time were spent creating our Christmas cards and then addressing them.  I love this Christmas tradition, and we look forward to getting the mail every day to see new cards arriving! Now that we have moved three times in the past three years, I know people are having a hard time keeping track of us, but hopefully we will still receive greetings and photos from our friends and family.  We ended up using two photos of the entire family, so here's the one I like of the kids...

Christmas Shopping
What did I do before Amazon? Having Amazon Prime allows me to wait until 10 days before Christmas to order everything and to do it from a quiet chair in my dark home, instead of a bright and crazy store with a fussy baby! Last year we had some shipping issues, but I'm hoping I ordered early enough for all the items to arrive in time. I have ordered almost all the gifts in the last 24 hours, but we still have a few things to buy at a real brick and mortar store. I sure do love the Amazon option though. So very convenient. And now in the middle of typing this post I just spent several hours working on photo gifts online until after 2am. The only quiet time in my house! There's so much to do during this season!

FitBit
I found a used FitBit pair on Craigslist, so Steven and I have been doing daily challenges, and I'm also doing challenges with a group of Facebook friends. It has made me realize just how little walking I do in a day! I was keeping up when we had the dog and I was doing extensive walking, but this week has been hard and I am so exhausted from doing things until 1-2am every night. We will be pet-sitting for a friend over Christmas, so I hope that will keep me up and moving around. Right now I just want to crawl back into my warm bed because the heater won't turn on!  Steven is doing much better than me with all the walking he does at work, including some airport trips this week!

Friends and Family
It has been such a fun season and I'm thrilled that we can share it with our family and old friends here without dealing with the stresses of traveling. We attended Steven's company Christmas party on Friday, the girls and I went to a baby shower on Saturday, and we had a fun day on Sunday at the ice skating rink and dinner on the Waterway for a friend's birthday. We had my parents over and visited at their house this week to help with their Christmas decorations. Today we had a playdate with a few friends (and our 18 kids!), tomorrow Steven will take the boys to have an early celebration for SJ's birthday at a pizza and game place, and this weekend we hope to visit Top Golf again to celebrate my parents' December birthdays along with SJ's. This is a time of so much celebration and activity, but we're still spending most of our weekdays at home. I need a lot of rest after all these activities and late nights! But my heart is so happy to be here celebrating with all those we love.

Katie Grace
Our almost 10-month old has four teeth, is crawling all over, and pulling up on furniture. Our house still isn't really baby-proofed so I don't leave her on the floor all that much unless it's newly vacuumed and the kids have picked up all their little toys. I need to work at getting things more safe for her as she will begin to walk very soon! She's still happy as a lark and enjoys outings and new people (as long as they don't try to hold her, like at Steven's company party!). She loves chicken and mashed potatoes and will tolerate other things. It'll be so fun to share her first Christmas! One of my next big projects for the week will be making her a stocking to match the others.

I keep thinking of more I want to say or photos to share, but I really need to catch up on sleep and have been writing this for a couple days already, so I'll go ahead and end with two tidbits from today that I shared on Facebook:

Conversation with Thomas...
Thomas: Can I have some chips and salsa?
Me: For breakfast?
Thomas: No, mom! To eat while you're making breakfast!

Tonight's late night reflection...
FYI, Light Sabers on Amazon: If they want Luke's blue, that's $45. If they want a saber that changes from Anakin's Blue to Darth Vader's Red, that's $31. But if they're content with just Darth Vader's red saber, that's $21. I think this is some kind of life lesson, right? And I bought the cheapest one. Poor Tommy.

A continued Happy Advent to you all! One week until Christmas!!!

{pretty, happy, funny, real}

~ Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life ~

Every Thursday, at Like Mother, Like Daughter!

{pretty}

Here's our sweet girl all dressed up for the season!

{happy}

I didn't get photos of our Thanksgiving meal, but here are a few of a walk around the neighborhood with NeNe and PaPa on Thursday afternoon.

lots of card-playing on Thanksgiving!

{funny}

Our kiddos had fun at the annual family flag football game on Saturday before our 2nd Thanksgiving Dinner.  Copper the dog wasn't sure about the whole thing. And he threw up in the car again (the 4th time). He will not be taking car rides for awhile! One day I'll think this adjustment to a new adult dog is funny. Right now it's just very frustrating! He has escaped from the house/backyard about a dozen times and has now peed in the house twice. He's truly living up to his name, David Copperfield!

{real}

Steven Joseph was real happy to be able to celebrate with all the December birthday kids. Cupcakes and annoying screaming B family birthday song. It's a tradition!

Happy Advent, friends!