Chase turns 9!

It's that time of year again for birthday celebrations! We have 2 birthdays in January

right after Christmas, so it's like the party and gifts and celebrations keep on going. 

Chase turned 9 this year! Wow! He's growing up so fast it seems. He's such a witty,

funny, imaginative kid. He loves pretending to do martial arts, tell jokes, play 

with legos, and build science projects. He's a great big brother, even when Claire

throws his legos around. He's teaching her to color and it's so cute.

He's very artistic and loves to paint, draw, write, and make movies with friends.

We're so glad he's a part of our family. Happy Birthday buddy!

First up presents and breakfast,

 then continuing the tradition of chuck-e-cheese

Grant did this after he fell asleep, and he thought it was hilarious

 

He was so nice to let Claire help him open his gifts....

He absolutely loves fire, and doesn't like cake, so he always asks for donuts instead.

And requests that he lights his own candles. Multiple times.

Gotta get all those birthday wishes in. 

We ate pizza and hamburgers this day and had lots of donuts. And candles.

 Happy Birthday Chase!

Christmas

I'm finally getting around to getting all the hundreds of Christmas

pictures organized! I LOVE Christmas and take WAY too many

pictures of the things we did.

The boys had almost 3 weeks off. Claire was in HEAVEN. Then Jason worked 

from home quite a bit for weeks since his office was moving buildings. 

We all loved that just as much.

And we had family in town for almost a month, so we had such a great break! 

We did lots of fun things and as usual, loved celebrating Christmas.

We did a lot of park time, had fun finding our elf, saw Christmas lights,

made a gingerbread house, made a Whataburger gingerbread house (which

won our church decorating contest!!!), delivered presents to friends, decorated

cookies, made a lot of good treats (cinnamon rolls!), and watched lots of movies. 

It was hard to go back to reality. We're so grateful for all we have, especially 

this time of year. We hope you all had a very merry Christmas!

One of the best parts was seeing Claire SO excited for everything Christmas!

The tree got rearranged every single day. It was so cute. I remember when the

boys did that, and I'll miss it when she grows out of it.

She was NOT that impressed with Santa....

But LOVED the cookie she got afterwards!

 

 

 

We have a tradition in our family that if you ask our elf, you can hold him. (I just can't

not let them hold him when they're little.) Chase LOVED holding him and watching

TV with him and napping with him when he was little.  And now Claire loves him. 

So if you treat him nice, you're able to hold him. For a little bit. :) 

 

Gingerbread train! Claire said CHOO CHOO! about 100 times!

Jason brought home donuts from work and the kids were in heaven!

 

It was nice weather a lot, so we walked to the park lots of times.  

 Christmas morning!!!

 Gotta have the silly string tradition....

 

Grant got some geodes the whole family thought was fun to crack open....

Merry Christmas!