'Twas the night before Christmas...

How many of Santa's elves does it take to put together Ava's Christmas presents?? :)
I love these two pictures of the boys hard at work. Jason and I thought we did so well this year- we didn't buy a single present that required batteries. Little did we know that what we did buy would take so much work to put together. Lesson learned for next year...


Hard at work :)

Dinner with the Rainbows

Ava and I had dinner with Lauri and her parents at our favorite place- Chili's! Over the summer the Rainbows did some major renovations on their house and since I spent most of my high school years there, I was dying to see it!
It didn't disappoint- their new kitchen and family room are gorgeous! If they had had the amazing bar set-up in high school that they do now, maybe Lauri could have been talked into hosting a few more parties :)
Lauri and the Rainbows were so sweet to have Christmas presents for Ava- she loved the Elmo book, the cute pink wagon with building blocks and the aqua doodle. Ok, it was more than sweet- they spoiled her rotten! Their house must have made an impact on Ava, whenever I bring up the Rainbows, she talks about their grass- she must have really liked their backyard!

From their house we went to dinner at Chili's- it felt just like old times, except with a two year old sitting at the table :)

Hopefully we'll get together again soon!

The Rainbows and Little Miss

Of course, I was mid-sentence in this picture, but Ava looks cute and that's all that really matters anyway, right? :)

December Parties- busy, busy, busy...

December always brings Christmas parties, crazy hours at Swoozies, shopping, decorating and for us lots of birthday parties! Ava's social calendar was very full this year with back to back Saturday birthday parties for Kyle Fischer and Zach and Bryce Taneri. Kyle's 3rd birthday party was at DacKids, a fun pirate themed place that's like a big indoor sandbox. Zach (who turned 5) and Bryce (who turned 3) had a reptile themed party at JumpIts, with lots of jumpees. With all of the fun things to do at both places, Ava's favorite part of birthday parties is the birthday cake! She loves to sing happy birthday because she knows what comes after. She definitely has my sweet tooth :)

We had so much fun celebrating with all of our friends! Happy Birthday Kyle, Zach and Bryce!

Uncle Tony is Ava's favorite friend to play with!

Ava and Dylan could barely see over the table,

but there was no way they were missing out on cake!!

Yummy!

Ava climbing through the jungle gym at JumpIts

Ava going down the slide with Daddy- for some reason she is being a big scaredy cat and won't go down any slide (no matter how big) by herself.

The birthday boys Zach and Bryce

Again, patiently waiting on cake...

Dylan was driving Ava on their first date- needless to say, Jason was not happy about this! :)

Hi Jeremy and Isa!!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

One of my favorite things to get me in the holiday spirit is decorating the Christmas tree. I love unpacking the ornaments, one by one, and remembering who gave it to us or where we bought it or the memory behind it. It's actually a long and torturous process- Jason hates decorating the Christmas tree (don't tell him, but I don't really blame him!), so Gigi and Grandma came over to help. My favorite ornaments are the ones that I order each year that are personalized with whatever happens to be going on in our lives that year. We have a new house one, a new baby one, a pregnant mom one, Ava's first Christmas and a few others... I love them!

As you can see, Ava was a big helper- she especially liked hanging the gold beads around the tree and modeled them for us as jewelry. She was very opinionated about ornament placement and moved the bottom ornaments around to her liking. In fact, she moved them around almost every day- we only had two casualties the entire month. Overall, I'd say it was a successful christmas tree experience with a toddler!

Modeling the beads

Our little decorator

The final product

My favorite part of our tree

Look, I'm a Big Girl!

Ava started sitting at the table with us like a big girl. No more high chair tray for her! She loves her new placemats, personalized with her name of course :)

Our Christmas Tree Tradition

Tonight we went on our annual trip to get our Christmas tree. This is one of my favorite Christmas traditions! Ever since Jason and I were engaged, we have gone to this little tree farm on the corner of Dallas Hwy, picked out our tree and then gone to get coffee or hot chocolate from Starbucks. This year we are boycotting Starbucks (for many reasons!) and went to Duncan Donuts. Also, this is usually the first time that I get to turn on my Christmas cd's in the car, much to Jason's chagrin :)
This year was especially fun since Ava is beginning to grasp the holiday and she loved going to pick out our tree. The tree farm had lots of blow up characters and christmas lights strung around all of the trees. Ava LOVED the blow up Santa and every chance she got she would run over to him and wave and say "Hi, Santa!" She also made friends with the blow up Frosty, Rudolph and penguin. There was a nativity scene and Ava was very proud of being able to point out baby Jesus and Mary.

This night is always so much fun, I can't wait until next year!

It took every funny and distracting move I had to get Ava to look at the camera for this picture. She kept turning around to look at Santa and wave to him.

Ava and Daddy warming their hands by the fire.

"Mommy, come and chase me!"

We stayed warm by playing chase around the Christmas trees.
This was our tree we picked out!

We're Pregnant!!

We are happy to announce that we are expecting our second little baby sometime around July 05! We are so excited and thrilled to be adding to our family- we will find out on February 06th whether it will be another little girl or a boy. And for now, I am slowly gaining my energy back from the horrible month that was December and am anxiously waiting to feel those little flutter kicks so that this whole pregnancy can feel real. I cannot wait to hold another sweet little baby in my arms and can't believe that I am almost halfway through this pregnancy- it is flying by so fast! Right now I'm counting down the days until February 06 so that I can put a name on this little beanie... 18 days to go...

Long time, no blog...

Unfortunately, as I am writing this in mid-January, I am just now getting back into normal life- whatever that means :) December was the craziest of months and there were lots of nights that I was working until 2 and 3 am. I spent all of December in an exhausted fog... This was the hardest holiday season I've ever gone through at Swoozie's. The economy made us work for every sale, made customers even crazier, crankier and more demanding, and made everyone work longer hours with less help. I have never been happier to see December 26th than I was this year!
The other reason I was so tired is...