Christmas

Ok so obviously I am a little behind… but I am catching up. We were able to fly to Georgia for Christmas to be with Nick family. Nick is the oldest of 8 and it was such a special treat to all be together for Christmas. The last few times we have visited with his family we haven’t been able to all be there so it was an extra special Christmas. Nick’s sister Missy and her husband Chris have three sweet little girls that are our kids ages so it was a blast to have all the cousins playing together. His sister Beth and her husband Craig had their first baby this year as well, so there were three babies and four big kids. Nicks other sibling were built in entertainment :) yay!

Nick’s grandma was also able to be out from AZ visiting so that was special too! I am not a huge fudge fan but Grandma Mckellars fudge was DELICOUS seriously, I mean  come on now I’m blogging about it, two months later… good stuff.

We flew in the day the 23rd and stayed for a week. Our flights went great. It’s a long flight. Even with out kids you start getting antsy after that many hours of traveling but kids get burned out. We flew to San Jose first and than TX and than GA so it was just a lot of flying. They all did really well and we didn’t have any embarrassing screaming moments or anything. The baby is a champ, seriously. It was before she crawled and that was really nice because she didn’t want to get down. She would be a lot harder to fly with now. It really is amazing though that you can hop on a plane fly all day and be all the way across the US pretty cool! When we flew home we only had to switch flights once and all three kids slept for awhile on our second flight because it was pretty late GA time. I think we landed at 10:30ish.

We had a wonderful trip and we are so thankful for all the fun times! Thanks to all the family for making our trip great. Especially Nick’s mom and sister Katie. Seriously they both did so much cooking and so many dishes. Grandma McKellar did lots of dishes as well. There were 21 of us together and 19 of us staying there a couple nights so it was a cooperative effort to get everyone fed and everything cleaned up. We all pitched in here and there but after one particular meal Nick mom was back in the kitchen prepping for the next meal an hour later… Thank you for all your sacrificial love you’re a great example! Katie you were a servant to all of us thank you!!

I will probably continue my narrative through my pictures… so here goes

Christmas morning was a long process to get all those gift opened. The kids had a blast! I don’t have the picture of the mess in the stair way but I will have to get it. There was  a lot of wrapping paper!

see in the kitchen…

Christmas Night we got snow! A White Christmas, very pretty. The kids were very excited and they headed out for some play time. Here are a few pictures. I didn’t have the “big” camera but these are still pretty cute.

Allie was running around full tilt and than all of a sudden decided she was tired and Aunt Missy’s lap looked inviting. pretty cute!

we were trying to get a family pictures but Anna was tuckered out! She had been sleeping for a long time but I think she went back to sleep after this picture.

the group ( I took the picture and evidently Missy’s baby was sleeping, I don’t think I have any pictures of her but I promise little Rachel was there!)

these two were so cute. Wills is a month older than Anna and he had so much fun playing with her. He would go looking for her any time she wasn’t around.

the kids did some ginger bread houses while the big boys went out and played some Frisbee golf. I think everyone had fun.

watching Bambi

here are these 4 cuties.

Anna is 4 (bday Aug) Allie 2(July) Sonja 2(April) and Wills is 4(July)

(Allie’s shirt really does fit she just was pulling her arms up…)

One of my favorite parts of the trip was being able to play games together after all the kiddos went to bed. We stayed up till late at night playing Pictionary, buzzerwezzer, hearts, and a few more and it was a lot of fun! We had a wonderful time and it was great to meet the newest members of the family. so Merry Christmas everyone! Hope you had as wonderful time as we did with your friends and family.

the baby

Well we are kinda in love with this little girl. She is a very very good baby. Nick said if we could clone her we could make some serious money. I haven’t specifically blogged about her in a while and she has changed and grown up so much in last two months.

Before we left for Georgia she was getting up on all fours and rocking back and fourth but she was still using the rolling method to get from here to there. Two weeks after we got back the girl figured it all out and has been stuffing everything from around the house in her mouth ever since. She is enjoying her mobility immensely. Since we have wood floors through most of the house she has to move her little legs really fast to keep them under her. It is SUPER cute!

Before Christmas she had been sitting up but was still a wobbly. When we were in Georgia Nick sat her on the floor and walked away, she sat like a champ and I thought, hmmm maybe I should have done that earlier (just for the record I would not have been happy had she fell and bonked her head). So when we got home we packed up all the baby stuff, swing, bouncer, baby bath and brought out all the big girl toys. I seriously feel like she grew up so much in a month and maybe it was because I was busy so I wasn’t pushing her to grow up and so she could do it all when she figured it out? I don’t know. Life’s busy.

With crawling came pulling herself up on everything. She can pull herself up to standing but she usually stays on her knees. She also started clapping and waving right around the same time. Over the last month she also started say G’s and H and she said momma a couple times and Nick said she said and than went looking for me, how cute is that!!! :)

She started eating solids at 6 months and she didn’t love them. We started with rice cereal and she would just spit it out. So we added some veggies same result and than we tried applesauce and she finally found a reason to swallow what I was putting in her mouth. I was thankful to finally find something she liked eating. She still doesn’t like veggies. She tolerates ones that she can feed herself but refuses to eat the baby food ones. She’s a girl after daddies own heart. She eats finger foods really well and prefers them to being fed. One night when Nick was feeding her she wanted the spoon so he gave it to her (I am still fighting her while feeding her because of it, usually I just give her another spoon because she always want the spoon). She took a bite and gave it back and they kept doing that, he handed her the spoon with the food she put it in her mouth and gave it back. Funny stuff. 

With the discovery of food and her fascination with the world in general, she has decided she would rather not nurse. I don’t agree with her new ideas so we are fighting… that is mostly a joke but seriously it’s a struggle to get her to nurse during the day. The other day Nick told me “you should get her a book she looks bored” when I was trying to nurse her. LOL, how silly would that be, if it worked I would totally do it though… :) She nurses like a champ when she is tired though so we have been nursing at night. I am ok with that though since she nurses so well. She wakes up at least once sometimes twice. Someday I might actually sleep through the night again but I think it will be many years and than I will definitely have to retrain my body because even when they all sleep longer than normal I wake up.

I was suppose to take her to the Dr. at 6 months, (she is now 8m, sheepish grin) so I am not sure how big she was or anything like that but she is a healthy little monkey and we are very thankful for our sweet girl. I am sure she won’t be overly thrilled with me because I did schedule that apt with the Dr. where she will get more of her vaccines…

I will add pictures later but I figured I will through this up for now

Christmas # 1

I am sorry I am still way behind. I had an unexpected delay in my schedule this week when I sprained my ankle in my soccer game Tuesday. Now I do everything much much slower… Hopefully it will heal quickly. So back to the blogging where I left off.

Like I said Christmas week was a busy week for me… Wed I spent the morning cleaning, doing laundry, and getting ready to fly to Georgia the next day. I also decided to have my parents Josh, Dave and Rach over for dinner and gifts. My dad told me he thought I was crazy but I figured I wanted to get the house clean anyway and this way we didn’t have to leave. My mom came over early and helped me fold and watch the kids so I could focus on the 50 things I was trying to remember and get done. We had a nice dinner and enjoyed celebrating Christmas together. Oh plus my mom and sister did all the dishes for me :)

and… a huge shout out to my incredible sister who hung around after presents and and everything to help me pack the kids. She was a huge help, especially since someone had made plans for the evening and was gone.

Here are some pictures

my mom holding my little girl

Allie loves to say “Cheese” for the camera, I did not teach her this… (seriously)Uncle Dave holding Keira girl (and also you can see my dad was there :)

my kids LOVE to run around in their undies so I got some bathrobes because I always think they must be freezing… they have hardly worn them. The one Allie is wearing was actually Williams but it says Alex on it. It’s a Buzz Light year one i  got at the thrift store a couple years ago, I figured Alex actually works for her name if she wanted it to, we call her Allie though.

I think Wills took this picture. It makes me laugh.

You may be wondering why I posted a completely black picture. Well just to show you what fun stuff ps can do. The picture next to it is my recovery in photo shop. Kinda impressive…

well that’s it for now but hopefully I will be back really soon to post about my baby girl who seriously has grown and changed so much since the last time I actually posted about her. She sits up, crawls, eats everything, and pulls herself up on all kinds of stuff. She grew up so much in one month… but more about that later.

Our Christmas

the week’s leading up to Christmas were busy for me. On Monday of Christmas week I went up and did some sewing with Chrisy. She is my sister-in-law. She actually knows how to sew so I was watching and trying to learn, at one point I got confused with something I was working on and since I was in a time crunch I figured I probably lined it up right even though it looked off and decided to sew it… you can probably guess how well that worked out, I am quickly learning to art of the seem ripper. My time crunch was due to needing to meet my sister, who was just coming into town from college, and my dad for our annual father daughter shopping trip for our mom. We have done it for at least 18 years I think and it’s one of my favorite traditions. Tuesday night was our annual family Ginger bread house decorating contest at Dan and Chrisy’s house. I LOVE IT!!! I had to leave a little early to make my Tuesday night soccer game but I got to be there for most of it. I will have to get some pictures from Chrisy because I didn’t bring the camera. It was fun.

I stole these from her facebook. Here is her title

Chrisy French Myers's Photos - Myers Family Annual Graham Cracker Gingerbread House Building Contest (AKA "Hang Out and Eat a Ton of Candy")

yup that’s right. we don’t mess around people…

Chrisy’s creation

My Vegas Chapel of love. That wasn’t my original intention but it started looking very Vegas like…

Josh’s house. we called it a frontier house… complete with an outhouse

Dave and Rach hard at work

Dan’s focused

Jonathans creation his goal, every year, most candy possible!

heathersNick’s reindeer?

Nate and Gav’s- Gav did the present

Nate’s man

Dave’s snowboarder and sledder with a Christmas tree

His snowboarder wrecked! Dave always comes up with something creative!

Rachel’s present assortment. Turned out nicely!

Dan’s, yes it is full of candy.

It’s always a ton of fun. I have more to post but I have been on the computer for awhile now so tootles for now I will fill you in on the rest of our Christmas another day.

my ramble-back to the blog

I am sorry I haven’t written in awhile. To my five faithful readers you have probably missed us. I decided to give myself a break and just enjoy the time my brother and sister were home from SoCal. I am not a huge new years resolution person probably because I am a task type person normally so I continually set goals and try to accomplish them daily, weekly, yearly, (and maybe there are several I should set and really try to accomplish so maybe I will think through that more but…) I think if I had a resolution this year it would be to relax and stop stressing unnecessarily. I am not patting my own back here, because there are many many ways I fail, but I work really hard to keep our house clean, organized, all of the above. I think that is a really good thing! I am thankful that it comes naturally, my momma trained me well. I have been realizing lately though that I think I work too hard at it. I think if I just cut myself some slack and condensed my choirs a little it might make for a more available mom. Don’t get me wrong that doesn’t mean I can live with dirty dishes and unwashed laundry or in a general mess, no no this lady can’t handle that and that would not help me be more relaxed, I guess what I am gonna try to do is have days that my choirs aren’t my focus and see if that helps give me the freedom to feel like I can just hang out with the kids and if all I accomplished that day was getting everyone dressed and fed than that’s fine. I think I demand to much of myself unnecessarily and than stress myself out because I didn’t get it done. I think I also kinda find my identity in my to do list. I take pride in being on top of everything and than get annoyed that I ran out of things to do or can’t keep up with it all. Maybe that doesn’t make sense to you but it gives me a sense of purpose and accomplishment when I get to check things off my list or discouraged when I wasn’t able to get to anything. So I guess what I am saying is I am going to keep having my list, because let’s face it I need help remember what it was I was gonna accomplish, I am going to keep my house clean but realize it doesn’t have to be spotless (I do have three kids), feed my family, do the laundry, and the dishes, and don’t forget the shopping but I am not going to let it stress me out or become my focus… because honestly it’s not what life’s about, even a stay at home wife and mommies life and I really want to remember that!!  I want our focus to be the AMAZING LOVE of God and let that permeate everything we do. Already in 2011 I have failed my family numerous times but that’s the awesome thing about God, His mercies are new each morning and I know he wants me to succeed in my service to him. So pray for me cause I definitely need it. Hope you find time to enjoy 2011.