Merry Christmas :)

I sure love Christmas. I LOVE watching the kids get so excited the night before with anticipation, that's ALMOST as good as watching them Christmas morning :)
Here's Sammie eating her first Christmas present :) I can't believe this was her first Christmas!

My little model :)

Speaking of models :) Here's Bradley showing of his shoes and scooter at the same time :)

After we open presents and hang out at home for a little while we make our way over to Mom's. We were so blessed to have everyone together again including Uncle Rick from Saint Louis.

Crazy to think next year we'll add another little one to the bunch! Can't wait to meet baby Ayden!!!

Oh how I wish I could post another picture ;) Mindy was having a hard time with the new kittens in Mom's house, she has become very allergic to cats over the years. She was sneezing like crazy and her face was all itchy. I have a WONDERFUL picture of all of us together and she was in mid-sneeze and Kevin immediately said she looked like the Predator in the picture and (sorry Mindy) we all agree. It's SO funny and I'm laughing just thinking about it, but unfortunately I cannot share. Hopefully my great description of it is enough :) LOVE YOU MINDY :)

 

Christmas cookies

This is the first year the kids actually got into making the cookies with me. Gracie was too little last year to care, and Bradley very quickly lost interest. This year they loved it!

Boys' Birthday

I gave Kevin the good ol' trick candles for his cake, the kids thought it was hilarious :)

I attempted to make Bradley cupcakes in ice cream cones, they did not turn out very pretty, but they were yummy and he thought it was cool :)

Bradley's drawing of his birthday cake, with him, the number 5, and it says Happy Birthday Bradley :)

Christmas photo shoot

I decided to try to take pictures of the kids myself this year for our Christmas card. I wanted to get one good one of all of them together, but ended up using individual ones instead because it was just not going as planned :)

 

Even though now the more I look at them this is my absolute favorite because it shows their personalities :)

Bradley's 5!

This year Bradley had a dinosaur party, of course since lately all things are dinosaurs. He is SO smart and watches these national geographic shows about dinosaurs and learns so much, and is teaching me so much. Even though at first I was trying to get him to not watch those because I thought all the killing and eating of other dinosaurs might be a little too violent for my little boy - but no, he loves it! He'll even tell me to look away when one is going to get killed because he says I won't like it :) Thanks to the Internet, and Pinterest specifically, I had WAY too many cool dinosaur party ideas filling up my head. I feel like the older they get the more I have to do to keep them entertained and make sure they have a good time for parties - especially when I don't bring them somewhere cool and it's just at my house. So I tried to go all out. I'm pretty sure he had fun seeing that he STILL wants to do the dinosaur dig in the sandbox and STILL wears his tail and dinosaur head around the house all the time :)
Here are the pictures I used for the invitation.

 

 

Dinosaur coloring

Dinosaur cake. I think I'd like to take a cake decorating class because my cakes never look as nice as they look in my head :)

Digging for dinosaurs, we had big ones just buried in the sand, and

little ones in hard dinosaur eggs that you broke open :)

 

I can't believe he's already 5. He's such a grown up little boy now. I am dreading him going to kindergarten next year and him being away from me every day for hours. I'm excited for him but sad for me. I just LOVE spending time with him. I'm one lucky Mommy!

Playing in the back

One of my favorite things to do when it's nice is to all go play in the backyard and take pictures of my beautiful babies :)

Determination

This is what pure determination looks like :)