Christmas Traditions

We got ourselves a $5 Christmas tree tag and drove out to the mountains to get ourselves a tree.  It was crazy that there was no snow in town but 30 minutes away, there was several feet!

 We pulled up to what looked like the perfect spot (as in, not far off the road - we were in a minivan!).  Reed fell asleep on the way there so I stayed in the van and Jaron took the kids out. There was this little creek that the kids weren't sure how they'd get over. 

 Jaron picked them up and threw them over it.  They loved it.

 It felt good to be up in the forest!

 They picked a beauty, albeit a large one.

 When we got it in the house, it only fit one place: the middle of the vaulted ceiling and therefore the middle of the room.  We had fun decorating it.  We enjoyed our real tree but I did look forward to the day we'd have our living room back, too. :D

We also went to visit the mall santa.  Once again they wouldn't let us take a picture with Santa unless we paid for it.  I'm too cheap for that, especially since none of the kids would get close to santa except Alden.  Eli actually hid in the stroller and wouldn't even come into the display.  :D  Alden asked Santa for a bb gun, Eli asked for a Skylander, and at Santa's suggestion, Gracen asked for girl Lego.

Belly Pics

I thought I did such a good job of taking belly pics this time around.  I took three.  Haha.

I tried my best to keep the weight gain reasonable this time because I still have some leftover from Reed's pregnancy.  I gained 27 pounds - the least I've ever gained in a pregnancy.  I still got "Holy smokes, you're huge!" comments starting at about 25 weeks.  Ha...ha.  Love those.  I do seem to gain almost all the weight in the second trimester.  This time around I gained a few pounds in the first trimester, a lot in the second, and somehow almost none in the third trimester.

I'm not sure where I'm at for these pictures so I'll make guestimations.

30ish weeks.

 36ish weeks

38 or 39 weeks

The Reedster

Reed is just at such a cute/exasperating/fun age right now.

He's incredible at making messes.  Absolutely incredible.  But he likes to "help" too, like when I clean out the fridge.

He also likes to help cook.  Always helpful, indeed. 

 He LOVES screens.  Loves 'em.  Deletes all kinds of apps, messages people, etc.

 This was at Eli's birthday party.  He started being so clingy and then would cry every time I would put him down.  HARD to run a birthday party for eleven kids at the same time.  But by the end of the party he was running a fever and I felt terrible.  He was sick for the next few days.

 This is mostly what Reed does: cars.

 And lately, I find him right here a lot.  He's not reaching for his milk or anything.  He just stands in the fridge. Haha.  Makes me laugh.

 For all the mess making he does, Reed couldn't stand being dirty very long when we played cars in shaving cream the other day. :D  Cute kid.

Gingerbread House

As soon as Thanksgiving was over, we jumped into our Christmas traditions.  I was motivated to get as much done as I could before baby girl made her debut.

 We love decorating gingerbread houses but we take the easy way out and decorate graham cracker houses instead.  I even went so far as to make the houses before the boys got home from school to make sure we'd have enough time.

 Reed was a trooper.  We locked him in his high chair so he couldn't wreak havoc. He wasn't that interested in the candy (surprisingly) but he seemed pretty content to just watch.

Our little Christmas candy village:

We totally ran out of candy before everyone was done this year!

Eli's:

 Alden's:

 Gracen's:

 Daddy's:

 Mommy's:

Thanksgiving

For family night the week of Thanksgiving we made a gratitude tree.  It included some things like food, freedom, school, Daddy's job, friends, family, healthy babies, the scriptures, and clothes.

We kept Thanksgiving really casual this year.  Jaron asked early on if we could celebrate Canadian Thanksgiving instead.  I was blown away...until he said he wanted to go hunting at American Thanksgiving.  HAHA.  Should've known. But by the time American Thanksgiving rolled around, Jaron had already shot his deer.  We still kept it laid back and relaxed.  We still had a turkey dinner, but we pulled leftover turkey from the freezer and took it easy for the holiday.

 A few snapshots of the things we're thankful for:

Besties and matching birthday shirts.

 Bestie who coordinate.  Just kidding.  This is a terrible picture but we thought this was funny.  We had the Hiatts over for dinner and realized that great minds think alike.  Believe it or not, Meli is due only about a month after I am!  She looks GREAT!

This is our and the Hiatts kids.  We love having them over to play or for a movie night.  Isabel and Reed fight to no end. :D  We are incredibly thankful to know the Hiatts and that they also moved to Twin Falls!  They're like our residency family. :)

We are also all incredibly grateful for this awesome park that is walking distance from our house.  It has everything - a creek, bridges, bike/walking paths, playgrounds, and canyon wall rocks to climb around in.  It also has a mean looking ultimate frisbee course that we have yet to make use of.

Happy Birthday, Eli!

We had a birthday party way back in November for Eli.  I realized that if I was going to do a party for him without having a newborn or being 39 weeks pregnant, I was going to have to do it before Thanksgiving. 

Eli requested a Skylanders theme.  Pretty tricky to pull off since I know next to nothing about the video game.  Thank goodness for Pinterest!

 We decided to do 8 activities for the party, one from each of the Skylanders categories (Life, Undead, Earth, Air, etc.).  We handed out "passports" to fill in as each activity was completed.

 These balloons were supposed to represent "chompies," which are some kind of bad guy in the game.  

 I don't even remember what category this activity was in but poor Boston got flour in his eyes.  He was a trooper about it. I felt terrible. :(

 We ate a dinner of hot dogs, Skylanders chips and fruit snacks, and prism break cookies.

 His cake was supposed to look like a portal.  One of the Skylanders fell off before he even blew out his candles and it really kind of just looked like a soccer ball cake. :D

 Eli's friends were so generous and he loved all of his gifts!

At age seven, Eli is still my little snuggler.  He still asks me to lay with him before he goes to sleep at night (which is getting harder to do, especially with a newborn!).  Eli is a great student at school.  I can't believe how far his reading has come since first grade started.  I have gotten to regularly volunteer in Eli's class this year and it's so fun to be in the classroom with him and working with his reading group.  Eli loves superheroes and video games and sports.  He's an absolute monkey on the playground - he has incredible arm strength!  Eli is a sweet, generous, compassionate person.  I absolutely love to listen to him pray because his prayers are relevant and insightful and so sweetly sincere.  Eli is best buddies with Alden but plays a lot with Gracen too.  He makes the most effort to play with Reed and Reed adores him for it.  We sure love our Eli!!

Halloween

We sure love Halloween around here.  We had our annual Halloween party for neighborhood kids again but this year it was the best ever because Genny and her girls decided to drive down from Canada to visit us for it! SO fun!

I like to put the party's dinner menu on the invitation to spark the littles' imaginations in anticipation of the party.  This year we served spider legs (grape kabobs), bones 'n blood (breadsticks and marinara dip), worms (quartered hot dogs), severed fingers (cheese strings with almond finger nails), monster eyeballs (rice krispies balls), and dirt 'n worms (pudding and gummy worms).

 Each of the kids got to invite a couple of friends along with our cousins.  What a spooky bunch.

We played "monster stew," where the kids had to suck up bits of paper with straws into their buckets.

 Then we made mummies.

 And played a few other spooky games that I didn't take pictures of and can't even remember right now, haha.  We used the time at the end to draw haunted neighborhoods on long strips of paper. The kids loved that most I think.  

 I invested a couple of bucks in a cauldron and got some dry ice for it.  Definitely a spooky centerpiece, although it didn't smoke as much as I hoped it would.

As Halloween neared we finally got our pumpkins carved.  Alden made his own design this year instead of printing one off.

 These posers.  Eli is the ringleader of picture posing.  I don't teach them or ask them to do this stuff.  Haha. 

 Seriously.  When Eli's future wife asks us for pictures for their wedding reception slideshow, I'm going to need someone with some serious photoshopping skills to make some normal pictures of him. :)

 My super cute bunch.  Haha on Gracen's face.  She's learning well from Eli.

 And Reed just learned to say "cheese" for the camera.  Complete with an actual piece of cheese in his mouth for this one! :D  Eli was a robber and Reed was his bag of money.

Work it, Eli!

 Alden was a Transformer. I wonder how long my home made costumes will be cool in their eyes. :)

 We didn't trick or treat for very long this year.  Gracen and Reed only lasted a couple of blocks.  Reed absolutely loved trick or treating.  He was the cutest.  At each house, he didn't care one bit about the candy - he thought he was being invited in when people opened their doors and he actually made it into a few homes.  Then he would wave his sweet little chubby hand at the person as he left.  Total and absolute cuteness!

 The boys and I trick or treated extra on the way home but were still disappointed they had to be done.  I figured they had plenty of candy, though.  At this point, I feel like they got too much.  Shouldn't it be gone by now?!

 Gracen also won a coloring contest at our local Albertson's!  She got to go in and choose any bag of candy she wanted.  She chose a bag of Hershey's kisses and she has loved sharing them with her family members.