Thanksgiving Christmas

I know I'm about 3-4 months late but oh well this is my memory book and I can't go without documenting, especially since it was Kendall's first Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Thanksgiving 2013

We did our annual trip down to San Angelo to see my husbands side of the family.We love getting away from the craziness of Dallas to enjoy a little quiet family time in this small town. We don't do much while we are there and that's what we love about it.

 It's been a tradition to eat Thanksgiving dinner over at my husbands grandmother's house.  She's 100 years old (ssshhh I didn't tell you that) and still makes dinner for the entire family!! Kemper was such a ham making us laugh through out dinner. I'm thinking part of it may have been  because I treated him to a little of my soda from a wine glass ;). I think he really enjoyed the perks of sitting at the adult table. Do you see little Kendall in the background sucking on a chicken bone? When her brother was around the same age his great grandmother gave one to him on Thanksgiving and he was in heaven sucking away. She went out of her way to make one for Kendall this year, and just like her brother it kept her quiet long enough for all of us to enjoy our dinner.

Spending time with the family playing pass the baby.

The kids with their grandparents. I still can't believe that 100 years separate Kendall and her Great Grandmother. It's a blessing that we get to spend another Thanksgiving with her.

On one of our few outings we took Kemper to bowl for his first time. He had a great time. He would knock down those pins and then come back strutting to his seat like he owned the place.

Like I said we didn't do much over thanksgiving besides eat lots of  great food and hang out with the family enjoying a simple life. Why would you want to do anything else??



Christmas 2013

We did our traditional  Christmas celebration back home in Dallas.

We did a better job at taking the kids to see Santa this year than we did last year.  There was no wait to see Santa ( three hour wait last year) and I didn't lose the pictures afterward!! Yay!!

Both of them smiling and looking at the camera!!  It's a hard thing to do especially when one of them can't hear and you have to jump up and down like a fool to get her attention!

Some of our Christmas decorations. Yes, we have two trees. Our big show off tree and our smaller sentimental tree. We had a full mantle with two extra stockings this year. One for our sweet new addition to the family, Kendy, and the other for my father-in-law, Jim, that came to stay with us this Christmas.

 The tradition of making homemade cookies for Santa  has evolved into baking store bought cookies. Please don't judge ;) Although we did go over to a friends house and bake and decorate real gingerbread houses. It was so much fun I hope to start making that a tradition.

I can't say that The Elf on the Shelf is my favorite tradition but K is obsessed with it. He would wake up sooo early just to see what his elf Lucky did. UGH!  He also begged us to ask Santa to send a girl elf for Kendall. So Snowflake the girl elf is now part of our family.

I'll admit having a little girl is so fun when it comes to dressing for the holidays. She was so stylish in her festive gear.

The Christmas Post

(For some reason this never posted until now)

Just a little recap of Christmas 2012 with just a few million pictures...

We made our annual trip to Santa's Village. Unfortunately it was so crowded that we didn't stay long. It was pretty cold and there was a 15-20 minute wait just to walk through the tiny houses. K wasn't really in the mood for the cold, crowds,and lines and neither was I. This little village has gained a lot of popularity since I was a kid. better luck next year!

Next stop: Visit with Santa!

We thought it would be a good idea to go see Santa on a Sunday afternoon as soon as the mall opened at noon. We arrived to Santa's station around 12:20 and the line was already at (what we based on previous years) the hour mark. We were fine with that, this is Dallas after all.

Well we were wrong. It took THREE hours of waiting to see Santa. Honestly the line wasn't too bad, it was he people running the show that delayed it all. They were allowing people to take as many pictures as as they wanted until they got one they really liked. Seriously?? take 5 pictures, pick one and move on. The family in front of us took 15 minutes to take their pictures. They honestly thought they could get their 6 moth old and 2 year old took both look and smile at the camera, while being terrified of Santa. I almost lost it.

Luckily K was in a fabulous mood. I think he was just delirious after waiting so long. He started rolling on the ground and pretending to be asleep. Normally I would never let him do that, but after three hours we just found it funny.

After all that waiting, a few days later I lost the pictures. I almost cried. What they say about pregnancy brain is true. I believe I threw them away while I was cleaning. Grrrrrr.

I couldn't stand not having a a picture of K with Santa this year, so back to the mall we went. This time we went to a less popular mall with a toned down Santa. The line was only 30 minutes and we got our picture with Santa!!  We celebrated later with giant cookies. K took the picture of my husband and I, pretty good  for a 3yr old!

  2012 Picture with Santa. We call this Kemper's Elvis smile.
Thank you, Thank you very much.

 Helping dad put out the outdoor Christmas decorations.

Final result.
They had so much fun doing this. I can just imagine years from now them making this a tradition and going crazy on the outdoor decorations together.

 This Holiday we had an Elf visitor from the North Pole, his name was Lucky.
I must admit this Elf on the Shelf is one of the best ideas ever. K was on his best behavior for the entire month of December in fear that Lucky would report back to Santa any bad behavior.
He got a kick out of waking up each morning to see what crazy and silly things Lucky had done while he was sleeping. On Christmas Eve he got in the refrigerator and was going to eat all the cookie dough that was for Santa!
 ( For all you serious Elf on the Shelf people, yes Kemper is touching him. At our house he could be touched ONLY to put him back on the shelf after we found him in the morning without losing his powers)

 Christmas Eve.
 K putting out the cookies & milk for Santa and the carrots for the reindeer. He was really sad knowing that Lucky would be going back with Santa that night, broke my heart. ;)




K was so worried about us starting a fire on Christmas Eve, he came up with this theory all on his own. We couldn't help but laugh and get the video recorder out.

Christmas morning.
This was the first year that Kemper really understood the concept of Christmas morning. Just watching him walk down the stairs  and seeing his expression after he saw all the presents was priceless.  He was so excited. He couldn't believe that Santa had visited and brought him everything he had asked for. His favorite gift was his "piano" His Meme has a keyboard at her house and he always loves to play with it. He really wanted one of his own. My husband was able to get a beyond awesome deal on one off of Craigslist. He was also thrilled with his new Cars Movie tricycle.

Looks like someone was good this year.
 I think this is just half his loot!

Later that afternoon we went to my parents house to open more gifts.We were very surprised to that we also got the gift of a white Christmas!!

Merry Christmas!!

After all the snow cleared up my husbands parents came in town for a visit. K was in heaven. He loves it when they come over, and they came bearing gifts!! :)

And then it was all over,time to start a new year. I had to work and didn't get to celebrate the New Year with my boys, but I did get ring in it in with my other "family" at work :)



We had a wonderful Christmas and it was even more special this year because I could really see it through the eyes of my son this year. It made me so thankful for him and our family.

Never worry about the size of your Christmas tree.  In the eyes of children, they are all 30 feet tall.  ~Larry Wilde, The Merry Book of Christmas



Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!!

Merry Christmas! 2012

The Christmas Post

I've been a slacker in blogging department and this really bothers me, just for the simple reason that I would like to go back and remember the stories behind the pictures. 
Can you guess what one of my New Years resolutions will be?
Ha! we'll see!

Oh Christmas tree...

Or as Kemper calls it "mistress tree"  We really need to work on that one!

We had two Christmas trees this year. Why two? A few days after Christmas last year we came across a 9 ft pre-lit Christmas tree at a hardware store & they were practically giving it away so we had to get it. We put it in the living room and put our old 6ft tree in the den. We called the smaller tree our "sentimental tree" because that's where we put all of our favorite and gifted ornaments.The larger tree was nicknamed our "Show off" tree.;)

 My husbands favorite holiday is Christmas, so it's pretty much the only time I can get away with going out and buying stuff to decorate the house. We had fun as a family decorating the house with the movie Christmas Vacation playing in the background

Next year my hubby wants to "Griswold" the outside of our house. That should be interesting...

Thankfully we have a very well behaved toddler that never got into any of the decorations. He loves them all so much, I'm not quite sure how to break it to him that they have to be put away soon.

Speaking of my sweet Baby K, lately when I try and take a picture of him he tells me "No more pictures momma!" So we had to get a little creative in order to get pictures by the tree. We told K and his cousin Nolan that they could get under the tree IF they let us take their picture. As you can see it worked! My favorite is the "Home Alone" pose in the first picture.

Visions of sugar plums...

 Kemper and I did a little holiday baking. He is always asking me to get out my bowls and spoons so that he can pretend cook, so I knew he would have a blast cooking for real. He had so much fun mixing and pouring all the ingredients. We made his favorite sugar M&M cookies. We also made jars of cookie mix to give to all the neighbors and K's teachers. We called them "Kemper Kookies"

We also did some gingerbread house decorating  with my sister Maria and nephew Nolan. It took K a little while to grasp the idea that you are supposed to decorate with the candy and not eat it, at least not yet. ;)

All aboard!!

We made many trips to the mall this season, to get gifts for everyone and to see the trains of course! The Trains at Northpark were amazing, too bad my iPhone couldn't quite get all the details. K's favorite was the scene of Big Tex from the State fair.
One of the other malls has a train that you can actually ride. We were not quite sure if K would ride it because he normally won't do anything like that alone. We took the risk and bought him a ticket and sure enough he got on that train alone like a big boy. We were so proud ;)

Here comes Santa Claus...

Kemper is at the age where most children are scared of Santa. So this year I did a little trick to get him interested and wanting to visit Santa. Each time we would go to the mall we would stop by Santa's workshop. We would only stay and watch for a minute or two, then I would tell him we needed to go.(I know this sounds mean)The first two times he didn't mind, but by the third he was begging to see Santa. So we finally went to see him. The wait was about 45 minutes and he was very patient for a 2.5yr old.

When it was finally his turn he turned to me with a nervous look and said " I want to see Santa, no pictures." Ha! he was more upset about getting his picture taken than meeting Santa. So I did what all good parents do and bribed him with a cookie afterwards if he let us take his picture. Mission accomplished!

  

Twas The Night Before Christmas...

It was so fun getting to teach Kemper about Christmas this year. He still pretty young but he is beginning to grasp some of the concepts. He loved hearing the stories of baby Jesus and Santa Claus.

We started the tradition of leaving milk and cookies for Santa and carrots for the reindeer.
(Please ignore the pacifier, it's a work in progress!)

Christmas Morning...

At last it was Christmas morning. We took K downstairs to see all the presents Santa left him. At first he just stared at the presents, not knowing what to think. After we told him they were toys he was ready to open them up. He would unwrap a present and then want us to take it out of its packaging  immediately so that he could play with it. I don't quite know why manufacturers insist on making toy packages so hard to open, by the time we got one opened he was already onto the next toy. We found it funny that one of his favorite gifts was a simple $1 slinky I got at the grocery store. I think he liked it more than his new bike. Oh well that's a toddler for you!

Later that day we went over to my parents house to celebrate and open more gifts. K and Nolan were surprised with new cars! Their awesome aunt Maria got them for them.

We had a wonderful Christmas this year, and are looking forward to many more.
We are so blessed and thankful for Him and all his wonderful gifts.

The greatest one being the love of our family near and far.

 Welcome Christmas. Bring your cheer,
Cheer to all Whos, far and near.

Welcome Christmas while we stand
Heart to heart and hand in hand.

Dr Suess