January, already? Well, here is a tribute to December

As usual, the month of December came and went and before I knew it, it was ten days into 2011! Wow.  Where to even start....... I guess I will start with the last few December activities before Christmas.

We let the boys decorate a gingerbread house.  A tradition I guess, because they asked us when we were going to let them do the tradition of building a gingerbread house :) We may have found little pieces of frosting and bits of candy for the next few days, but totally worth it!

This year I let the kids have their own tree upstairs! It was so much fun.

  We put all of the ornaments that they have made for us as well as all of the ones that we have gotten from the vacations we have taken together.  I love that we started that tradition almost ten years ago on our honeymoon.  It is so much fun to pull out the ornaments and remember where we have gone together.  It brings back so many memories and the kids love it as much as I do!

As for the downstairs tree (aka the "real" tree so that we can have a "real Christmas"), I never got any pictures of us decorating it.  But it was beautiful. And I do love that it smelled so incredible every time we walked in the house.

The kids had school off the week before Christmas, and I was going to take the time off, but my sister Layne wanted to hang out with them for the three days.  I am so grateful for her.  She did a ton with the kids and they had so much fun with her (Although, it was selfishly hard for me because it was the first time ever, in their whole lives that the kids had a vacation from school and I was working. I missed partying with them.  But they had a really really great time with her.)

This is a picture of when they went to the shark reef with their Aunt Co, Uncle Justin, and Aunt Layne. 

 

We were lucky enough to get to go to the bowl game that Boise State played in.  The "men" of the family and Nat and I braved the poring rain and went. 

We had a GREAT time.  Dad got us awesome seats! We were about 5 rows up on the twenty yard line.  This picture isn't even zoomed.  That was the great part.  The not as great part for at least Mark and Ernie was that my Dad is Uof U alum, so he got the tickets through his connections there and pretty sure we were sitting with all U of U's family members.  That made it a little hard to cheer as loudly as usual for BSU :)

I love that Ernie is trying to oblige me in this picture, just like my kids.  Hey, I guess it was win win.  I got a picture of him smiling, and he didn't miss the play.