A Holiday Smorgasbord

hey there santa baby!

My kids are in the garage taking apart a printer that went defunct. Their arms are black from the ink, but they're being nice to each other and having a good time, so I'm not complaining...Meanwhile Marianne is asleep; she is such a good chunky baby!

It's the perfect time to blog... :) And there is so much to blog about! My sister Amy and her family and my Mom visited the week before Christmas, then Jacob had his birthday party and turned the wise old age of six, then of course we celebrated Christmas, and then we went to visit my parents and Tyler and Gina in SV for New Years. So from all of that here are the not so brief highlights:
* Amy made an adorable chefs hat for Marianne. Why? Why not.

I think it emphasizes her chubby cheeks. While Amy was here visiting we decorated sugar cookies, played scrabble of course, played on my new (eek!) Silhouette, did some face painting, fixed hair (aren't we all so cute looking!)
and ate homemade sopapillas...Everyone loved holding and talking to Marianne. Joshua was especially awesome with her. I had two huge paintings to work on while she was here, so that sort of ate up a lot of time, but it all worked out in the end. Here are all the girls:
*Jacob turned six.

He is truly an awesome kid. He asked for a birthday party this year and I relented, on the one condition that he would actually enjoy his party and not get obsessed about his presents. (Flashbacks from a four year old's birthday party gone sour...). It sort of worked. Mostly. We had a Bat party, complete with doing spray paint bats, a "night vision" (flashlight) bat hunt, and of course a sorry looking bat cake. (Colonel ate part of the cake while it was cooling and I had to make do with the remains that he hadn't touched. Bad dog.)
*Christmas was wonderful. We stayed home, which we love to do, although this year Christmas eve was all on our own because everyone else did their own thing, too. It was a little different but really special. The kids acted out the nativity,

we had a special candlelight dinner, Bekah read "The Night Before Christmas,"
and kids actually fell asleep at a decent hour. Christmas morning was full of the usual excitement, even Santa visited!

Everyone made out like bandits...Bekah got a sewing box complete with all the sewing necessities, and some rollerblades, Jacob got a Trio Castle set, and Beau got the jet from Cars2, along with Lightning and Mater. Rus got a new pair of binoculars from his parents and an old Stanley jointer plane from me, and he made me a beautiful jewelry box that originally started as a juniper log out at his parents house in Edgewood. It is really beautiful. We had a nice morning [no fighting], enjoyed church [I enjoyed it at least on the stand leading music the whole time; Rus was in and out the entire meeting with Beau/Marianne], took family pictures [they even turned out good],
and had Christmas dinner at Carla's house [where our kids were not completely rotten].
*We enjoyed a couple of days rest/fighting with our kids here before loading them in the ManVan and heading to Sierra Vista. The seven+ hour drive down was painful...Rus bought a dvd system for his van before we made the drive back home. We enjoyed stopping by his parent's home in Lordsburg both on the way down and back. In Sierra Vista we cleaned out my parent's shed (actually really fun, I thought), went swimming at the Cove (love. the. Cove.), went to Kartchner caverns, ate out at Texas Roadhouse, went roller blading, went to see Mission Impossible with Tyler and Gina, went shopping (just the girls), had a moustache party,

and even stayed up until midnight so I could make out with kiss my husband. Jacob loved seeing the bat poop at the caves, Bekah was a swimming/sliding/fiend at the Cove, Marianne got spoiled and kissed and hugged by everyone, and Beau was just a happy/contrary/mean/wonderful kid.
And now it's 2012. Last year started with pages of resolutions...then I found out I was pregnant and those resolutions are exactly where they started - on paper. We did do a lot of amazing things, from remodeling and moving to having a new baby. This year I'm hoping to be a little less ambitious and thus a little more successful.
Happy new year to you too!