Busy, Busy, Busy

December, like all the months before it, is just flying by! We started off the month celebrating Phil's 33rd birthday! Jackson was so excited. He was at Walmart with me when I bought the ingredients for Phil's cake, and afterwards ran around the house for days yelling, "Dadoo birthday cake!"

Helping Daddoo blow out his candles...

Here is Heather and Phil's combined birthday and Christmas present...

Isn't it purdy? Although it's taking me twice as long to create this post trying to figure out all of the Mac stuff. We absolutely love it, though!

The next weekend we went to see Santa arrive in KFalls in an F-15....

Mrs. Claus got to meet Santa out at the jet...

After seeing Santa we went inside the hangar and enjoyed some fun Christmas activities. Jackson's favorite was frosting a cookie...

Here's Jackson and his sweet friend, Brock...

Emmett took a little snooze with Dad...

We didn't get any pictures with Santa because the line was reeeeally long and we knew Jackson would be scared to death. Maybe next year!

My sisters and I met in Vegas last week to celebrate Becky's birthday (a few weeks late). We had a great time!

Here we are at Bobby Flay's Mesa Grill in Caesar's Palace...

...and at the National Finals Rodeo...

We had seats in the balcony, but after the rodeo started we snuck down into the lower seating area and sat in some empty seats. We were six rows up from the floor, and we ended up sitting next to a really nice cowboy who was actually a moderately-famous horse trainer. Becky and my dad had attended a horse-training seminar that he held in Jacksonville a while back. She was a little starstruck!

We were so close that at one point one of the horses kicked a clod of dirt up onto us! The ladies behind us took a picture of it after it landed on the floor.

Bull-riding was the last event and, unfortunately, only one cowboy was able to stay on for the full eight seconds. We were expecting a little more with this being the National Finals and all, but I guess those bulls are unpredictable.

After the rodeo we took a shuttle back to the Wynn hotel. One of those celebrity-photo-taking backgrounds (called a "step and repeat"... thank you, NYC Housewives) was set up outside of a club there, so I had to take advantage of that. Like my Hollywood pose?

Some other pics from the week.... I love my sisters!!

A big thanks to Phil, again, for staying at home and taking good care of the boys! He's such a great Daddy. Here are some pictures from the boys' week...

Emmett is still trying desperately to crawl! He's getting closer every day, little by little.

Oops, We Did it Again.

We picked out Christmas trees that are way too big for our house. In our defense, it is really hard to find good-looking small trees out in the forest. All of the ones that are full and nicely shaped are at least 20 feet tall. And we forgot to bring a tape measure with us like we've been saying we would all year long. Oh, well. We still had a really fun day and ended up with two beautiful trees.

This was Jackson's first experience with snow this year. Really, it was his first true experience with snow at all, because we didn't have very much snow last year and he had trouble walking around in it and wasn't a big fan.

Boy, was this year different! As soon as we set him down on the ground, he was off and running. He absolutely loved it and was pretty annoyed with me when I made him stand still for a few seconds to take a family picture.


Emmett was very snuggly and warm. Phil's aunt bought Jackson this snowsuit for Christmas one year, but he was too big for it by the time we lived in cold weather. It fits Emmett perfectly, though, so I'm sure he'll get a lot of use out of it this winter.


We picked out our trees pretty soon after we got there and it was a good thing, too, because it started to get dark right after Phil hauled in the second tree.


Here's a short video of Phil being a good sport. He had to haul that tree pretty far... thanks to my pickiness. I walked quite a ways into the woods before I found one to my liking. :)




After dark we all huddled around the campfire and drank some cocoa. My friend Rocky makes the best cocoa in the world. I look forward to it every year. It is amazing how drastic the temperature drop is when the sun goes down. About an hour after dark Jackson walked up to me, held out his gloved hand and said, "Hand!" in a very sad voice. His hands were really cold. So we walked over to the minivan to warm up for a minute and he took one look at the van and said, "Home!" and started to cry a little. Needless to say, we left right after that! :)


Cocoa mouth...


Just in case you're curious, here are the trees in our house before...


...and after some pruning and trimming...


They take up a ton of space in our rooms, but it's only for one month once a year, right?

I realized the other day that I never posted about Thanksgiving. In addition to all of our numerous blessings of family, friends, health, happiness, etc. that we are truly thankful for, we are very blessed to have some great friends out here. So many of us wanted to get together for the holiday that we had to rent out a dining hall on base to accommodate everyone. There were about 55 people there total. We had so much yummy food... it was a great time.


Someone pulled out a karaoke machine after dinner and the little girls immediately flocked to it.


This is my friend, Lana, with Jackson. She is such an amazing person... beautiful, outgoing, fun, thoughtful (she would truly give you the shirt off her back, even if it was freezing outside!), and great with kids. Jackson just loves her, and it is so wonderful to have a friend who loves your kid right back. She's funny, too... on Thanksgiving she said to me as Jackson walked by, "Ohhhh, I just want to marry him." :)


And, as if this post wasn't long enough, here are some random pictures that Phil took of the boys the other day. First, the just-having-woken-up blank stare...


Playing together after breakfast...


Being silly...


I thought Emmett looked so grown up in this picture. It almost made me cry!


And then this picture made me laugh. I bought this hat last year before E was born. It's 6-12 months and is obviously a little too small for Mr. Tubbo. :)


Hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are enjoying the Christmas season so far!