Storytime

For the second year, we invited some friends and family over (on different nights) for a fun christmas story evening. Everyone wears pajamas, and the we read our favorite christmas stories and have lots of treats and hot cocoa.

The kids absolutely love it, and I love having people over to celebrate the holidays with. Not only that, but it's pretty easy to do, and makes me feel like I'm doing something fun for the girls.

The fun thing was that this year, kids were old enough to do the reading, so I didn't really have to. When we had our friends over, we had 18 kids in the house, with four families and only 5 of those kids were boys!! 

Then we had the cousins over, and Halli read her story. She LOVED getting to do that!:) 

And with our family we had 15 kids here and only 5 were boys. What can I say, we know lots of girls! The funny thing is that even with all these girls, Halli and Peyton's best friends are boys, gotta love it!

These dads sure do love finally having some boys around to play with though!

We really love having our pajama parties, and I'm sure this will become a favorite tradition in our house!

Oh, how we love photoshop!

For my inlaws for christmas, my sister-n-law had the idea to get all the grandchildren together for a picture to give to grandma & grandpa. That's 13 grandkids, and most of them are under 5.

So you can imagine that I didn't get any pictures that turned out perfectly with that many kids. Someone was always looking away, or making a funny face.

Here is the photos I chose to start with. Two of the boys, Blake and McKay, were actually kinda smiling, which they weren't doing in any of the other photographs. Unfortunately, Halli's hand is in her face, Lexie has her thumb in her mouth, Jaden has his shirt in front of his face, Katelyn is almost blinking, and Olivia is sticking her tongue out. That's alot of people to fix.

 But I really liked this photo of Halli. My pretty, pretty princess!:)

I loved Lexie's smile in this one, and Jaden wasn't too bad either. At least you could see his face.:) 

In this one, I really liked Katelyn, (the girl in front holding her baby sister), and Olivia, ( in the pink in back). So I used those photos.

After lots of cutting and pasting in photoshop, here was the final result.

13 Happy kids, smiling at the camera. well, at least none of them are crying, right? I really don't know what I would do without photoshop some days.

5 months old

I'm just a little late, but a couple weeks ago, this little man was 5 months old.

He is one HANDSOME boy if I do say so myself!:)



He's sleeping better, sometimes. I appreciate those times.:) 

He's happy when he's being held, and loves attention. alot.

We are loving having little "drey-drey" (as Lexie says it) in our family. He is, considering how much we haul him around everywhere, one happy, sweet boy. He's also KILLING my back. Seriously, this kid in a carseat is NOT fun to haul around!

Merry Christmas!

Now that I've finally got the christmas cards in the mail, a mere day before christmas eve, here is the final copy! Merry Christmas!

Here are just a few of the pictures that didn't make the cut. Have I mentioned how in love I am with these kiddos. They can definitely drive me bonkers, but when they're not doing that, they are the sweetest people I know. I'm one lucky woman if I do say so myself!:)

Santa & Candy Canes

This past saturday, my brother and his wife came to town, so we headed out! We went to visit santa, and saw the line and decided not to visit santa at that spot. But we did wander around and take some fun photos of the girls by some gorgeous water fountains while waiting to go on a carriage ride.

Eric & Jill and Britt & Brett didn't hang out for the carriage ride. Can't say I blame them, but the girls REALLY wanted to go, so we waited around! It was fun and the girls thought it was awesome so it was totally worth it.



Then we headed over to yummy micky-D's. Santa was there and there was no line!:)  Okay, so we're a little cheesy and it would have been way nicer to visit santa at the first spot. But seriously, a santa, is a santa right? The kids didn't care, why should I? Plus, at McDonalds, they gave us cookies!:)

Also, I like how the "elf" is posing for me.



That night after everyone had left, and the kids were all tucked in bed, Kevin and I headed upstairs to watch a movie. Later that evening when he checked his phone, one of his YM had texted him. He said he liked our christmas decorations and wanted to know where we got them.

Weird, we didn't do any christmas decorations!

Then the lightbulb went off and Kevin ran outside.

They got us good.



There were candy canes EVERYWHERE.



On our cars,



the sidewalk, in fun heart shapes too:)



They even stuck them in the holes between some of the bricks, clever kids.



It was a festive suprise and the girls LOVED it when they woke up in the morning.



We now have just a few extra candy canes at our house.





I don't really need that many at my house, so they're on the porch, in a pretty bucket, ready for the taking by anyone craving a candy cane. So, if you REALLY want one, (heck, even if you just kinda-sorta think you might want one next week), you know where to get it!:)

Super-fun Christmas "stuff"

Let's rewind a few weeks, alrighty? At the beginning of November, (yeah, I'm on top of it:), our ward had a craft day, and I was lucky enough to head it up. I found some super cute ideas that we could make, put some examples together, got the prices figured out, set up the sign-up sheets, and it was all ready to go. Then people actually signed up...and I had to go shopping.

Did you know that Hobby Lobby doesn't carry endless amounts of everything? I had to go to, literally, 8 Hobby Lobby's in our area. Thank goodness we live in Houston and there are that many within driving distance. But I was able to find everything I needed. Thank goodness!!!

This is what my dining room looked like for about  a week before the craft day.



It was all in an effort to make some really cute apothecary jars. I found the original tutorial over on Shanty-2-chic.  They aren't too complicated and look really cute when finished! I took this next picture off the internet, but just picture them filled with christmas candy, and the letters to spell out "Joy".  Another bonus, because everything at HL is usually 50% off, it's pretty cheap too, about $6.50 for each jar.

The next project we offered were magnet stands. These are adorable and are perfect for recipes in the kitchen, or pictures that you can change out all the time. They're also super easy and ya just glue it all together! I also found these at shanty-2-chic. Those are some creative ladies over there!

The last one was something I actually came up with by myself...huge for me cause I'm notorious for stealing other peoples ideas and not coming up with things on my own. :)

It's just some advent ornaments. You print it onto cardstock, cut them out, fold them up, tape it together, fill with candy, and hang on the tree. Super simple, but slightly time consuming! I know it's too late to use these this year, I'm a little late, but here's the link to download if you want them for next year.



Last but not least, it's that time of the year, Teachers gifts need to be ready by tomorrow for Peyton's preschool teachers. I can never think of what to do, but this year I saw something super cute and super easy to do over on house of smiths. Now, her's is cuter than mine, but in my defense, I don't own a vinyl cutting machine and just used scrapbooking rub-ons. It was cheap, easy to do, and I REALLY like the outcome.

Hopefully, the girls teachers will too.

So there ya have it. A few different, simple ideas for christmas! Glad I'm finished with it all, and just have a few things left to do to get ready. Namely, baking, yum!!!