Feelin the Love

Back in the day, when we used to have cable, I would spend my days watching HGTV and to be honest a whole lot of trashy TV, hello Kardashians.  Anyways, when we got ready to put our house on the market I remembered my HGTV days and all the house selling shows I used to watch and knew I needed to unpersonalize (not a word but you know what I mean) our house.  Luckily that was in the fall so down came all of the pictures and up went our autumn decorations.  Time passed and we still owned the house but December was easy peasy since we could just decorate for Christmas.  Now January came along and I was stuck.  I didn't have any decorations besides our regular family stuff and according to HGTV that's a big no no.  

I figured we were close enough to Valentines we'd just decorate for that but problem number 1: I have no valentine decorations and problem number 2: we are putting the smack down on our debt from last year so I had no budget.  I was commiserating this problem with Hunt (Chris is probably glad he's gone at times such as these) and the girl is a genius.  She promptly replied "Let's make something" and then began waving her arms and going off about paper, glue, and cutting. 

 A few hours later we created this for our front room.

I love it! 

And apparently I'm not the only one because we are under contract again and set to close the end of this month!  Cross your fingers for us that this time it works out.

Heaven is Here

Life is so much better when Chris is around.  Not that it's awful when he's gone, but when he is home it's heaven.

Maybe that has a lot to do with the fact he takes us to places that feel like heaven to me.

And he's not such a wimp and doesn't care about going out in the cold.

 He doesn't care about walking around on frozen ice that is completely solid and safe but still freaks me out.

Plus he teaches the girls all of the important things in life.  Like how it's okay to spend 15 minutes picking out the perfect accessories to go with your 22.

And then afterwards I get to listen to 15 minutes of how we need to buy a new gun to go better with our accessories and match our clothes.

With these two little girls and their daddy I really do have my own little version of heaven.

Second Christmas

 Since Chris was originally not going to spend Christmas with us, I left the majority of the girls presents home.  Which meant Santa got to come to our house around three in the morning after driving home from California.  That was fun times! 

 Our girls were so, so, so spoiled this year.  They got so many horsey, barbie, princess things it's unreal.  Thank you to all of the people who love them so much!

After opening presents at our house we got to go spend the night at Grandma and Grandpa Phillips's.  Every year they make something amazing for Christmas and this year was no exception.  The girls got the most adorable nightgowns and a puzzle table!  Doing puzzles at their house is our favorite past time and our puzzle table is used constantly now.

The next day we went up to Temple Square to see the lights.  Pais hated it!  I think the shock of going from 75 degree California weather to 30 degree Utah weather was a little much for her.

 So we spent a lot of time indoors after that playing with our new toys and adjusting to colder temperatures.

Our Christmas Miracle

The night of Christmas Eve was the longest night ever!  The girls refused to sleep.  Mainly Pais who was a crazy person and kept waking Hunt up in the process.  Around 4 I finally gave up and took them downstairs to watch a movie.  Hooray for Christmas movies being on 24/7 that night because I fell asleep and who knows how long they stayed up after that.  At 7 when I woke up they were passed out on the couch.  I guess we have finally reached the "christmas is way too exciting to sleep stage" of life.  Little did they now we had the best present for them.

Chris was scheduled to work over Christmas this year.  Super sad but I think the fact we told Hunt Santa was coming twice really made not having dad around easier to deal with.  Luckily (sort of) for us Chris ended up sliding into another truck during a snow storm a few days before Christmas.  His company policy is to suspend all employees after they wreck until they can take a positive drug test.  Since it happened to fall over the holiday his drug test didn't make it through in time and we found out Christmas Eve night that he could come home for Christmas.

That night he drove 6 hours to Bozeman, hopped on a flight to Seattle, then another flight to Portland, and finally the last flight he landed in San Jose around noon Christmas day.  We didn't let the girls know he was coming and I just told them I had to go get a really big present.  When he walked in Pais could not stop laughing and Hunt wouldn't let him go.  It was the best and I'm so glad we were able to end the day together as a family.

 One of our Christmas presents from Uncle Mike was tickets to the aquarium.  We found out going to the aquarium over a holiday is a bad idea, the place was packed.  Instead of looking at fish we spent the day taking a million awkward self photos of ourselves.

 During this awkwardness Hunt lost her shoe and Pais was determined to put it back on her foot.  Sometimes I really feel like we are a "special" family but at least we have each other!

We also took the girls to their favorite park.  They got brave this time and wanted to try out the zipline.  Their faces were hilarious!

 Best Christmas Ever!

December Favorites

I'm slowly getting around to posting about the holidays at our house.  It's coming in segments and this first one is all about the different things we did that were really fun and could be a post on their own but I'll just show pictures instead.

 We spent a lot of time in the snow! This is the first year in three years that I haven't had a husband home all winter long who takes over 100% of all outdoor winter chores.  I actually have to shovel and it stinks!  Since I always have my two little helpers with me we went and bought them their very own pink snow shovels and now pretty much everything we do revolves around using our shovels.  The Utah Lake boat harbor and the random cattle slaughtering place we found out west can thank us for plowing their snow.

 We went to Thanksgiving point to see Rudolph again.  Pais wasn't a very big fan.  She wasn't a fan of her cookie from Slurp after either so she must have been having a bad night.

 We decorated three different Christmas trees this year.  We're practically professionals now.  We'll be offering our services to the public next year because every single one of your ornaments on the same branch is going to be the "in" thing.

 Poor, poor Molly was reunited with her BFF Huntley.

 

We went to Christmas in the park in San Jose.  Auntie April was super nice and took the girls on lots of fun rides.

 We decorated aka ate lots of frosting a gingerbread Christmas tree.

 We had fun and got super spoiled at our family Christmas Eve party.  I didn't take any pictures of this besides a few of us getting ready in the bathroom before the party.  Super lame.

Last of all we had lots of fun hanging out at Poppy and Annie's.  They always have the best treats and Annie treated the girls to their very own pedicures. 

Stay tuned for the next segment in Christmas and our very own Christmas miracle!