Thursday, January 5, 2017

December little things.

Before I move on to a new year, I wanted to empty my December memories onto one final page.
I found these snapshots of our busy December in my phone.
 
We bought a new tree and found the perfect place for it.
I added a little Mexican feel with Loteria (Mexican Bingo) cards and dolls.


I hosted a craft night for a small group of girls. We each painted our own snowflakes.


We started a tradition of opening one book present each night.
I had 15 Christmas books wrapped and she picked one to open and read each night.
 Her favorite was Mickey's Christmas Carol.
Which, was a good thing since a local church had a play of the Christmas Carol.
We went all dressed up (her idea) and sat in the third row where she was captivated.
She clapped after the songs and waited in anticipation for Scrooge!

We made plenty of trips to the library. This was a long trip since she decided she wanted to "read" every. single. one.
 We went on a tour of lights in the cab of my dad's truck.
 In Iowa, she was in puppy heaven!
There were four dogs and she loved on every one of them. Gave hugs and kisses. Played tug-o-war. tag. read to them. She woke up most mornings saying "I wanna go play with the dogs"
We made it to Iowa in one day - 13 hours - with 3 stops. Tried to keep her busy but she would have been fine with movies for 13 hours.


Frozen yoga. She got everyone in on the action.
 This was the year of books. She probably got 15 new books and had most of them memorized by the new year.
 All bundled up for the Iowa winter.
 just beautiful! The kid is kinda cute too!

One of her favorite new toys was a cleaning set.
She keeps busy with the spray bottle, towel, scrubber, etc for at least 30 minutes per session.
I finally did go buy natural cleaning products to put in that spray bottle.
The kitchen has never smelled so good!

 Her other favorite toy is this frog hopper game - from the Dollar Tree.

So many memories were not captured on camera.
It was a great year for us, especially in a new home and we can't wait to see what 2017 brings!

Tuesday, January 3, 2017

Our First Christmas Eve.

We have two AMAZING families!
We alternated holidays before we had Reyna and since then, we have made an extra effort to see both (San Antonio and Iowa) at Christmas. We are blessed with university scheduled jobs so we have lots of time to travel. And we still hope to do that BUT we felt rushed and drained and lost at Christmas. Between packing and wrapping and opening and unloading and driving and packing again (you get the pictures) we felt like the meaning of Christmas was getting lost. So we decided to slow down.
This was hard. for me. My family has a HUGE party on Christmas Eve and I LOVED it growing up. I still love it but the biggest difference is that we live 3 hours away so ... anyways...we skipped the party this year with grandiose expectations of what Christmas Eve would be like.
 
We'll go to Christmas Eve service!
We'll bake cookies for Santa!
We'll watch a Christmas movie!
We'll read the Christmas Story!
We'll wake up and open presents from Santa!
 
Well....we did it! All of it!
 
We had a candlelight service at UBC.
Then headed home to make cookies.
I didn't get a picture of the finished product but they were snake cookies with blue icing and sprinkles.



Then we watched Mickey's Christmas Carol. This was also her favorite Christmas book this year.

 
We read the Christmas story at bedtime and woke up with santa on the mind.
Reyna was greeted with gifts from Santa and a stocking filled with goodies.
 

 
We spent the morning opening gifts slowly and playing with all our new toys/books/tent.
We also had ice cream smoothies (it was 70 degrees out)
 
Some of her Santa gifts included:
A skateboard
a tent
a bear pillow
a doll
 
we exchanged gifts and Reyna me a set of light up swords.
She got her Papa, a set of light sabers.
hmmm. I don't know how that happened...
but she sure is cute.
 
We loved our little Christmas. It was calm and meaningful and just what we needed in our new home.
We woke up bright and early to head to Iowa the next morning.