Christmas

Christmas was lots if fun. Spent Christmas Eve day with Uries baking cookies for Santa and delivering treats with grandpa. Evening at the Gma and Gpa Broughs and back to Harvey's for nativity. We had a fun morning and then spent the afternoon back at the Uries. It was great to spend the days with family!

Sibling Gifts

This year we had the kids draw names and then they had to make a gift for the sibling they picked. It was so sweet to see them all thinking hard of what would be the perfect gift and creating it. 

Hannah found a gift tag with a moving Santa she was so excited to give Matthias. She also made him a puzzle of his name. 

James wrote Hannah a poem about snow and cut out a snowflake for her. Then drew a picture of her on the gift tag.

Matthias made Hyrum a rattle with an empty toilet paper roll we found at a Gma Broughs and some rice. 

Hyrum had James so we traced his hands to make the antlers for a Pokemon that we then made a spec sheet for. 

This was a lot of fun to do this year and I hope to continue. 

Trains Trains Trains

While in Utah my mom and dad took us to a fun train store to see Santa, drive trains, and even ride one. They also have friends with a huge train set up so we went there as well. All the kids loved the train day! And now Hyrum knows exactly what train and choo choo mean so he gets really excited to see all the ones on the track near out house.

Snow!

For Christmas this year we went out to Utah. The kids were so excited to see snow and had a blast playing out in grandmas yard. They had snow ball fights and made snow men. Hyrum even got to ride around in a sleigh!

Matthias turns 7!

Matthias had a birthday! He turned 7 this year and I can't believe how big he has gotten. Currently he loves Minecraft so he had a Minecraft cake and also got some Minecraft paper craft stuff. Also Legos and a new Lego game.

He is still so Matthias...crazy, happy fun all the time.

Love this guy!

We Love New York

Taylor had a conference out in NY during November and since he had trips every other week all semester he asked me to come out and meet him at the end of his last trip. It was a really quick visit to NY, I arrived Tuesday afternoon and we left Thursday night but we managed to do a lot and have a ton of fun. And it was cold of course, but we totally survived and wore a ton of layers.

We stayed in a itty bitty room in a hotel right off Times Square so we wandered around there...visiting the Hersey store for James and somehow going to the giant ToysRUs all three of the days we were in NY. We took the ferry past the Statue of Liberty, wandered around NY and stopped at cemetery because of course I always have to visit the cemeteries. We found some good food and some okay food. 

Went to Little Italy, the Empire State Building, the Manhattan Temple, Grand Central Station, the MET, the 9-11 memorial, Central Park. We also found the most amazing pizza place ever crammed in a hole in the wall just down the street from the MET. Eating there at 4 pm on Thursday with a whole bunch of random locals was one of the highlights of the trip for me. And Central Park was our favorite spot to visit...the one bit of NY city that isn't city. Go figure. And we found an awesome castle in the middle of the park. 

Taylor got a stiff neck starting on Wednesday so he had a hard time looking around. At one point he couldn't turn his head at all so he would have to turn his whole body to look at me. And at Grand Central Station he couldn't even look up to see the cool constellations on the ceiling so I took and picture and showed him. While we were standing under them. Poor guy.

Super fun. Such wonderful friends to take our kids for 3 days! And then we got home 1 am Friday morning and moved out on Saturday. Because we're crazy like that. 

Thanksgiving

We moved just in time to unpack and be ready for Thanksgiving. Got in on Saturday and had Thanksgiving Thursday. I had everything unpacked and so I was happy. And calm. Somewhat. =] 

The leaves we hung on the cupboards when we got the key to the apartment the week before we went to NY and moved so they were the first thing in the house. Besides the cockroaches. Haha. Jk

Taylor invited Jiong from his group at school and Jiong's wife Lily who is expecting. It was fun to try to explain to them why it was necessary to eat more food than you could possibly hold. And then they skipped out on pie saying they were too full. What??! The must not have internalized "the eat more food they you can possibly hold" conversation. 

And then of course we put up the tree. =]