Christmas Eve...

Christmas was so much fun this year! Robb and Heather and Braden and Amanda's families all stayed at my parents' house and it was just great for the cousins to be together and to hang out late with the other adults.

My mom's thing is Christmas Eve. She bids for that because she knows it is a good time for everyone, and there aren't a lot of other things going on for other in-law families...and it's so ideal because she just loves doing a reenactment of Jesus' birth each year. She even made clothing for the kids to wear!

It's always funny to see which parts all the kids are going to want. This year, we had three angels at one point, but I think wound up with only two. A few years ago, it was the cool thing to be Mary.

Adeline is like 12 weeks younger than Betsey!!

I think Alice was one of the only wisemen. She came bearing all the gifts!!

Emma and Carson...Mary and Joseph!

Van was our baby Jesus...for a few minutes!

("Alice needed a hair and tooth cut...little does she know here!" Okay, that makes no sense, I know. I was so tired when I was writing this, and I really wanted to post it, but I finally gave up and went to bed. So...this little quote is one of the beauties I wrote while I was 1/2 asleep, still trying to rally. Usually I delete this stuff, but it doesn't hurt to document my crazy sleeping wakefulness from time to time...it's funny the next day!)

Alice

Alice again...

Hailey

Emma

This is definitely one of my favorite Christmas traditions...I even grew up doing the whole song and dance on Christmas Eve with my mom's side of the family and I hope my kids will have the same fond memories.

Allison and Gus...

Allison and I became friends our freshman year of high school when we both ran for and won class offices (is it lame that I don't even remember what we were? I want to say I was treasurer, but I think that is crazy because I'm not a money person, so maybe I was something else...). It was really fun to connect during our pregnancies with Betsey and Gus and as our due dates were really close to one another, we were really sharing the tail end woes of pregnancy discomfort.

Who delivered first? ME! That's the beauty of it being my third and Allison's first. Allison was actually due before me, but Gus was super happy inside and wasn't coming out on time!

They live in San Fransisco, so it was a fun treat to meet up for an hour or two at their hotel when they were in town for the holidays.

Trim the tree...

I love Christmas trees. I am not into decorating for holidays, an annual Christmas tree and a creche is basically the extent of what I do for the whole year...and even that I sometimes loathe when it comes to the cleaning up of the tree. We put the tree up this year around the 15th and guess what??? We didn't take it down until January 24th. Yep. This is why I can't possibly decorate for all the holidays and seasons.

More of Bee...

Betsey is busy, busy, busy! She is up and starting to get down the stairs all by herself and moving around the rooms now along the furniture, making messes of our kitchen floor and literally using her thumb and index finger to effectively fill her mouth with dust, lint, paper, buttons and anything else you can not possibly tell is on the carpet until you notice she is busy with something in her mouth. Poor girl always has someone else's fingers jammed into that two-toothed mouth looking for whatever she is gnawing on. She still only has two teeth and she loves chewing on her own tongue. It is kind of unique to her, she just pulls her tongue out of the side of her mouth and chomps up and down like it is a teething toy.

She gets herself stuck in some funny places...

She spits up nastiness all over the house...

She gets only about 10% of her food in her mouth...the rest lands on the floor. Have I mentioned she is obsessed with eating? I love it when she knows food is on the way. She opens her mouth, drops the binky to the floor and proceeds to open and close her mouth making saliva rich noises like she is already tasting something. Sometimes I drag this out a little because it is really entertaining. If you let her know food is on the way when there is still preparation involved, she'll usually scream and growl at you pretty intensely while you get her food ready.

Eating messes are getting intense, so sometimes a quick sink bath makes everything all better again. Sink baths have been known to thrill my children well into their third year of life. This was Betsey's first.

We love Sophie the Giraffe. Every baby should have one of these. I know they are expensive, I wasn't going to buy one, but was thrilled when someone gave one to us. I actually think that I want her to like it more than she does, but I love how soft it is for her to chew on and that it has so many great chewable and grab-able parts. I just love it!

The friendliest Santa Claus...

 

So it turns out that one of Chris' customers poses as Santa two months of the year at our local mall! We have gone to him for at least 6 years, but this year was the first year that I knew that Santa knows Chris. Anyway, Chris came with us and it was fun for the girls to tell him what they wanted. Alice asked for a Barbie Airplane and Ruby asked for peace sign, horse and star dangle earrings. I think these girls have been probably some of the best behaved children on Santa's list, so I think there's a good chance he'll come through for them.

The last pic is when Betsey the hair grabber took a death grip to Santa's beard to be sure that it is the real deal. According to Santa's deep belly groan when said grip was initiated, I think it's the real deal...and I'm sure he wouldn't wear a fake beard year round and Chris hasn't ever seen him without it. He's a great Santa!

Pacific NW Ballet Nutcracker...

Here's Ruby and Alice before we left for the Nutcracker in Seattle. It was our third year going, and they were excited! Love the dress that Alice is wearing from Sage and Mike!

Here is Alice, Hailey (we had an extra ticket, so my mom brought Hailey down, I took Betsey shopping for the day, as my mom kept the girls over night, taking them home from the show with her) and a home school friend of ours, Olivia.

Notice the hosiery malfunction on Alice's leg in the last picture...

Ruby's baptism...

We were so excited for Ruby's baptism day for so long! I still can't believe it is over. There are mixed feelings a little for me as a parent on a day like this. Of course I want it for her and I am proud of her choices and preparation for this covenant she is making and on the other hand, I know it is the beginning of more responsibility for her too. She's no longer considered unaccountable and perfectly innocent!

The day was perfect. We didn't invite a lot of people to her baptism, and as it turned out, we only had family show up. Ruby was surrounded by both sets of Grandparents, Jeff, Mary, Sarah, Nathan, Jane and Molly, Heather, Hailey, Emma, Carson and Adeline, Jordan, Braden, Amanda, Mason and Van and my cousin Jimmy, his wife Shannon and their boys, Eli, Cade and Luke.

I should have invited some of our non-LDS friends, I regret that now. I just felt like the religious part of me isn't really shared with my friends of other beliefs, and this was a day when I wanted to be totally in the moment, not thinking about if what was being said made sense to people, etc. Usually, if I'm at church and I'm aware that there is someone visiting that day, I will have a continuous radar on in my brain that goes off if there is terminology used that might not be understood to someone not of our faith. So then I can fill people in on what is going on. I just selfishly didn't want to do that on this day. I just wanted to wholeheartedly experience her baptism with no filters or explanations. So...I say this because my friends will probably read this and this is my apology/explanation to you as to why you weren't invited. You could have been there, it isn't a private ceremony for only members of the church or anything.

Here is the invite I made and emailed out (it was too late to mail).

Here is the program that I printed for people to have that day. Ruby planned the whole thing.

We really wanted her to sing with her grandma, but she refused. It was funny, because she was telling me how she wants to be a famous country singer one day, so I was like, "you should start by singing a duet with your grandma at your baptism!" Not a chance. The song she wanted Sam to sing follows:

I have faith in the Lord, Jesus Christ.
I have faith He will guide me with His light,
Tho’ my eyes have not seen Him and I have not heard His voice,
I have faith in the Lord, Jesus Christ.

I have faith in the Lord, Jesus Christ.
I have faith He will help me choose the right.
He is real and He loves me, I can feel it deep inside.
I have faith in the Lord, Jesus Christ.

I will keep His commandments,
I will try to do what’s right.
I have faith in the Lord, Jesus Christ.

Ruby was baptized at the same building in Edmonds where I was baptized! We chose this because in our stake, we aren't allowed to have individual baptisms, so we would have shared our baptism with unknown, countless other children and we would not have been able to have our own program. It would have been planned for us, we may not have even been able to participate at all. This idea didn't thrill us, so we opted for an "out of town" baptism in Edmonds!

I can't believe that I didn't take more pictures. I have no pictures of Ruby in her beautiful dress...just in this stuff she wore for the actual immersion in the water. Well, there are a few pictures...but none that aren't snapshots.

Here's the reason why I was not really on top of the picture thing...we had a nice luncheon after the baptism...it was a lot to plan, pack up and put out!

Mason, Carson and Jane eating up.

We got Ruby a present for her baptism, a nice set of leather bound scriptures. The Holy Bible and a Book of Mormon. She loved them!

It really was a great day, spent with family and we were super happy that Chris' parents could come from Colorado to share it with us. We went from there straight to the Christmas piano recital!

Riding Ru...

Ruby got to show of her horse riding skills for my in-laws when they were in town the weekend after her birthday. It was nice to have them there because I was free to snap some pictures! She is really enjoying riding and is getting quite confident on the horses. This is her favorite horse, Blackie.

This particular day, Blackie was having a mind of his own. Usually, he takes a lot of coaxing to canter...but when Ruby got on him, he started galloping around the arena and she hadn't ever galloped before. So Lori, her coach had to bring him over and hold on to him and run him around in circles for a bit to tire him out.

I think this is one where the horse was running crazy. I was nervous. Horse riding is a dangerous sport!

Ruby was practicing jumping over a higher obstacle and she did a great job. She is so willing to try new things!

Ruby turned 8!

Ruby was soooooooo spoiled with family fun on her birthday! Having cousins that are your best friends live far away is really hard, so it was something super special for Ruby when she heard that Jeff and his family and Heather and her kids were going to be in town for Ruby's birthday and baptism (they were in town for Thanksgiving and made sacrifices to stick around the whole weekend and week following). Of course she has cousins who are equally important to her on Chris' side of the family that weren't here...but the fact that so many out of towners were here was still huge.

Here's Betsey and Molly crawling around together...they are only six weeks apart, and they have another girl cousin, Adeline, just over three months younger than Bee.

On Ruby's birthday it was also sharing day at piano...so we rolled over there with three extra adults and eight extra kiddos. It was comical, but fun for Ruby and Alice to play the piano for family.

I love the happy faces in this picture! Hailey, Alice, Ruby, Sarah and Nathan...if Emma was in the picture we'd have all the "round one" and "round two" cousins in the picture.

Mary, Carson, Oma (holding Van), Jane, Mason and Jeff.

This is Molly...she's super cute!

Ruby is such a gracious gift receiver. She was genuinely thrilled at each gift!

I usually make cakes for the kids, but I was watching my diet and didn't want to torture myself any more...DQ it is! She was happy with it though!

We went...yes, all of us...over to the mall in Puyallup to get Ruby's ears pierced. I was allowed to pierce my ears when I was 8 and it seemed like a good age for Ruby too. She has been obsessed with this idea for about a year now, and though it didn't really matter to me when she had hers done, I did think it was wonderful for her to experience wanting something really bad and having to wait. I just don't feel that is a very common experience for kids today and I need to create that more for mine, because it made the event sooooo exciting!

Hailey, Sarah and Ruby. BCF. They love each other so much and are so lucky to have cousins so close to their ages!

Ruby was very brave, but you can see that she was apprehensive in the moment.

Immediately following the first ear, she exclaimed..."that didn't hurt! I did it!" She said that over and over again and then prepared for the next ear.

Anyone been to Claire's with 20 people before? I have! It's quite a crowd in a little, cluttered store like that! It was so fun and special for Ruby to have her people there!