My sister had her baby!

Penelope Lea made her arrival on December 26th at 6:45 p.m. She is 5 lbs. 13 oz. and 19 1/2 inches long. She is such a pretty baby.

My sister ended up having a c-section (after nearly 12 hours of labor). I was in the OR with her during the surgery. It was such an emotional experience. I love my niece so much and am so pround of my sister!

I took a plethora of pictures. I couldn't help myself. I told Penelope that she better get used to it with me as an Aunt. There are many many more pictures to come!

Here are a few some of my favorites...

Merry Christmas!

Well as usual I'm one of the first ones up. I can never sleep late on Christmas!

Last night we drove through Ransom Canyon to look at the lights. It was so pretty.

As I was clearing the memory off my camera this morning, I realized I have A LOT of pictures from the month of December.

Here are some of my favorites...

Wearing the hat Nana made him-


Enjoying his hot cocoa


The Family


Making Christmas cookies-


Hanging out with Daddy.. Those socks he got from his Grandma and he wanted to wear them all the time.:-)


With his cousin Albert at Albert's Christmas concert.


Our new found addiction... Rock Band!


Santa and a miniature horse! (I'll share more pics from that later.)


And last but not least a picture with Santa and Mrs. Claus~


Merry Christmas Everyone! I'm off to wake up my guys who are STILL sleeping at almost 9 o'clock!

The Polar Express

We've been very busy this Christmas season. I have a lot of pictures I need to put on here. I'm very excited because the day after Christmas my sister is having her baby!! I can't wait to meet Penelope.:-)

Anyway, the Sunday before last we went to The Polar Express. It was really cute! Holden loves the movie and book so he was really excited about the whole experience.

We all dressed in our pajamas. Funny thing is I didn't think about it until the drive there but I think the wearing pj's part was only for the kids. LOL. But oh well...we're all just big kids, right?



Holding his ticket, about to board!


Getting on the train..


Looking out the window


The helpers passing out hot cocoa and cookies..


Holden enjoying his cookie.


The North Pole (not the greatest picture because it was taken from the inside of the train, but you get the idea.)


And lastly Holden admiring the bell he got from Santa.


Since I probably won't post again until after Christmas, I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

Childless

Last night Holden spent the night at my Mom and Dad's. My sister wanted to spend some time with him. It's the first time I had been away from Holden since he was a little baby- and then I was busy catching up on my sleep so I didn't have time to think about him being away. It's hard being away from your child! I trust my sister but it still makes me anxious to be away from him. It was nice to have some alone time with Matt though. This was the first year we didn't wake up early to go Black Friday shopping. Usually we are out and about by 4 in the morning, but we decided to sleep in this time. Holden is spending the day with my sister. They are going to the mall to do some shopping, eat lunch, and see Santa Claus. I talked to Holden on the phone this morning and it was so cute. Here's how the conversation went-

Holden: Good Morning!
Me: Good Morning, did you sleep good?
Holden: sleep good
Me: Are you going to see Santa Claus?
Holden: Yep. And going to the store to get nutcracker. We don't have a car.

My sister told me that she had told him he could get a toy today. He wanted to go to Target to get the plane toy he's been wanting (Fisher Price GeoAir). My sister told him they couldn't because she doesn't have a useable car. So that's why he was telling me that. LOL.

I love talking with him on the phone. His little, sweet voice melts my heart. It sounds even better than in person, if you can imagine that.

Me and Matt are about to go shopping or at least looking to see if there are any sales left to be had. I'm sure every place is packed, but I love all the hustle and bustle of this season. It makes it feel like Christmas time!

I hope everyon had a Happy Thanksgiving. Ours was good and I have some pictures to share.. I'll post those soon.

Our Professional Pictures!

A couple of weeks ago I won a drawing for a free one pose portrait package. Of course it didn't end up being free because I can never pick just one pose! LOL. However it did save us some money and I had been wanting to get our pictures made for a while now. I'm pretty happy with how the pictures turned out. Holden wasn't all that cooperative but you couldn't tell it from the pictures!

Wordless Wednesday~ Enjoying the Fair!

Way to go Red Raiders!!! Guns Up!

Anybody that knows me knows that I'm not much of a football watching girl. I really don't enjoy football for the most part. However yesterday's game I was definitely hyped up for. Our Texas Tech Red Raiders were playing #1 in the country Texas Longhorns.

It was a HUGE game for Texas Tech. Never in the history of Tech had they beaten a #1 ranked team. Many people were favoring Texas to win but...

That didn't happen!! Texas Tech won 39-33!!!!

It was a very nerve wracking game. Tech dominated the first half but didn't do so well in the 2nd half so it ended up being a little too close for comfort.. but they pulled through!!!

I'm so happy they won. There are so many t-shirt fans for Texas and they annoy me. And sadly some of the UT fans don't even know where UT is!!! A couple years back one of our news stations was interviewing Texas fans. The reporter would ask where UT was located and some people didn't even know! Sad, huh? They just want to be Texas' fans because they win a lot.

Go Tech!!!!!

Happy Halloween!

Argh Mateys!!


The pirate's first look at himself.


Being cheesy!


Just for fun here's a picture of Holden last year dressed as a spider...


And a similar pose this year...


Holden had a great time trick or treating around the neighborhood. We even got him to say "Trick or Treat" a few times even thought he did say it very very quietly. He made out with a lot of loot! When we got home we passed out candy and Holden loved helping give out candy. He kept saying he was giving it to "his friends".:-)

I hope everyone had a Happy Halloween!!

Pumpkin Carving

The other night we finally carved the pumpkin Holden got from the corn maze. Matt and Holden were going to do it together, but it ended up being that Matt carved it and Holden watched. He wouldn't even dig out the seedy part of the pumpkin. Stinker!

Even though Holden wasn't that interested in the process of carving a pumpkin, he LOVES the result. He keeps asking to go out in the front to look at his pumpkin.:-) He wanted to name the pumpkin and chose to name it Jon's Daddy. LOL. He has a little pumpkin who he named Jon so I guess he figured the big pumpkin would be Jon's Daddy. No name.. just Jon's Daddy. This kid cracks me up!

The scooper tool was more interesting than the pumpkin at this point.


Waiting patiently...


Getting tired of waiting...


Pulling the top off the pumpkin


Look at the look on his face! He wasn't too thrilled with the thought of putting his hand in there!


"Cheese"


All done!




Happy Halloween!!

Wordless Wednesday ~ this meerkat had me cracking up!

Big Decision

We are thinking about moving to Tennessee. It's such a HUGE and daunting decision for us.

Matt's work has an opening in Nashville. I would love to be there- we would be around so many neat places. At the same time I'm really scared to go through with it.

We've been thinking about it for a week now.

I'm not sure what to do.

Hopefully we can make a decision that is good for our family. I'm just not very good at making huge decisions like this and my stomach has been in knots for days.

What to do...what to do.

Rain, rain, and more rain

Yesterday we got a torrential amount of rain. Nearly 8 inches in a 24 hour period! It is the most rain we have ever gotten in one day. Before that it was around 4 inches. So we nearly doubled the record.


It was a lazy day for us. We just stayed home to avoid going out in the water. Holden even stayed in his pj's all day long. It was fun though... a very relaxing day.

Our street turned into a river.


This was even before it got really bad. At one point the water went half way up our walk way. Yikes!

Holden was so fascinated by all the water. :-)


We are supposed to receive more rain this evening. Hopefully it doesn't flood too much. As of last night, they were about to delare a state of emergency. Some people's houses were even getting flooded out. It's crazy! Oh and I think this is a first... school was cancelled today because of all the flooding. I don't ever remember that happening before.

Wordless Wednesday

Holden was pretending to be pregnant like Aunt Tiffany. He has his Toby underneath his shirt. LOL!

Redecorating...

We've slowly been decorating our new home since moving in. The first rooms we did were the kitchen, breakfast nook, and main living area. The paint turned out totally different than what we expected. We wanted a nice, subtle green and a golden taupe color, but instead we got bright yellow and a not so pretty green. We felt like we were in a 7-up commercial with the lemon-lime scheme we had going on. LOL.

See what I mean...








So last month we took advantage of Sherwin Williams 20% off sale (which now I think they are having a 30% sale going on..figures!). We repainted that whole area. We also hung some pictures (finally!) and revamped a table. Matt had a glass table that he bought when he first moved out on his own. It has been in storage for most of the time we've been together. A child + glass table = an always smudgy table. However, we decided we wanted a "bistro" look in our breakfast nook, so we brought the table back. We spray painted the table and chairs and recovered the cushions. It turned out beautifully.

Anyway here is what it looked like after painting:




The breakfast nook is the only area that is pretty much completely done. The rest of the space needs pictures and some other touches. We are thinking of re-doing the fireplace, but that won't be for awhile. That is a big project. We want to be able to hang a t.v. over the mantle because that would give us so much more space to arrange the furniture. To do that we will need to lower the fireplace and while we're at it we thought we may take away the bricks and put stone or tile around it. But we still need to think about that some more. We also want to put wood floors throughout the bottom level of the house (except for the kitchen and our room). I can't wait to do that!