My best friends

 

Kids

I love my new camera.  I love that I can take pictures of my kids now and not miss them smiling.  I also love that I don’t need to spend hours on Photoshop trying to “fix” my pictures, because who has time for that?!?  These pics came straight from my glorious camera, no Photoshop needed! I also spent extra on a portrait lens because some of my friends said I’d use it a ton, and I am so so glad I got it. Get ready to start seeing more pictures on my blog!

Christmas 2012

We celebrated Christmas a week early in Ohio so we wouldn’t have to take all our presents with us to Utah.  It was extremely confusing for Carly to understand that it wasn’t actually Christmas when we were opening the presents.  We ended up telling Santa to drop off her presents in Utah so she got to open her presents from Casey and me and Holland at home. 

               

Casey and I got each other iPhones for Christmas, and we got an Xbox with Kinect for a family present.

      We got Holland this animated rocking horse and she was freaked out by it for a few days, but once she saw how much fun Carly was having on it she gave it a try :)

                 

        Carly got “less” fun presents from us for Christmas (like books etc.) and we saved the more exciting ones to be from Santa (we bought them once we got to Utah).  We had to do this because she kept trying to find her Christmas presents and found most of them, little stinker!

                 

Holland loves this little baby she got from us

We spent our Utah Christmas vacation first at the Greens house.  It was so exciting to see Casey’s brother Tyson’s new baby Porter that they just adopted a few weeks before.  They found out the day of the baby’s birth that they got a baby, crazy huh!  After a few days shopping and eating tons of Mexican food we headed down to Provo for a few days.  We spent Christmas Eve there and then Christmas day we traveled back up to Centerville for a few days. 

Best cousin friends reunited!

My sister Brooke. 

My sister Kari’s little boy Bentley, and my sister Brooke’s daughter Ashley

Carly got to be Mary in the Nativity

                    

Every year my parents give all the kids/in laws some kind of BYU gift and this year we all got BYU beanies!  My sisters Kari (Left) and Kristen (Right) are both pregnant and due around the same time

Look what Santa brought!

               

It snowed almost everyday while we were in Utah and Holland and Carly loved it!

Casey pulling Holland in a sled.

           

Playing at GG and Papa’s

 

We ate Mexican food almost everyday,  we were in heaven! Here we’re eating at one of our favs in Bountiful, El Matador.

We flew home on New Year Eve, and our flight got in at 11:55 p.m. We spent our New Years on the tarmac. 

We had such a fun time visiting family and friends in Utah.  I love the feeling of being back at home and staying up late laughing with family!  I hope everyone had a great Christmas!

Holland

Holland is 17 months as of yesterday which means only 1 more month until nursery!  Casey is the one that gets her for Sunday School and Priesthood because I have to teach music in Primary so he is a lot more anxious to get her in there! 

Holland can FINALLY walk! It has been so long in the making. She has been cruising for about 2 months but just started walking all the time at the first of December. She seems so much happier now that she get places faster than bum scooting. The bum of her pants thanks her!

Holland loves: Baby Einstein, being tickled, snuggling, babies (real and fake), pushing her babies in her strollers, her blankie that Grandma Kathie made for her, brushing her teeth, animals, playing in the toilet.

Holland has been a completely different child than Carly has been which has made us seriously think about waiting  3-4 years until we have another child.  To make a long story short she just cries (screams) a lot and wants to be held all the time, and she still has problems sleeping at night (which is the hardest for us to deal with, and I’m sure contributes to the whininess during the day).  However, because she is such a momma’s girl all the time I do get lots of cuddles and kisses from her, and I never get lonely!

I can finally walk!

Carly’s 4th Birthday

                   

Carly’s Birthday Interview

This year Carly had a rainbow birthday party, if you can’t tell :) She had all the girls from her Primary class over plus her good friend Max which is Casey’s coworker’s son.  She had the time of her life getting so much attention from so many people! Then a few days later on her actual birthday we went to Chuck E Cheese and had a family party.  I’ve decided that once my kids can talk I want to tape them talking about their birthday every year for posterity sake.