Tuesday, December 15, 2009

Christmas, Christmas Everywhere...

Christmas is alive and well at the giant house on the hill... In the past few weeks we have...
Put our lights up outside...
Decorated our BEAUTIFUL FREE!!! 10 Foot tree...
Filled our fireplace with stockings galore...
Baked sugar cookies...
Done our Advent Tree each night with the kids...
Gone to the annual Encinitas Christmas parade...
Went and saw Christmas lights with our friends...
Have been to our fair share of Christmas parties...
And took our annual picture of the kids in front of our tree...



I love these treasures!!!!


How BEAUTIFUL is this tree!!!! Thanks to Adam's Uncle for blessing us!!


Here we added a few more treasures... I LOVE this picture! Look closely... It is sooo funny. Siah is picking his nose and could care less about what's going on. Reesie is actually obeying what's being said to her and she's the only one smiling. Aj is trying to be sweet to his sister, but as you can tell she's MAD and clearly is not into the picture thing. And Hal, she's lost in her own thoughts. This is the real deal folks! :)



Gotta love Siah in this one... :)


It's the first year of our entire 10 years of marriage that we have had a fireplace... and I LOVE IT!!!

Christmas, Christmas everywhere...

Tonight we took the kids to see Christmas lights... WE ate kettle corn and played Christmas music in the car as we drove through these decked out neighborhoods... Last year we found this awesome house that had turned their entire front yard into a train station with all these working trains. The kids remembered it from last year so we parked on their street and walked for a little bit....

The kids soaked up every second...


How cute are they??

We met up with the Barons and the Haynes Families (but the Haynes somehow managed to escape without a family photo. :)


All the ladies..


Family Fun...



This funny sign was in someone's front yard so we stopped and took everyone's picture...
Hal was first...


Then Siah...


Reesie...


Then Papa...

Papa and Mama in the car...


Aunt Kristin sent us this really cool Advent tree that we have been doing with the kids each night... ok, not really each night... truth be told, we did five nights in one tonight. :) But all the same the kids love opening the ornaments and putting them on the tree. They often have a hard time focusing on the devotion that goes with the opening of each ornament but I know that even if they are not completely paying attention, we have at least another 15 years to get the point across... so not to worry. :)

Adam got to read the devotion tonight...

All the fun traditions that lead up to Christmas Day have been doubley fun this year. Life is always so much better when lived with friends and we have been so blessed to have friends as a part of each and every tradition that we've done this year. I just LOVE CHRISTMAS TIME!!! And I'm so grateful for all the memories made.


So that's what's been going on around here... Hope you enjoyed the little update... :)