Christmas With the Fam

Well, this is very late, but I wanted to post these pictures. We did make it down to Kansas City again this year for Christmas, so here are some pics of us with my family.
One day before Christmas, Jaclyn decided to write out the Christmas story, so she had the honor of reading her story while Nana presented the pictures. She did great!

Presents!!

We gave Papa a picture puzzle of the girls, so here are Ashlyn, Katelyn and Papa putting it together.

Fun at the Salon!

We had fun at the salon today! Jaclyn decided that she wanted her hair cut short this time. I couldn't quite let her cut it as short as she wanted to (yes, Mom is more attached to her hair than she is!), but I went ahead and let her get quite a bit taken off. (I had to tell her that next time she could go even shorter if she really wanted to, so we'll see what comes of that.)

And then we had another little surprise. There was another girl there that I guess had nothing to do, so she let the girls pick out some nail polish and she did their nails! They thought that was REALLY fun. Ashlyn picked bright pink with sparkles on top, and Jaclyn picked pink on one hand and purple on the other, and with sparkles of course. Pretty fun. (I can see us having to do a birthday party at the salon one of these years...)

Christmas At Our House

We're leaving for Kansas City tomorrow to celebrate with my side of the family, so we had our own family Christmas on Sunday.

The girls got to open gifts after lunch. The big gifts this year were a bigger bike for Ashlyn and a two-wheel scooter for Jaclyn. So, they have had tons of fun riding around in our basement. That's definitely one good thing about an unfinished basement! The other gifts mostly consisted of books (they are very much into reading right now!)and some fun games for the Wii. Lots of great activities for being indoors during the winter months!

Cookies 'N More

Today was our Christmas cookie day. (I actually got this done two years in a row!) I did have some incentive this year. I found some adorable matching aprons for all of us, so I had to get them, and then of course, we had to bake! So, we started off our baking extravaganza with a little surprise gift for the girls.

We didn't quite have time to deliver our goodies, so we'll have to get to that tomorrow, but it was a fun afternoon. Ashlyn enjoyed it the most this year (which I was a little surprised by). Jaclyn was kinda done after a while, but Ashlyn stayed right with me. Here she is finishing up with the M&Ms at the end. Maybe I've got a little baker on my hands. (That would mean that her Mom would really need to learn something about baking!!)

We ended our day by opening stockings. It's pretty early, but we're leaving town on Wednesday, and Craig works through Tuesday, so this weekend is our only chance to have some significant time to open gifts.

Wow, cool socks!!

Ashlyn is actually really thrilled in this picture, although it's kinda hard to tell! She got a new game for the WII!! She's jumping up and down. :)

More to come tomorrow...

And She's Off!

Here's our little one on the go! Kendall started walking over Thanksgiving weekend, and now she's starting to get pretty good at it! I haven't been able to get a good picture of her in action (she always heads straight to the camera), but I was finally able to get some today. I had to run ahead, quickly turn around and snap the shot before she got to me.

I can't believe how big she's getting!

Mary Poppins for Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We hope you all had a wonderful time giving thanks with your families. We went to Des Moines to be with Craig's family. It was a very nice time, and a highlight of the weekend was taking the older girls to see Mary Poppins at the Des Moines Civic Center. It was the first real musical that the girls have seen and it was really cool. The music and choreography was outstanding, and there were some really neat special effects too. Mary Poppins floated away over the crowd and Bert danced on the ceiling! It was quite a bit different than the movie, but they did a lot of the same songs, so it was familiar enough to keep the girls' interest. Ashlyn got tired toward the end, but Jaclyn stayed interested the whole time. We couldn't take pictures during the show, so here are a few pictures I found online. The one below is from the Des Moines Register.

Aunt Jill and Grandma enjoyed the show with us.

We had some wait time before they opened the doors, so we entertained ourselves with some silly shots. Seems these days my girls are always ready to put on a show!

Family Pictures

Last weekend we got some family pictures taken, so I just wanted to share them with you.