Christmas Morning

We did the third annual Christmas Eve sleepover at my parents house again this year. Sue and Dave ended up sleeping at their house because they had some last minute wrapping to get done. At least that's what they told us, but I'm fairly certain it was because they wanted to sleep in their own bed. What party poopers. The rest of us had a good night. Becky and I fell asleep with the kids and I've heard that the rest of them stayed up and played cards. I'm told they finished the wrapping but who knows what really went on. :) Christmas morning I woke my family up around 7:30 and heard the rest of the crew stirring downstairs. I sent Hannah and Emerson and Madison in to wake my parents up. They really do a good job. Madison kind of stood back and took it all in. She's not as...what's the word I'm looking for...obnoxious...as my girls. :) It goes something like this...(running loudly up the stairs) NONNIE...PAPA...(throwing open their bedroom door)...IT'S TIME TO WAKE UP...(standing bedside)...GET UP, GET UP!!! SANTA CAME, SANTA CAME! They really do an excellent job. :)

The kids were all so excited once they saw all the presents under the tree. Can you see the excitement on Brittany's face?

Emerson quickly found her trike from Santa.

All the grand-girls. :) That's the tree top behind Caitlin, not her hair.

The grand kids. Poor Spencer, he slept in his contacts and was having a REALLY hard time opening his eyes. :)

We love Christmas pajamas!The first present opened was from the Pohl family, more specifically Daisy. Emerson LOVED it...a framed picture of our favorite pup!

Hannah got what she asked for...an American Girl doll. That Santa, he rocks!

This is what Emerson did for the rest of the morning, just sat back and took it all in. She was really mellow, a little too mellow if you ask me.

After presents we had breakfast...pancakes, hash browns, eggs, bacon and sausage. Becky picked up these super cute pancake molds from Williams-Sonoma. There is a reindeer, an elf and a snowman. They were so cute, especially if you put powdered sugar on them...it looked like snow. :)

We all had a wonderful Christmas. The girls were completely spoiled but my husband would have it no other way. Christmas is by far his favorite time of year! We say it every year but next year we really will scale back. :)

Up next...Christmas dinner in Issaquah.

Christmas Eve

I'm not too happy with the quality of the video but it'll just have to do. There were too many pictures just to put them on here...a slide show was a must! :) Enjoy

One of my favorite pictures is Hannah with her Littlest Pet Shop from Ashlyn.

If you look real close you can see that her eyes are watering up. She was SO excited to get a Littlest Pet Shop that it nearly brought her to tears. That's my girl alright!

Tutu Cute!

Someone in our house is 2 and is very excited about it!

We had a quiet little birthday party for Emerson last Tuesday, just the four of us. We'll be celebrating with the family next weekend. She's requested a Mickey/Minnie party. :) Are you sitting down? I made (yes I said, I made) homemade macaroni and cheese for the birthday girl. It's by far her favorite thing to eat other than chocolate. I was really impressed with my mad macaroni skills if I might say so. I used Tom's girlfriends recipe. I laugh because Hannah has started calling her his girlfriend. I better set her straight before she starts talking at school. :) Back to the birthday girl. Hannah helped me blow up balloons and they were by far the highlight of the evening. Emerson loves balloons. :)

She had fun opening presents once she figured out that there were fun things inside.

Hannah was so excited for Emmie to open the presents from her. Hannah picked out two puzzles and a Minnie Mouse coloring book. Emmie LOVED them.

Her big gift from us was a Tag Jr. She loves to play with Hannah's Tag so we figured she'd like the Jr version of it. And, we were right. She loves to "read" on her own. The clothes...she wasn't so excited about. :)

Then there was cake. You can tell she's the second child. Notice the candles? Come on, Jamie, really?! She didn't mind. What she did mind was having to wait for us to sing to her before she blew them out. She blew them out 4 times before we stopped re-lighting them. We're quick like that.

Happy Birthday to our frosting loving Monkey.

The big 4-0

My sister has an amazing friend named Charlotte. Charlotte offered to host Becky's 40th birthday bash the weekend before Christmas. When most of us would be going crazy trying to get ready for Christmas she was happily hosting a party. Maybe the crazy part is just me, I don't know. :) Charlotte and her husband Jay have an AMAZING house. It's the same house Hannah and I went to for the Halloween party. It's a perfect party hosting house. Lots of open space with a big kitchen and plenty of room for guests. Charlotte took care of everything. Invitations, decorations, food, drinks and the cake. I offered my services more than once to her but she insisted that she had it all under control. Even Rob didn't have anything to do other than write Charlotte a check for the food/drinks and make sure they got there on time. I mentioned she was an amazing friend, right? An amazing friend for an amazing sister.

I felt really bad for Becky. She had been battling the "crud" for almost 5 weeks and was on day 3 of antibiotics. It was her first real feel good day in quite a while. For not feeling so well she sure looked beautiful in her pretty, new, party dress. :)

Charlotte started off the toasts. I laugh at this picture. I would have loved to know what was going through Rob's mind before Charlotte handed over the floor to him. :)Lisa toasting Beck...they've been friends for 30 years!Julie, John, Sean and Lisa.I'm upset that I didn't have my flash on. Even though it's terribly dark, I love this picture of Beck.OK...how sweet is this. Rob helped her blow out the candles. Apparently, he thought she might be too old to blow ALL those candles out. Just kidding. She was recovering from the crud and needed a little extra lung power. I'm sure it had nothing to do with her new age. :)

It was a fun night celebrating Becky. Our girls went to Grandma Judy's house so that we could party all night long and not have to worry about them being bored (or you could also read that as...worried they would destroy the Devine's house). They had a fun time and Emerson did really well sleeping there. I was a tad bit worried about how that would go, but Hannah reassured me that she would "nuggle" with her if she was scared. Those two are too cute. :) The highlight of their sleepover was that they got to see Santa and his reindeer, Dasher. Imagine that! And, if you ask Emmie about Dasher she'll tell you all about how he pooped. The girl is obsessed with poop. :) I'm sure she'll thank me for that someday.

Christmas Cookies

You'll have to forgive me for my lack of blogging. The last week and a half were an absolute blur. I honestly don't think I could tell you what we did if it weren't for the pictures. I hope my family remembers that 30 years from now. My pictures are my memory. I'll get back to my regularly scheduled posts now and hopefully stay on top of them. :)

If you'll remember waaayy back to the beginning of December (a long time ago, I know) we made Christmas cookies. Well...those yummy cookies sat in our freezer for a week or so until we finally got around to decorating them. The girls had fun. Hannah loved creating new colors and Emerson enjoyed eating the frosting or should I say licking the frosting off of the cookies. We only gave her two cookies and her own frosting, so in case you're worried about eating one of Emerson's cookies, don't. Her cookies and frosting were consumed that evening and there was no cross contamination. Fear not! :)

She made purple!Nana...that's you on the phone. Remember? :)The finished product and boy were they yummy.

Santa is going to love these bad boys.

Eastham Foster Christmas Party

Tis the season for work holiday parties. This year Tom's office did something fun. We went to a cooking class. We divided into groups and made dinner. We had a delicious pork tenderloin, squash soup, sauteed green beans, mashed potatoes and an apple tart. I volunteered to head up the dessert team and Tom lead the mashed potato group and the rest of the groups had their leaders assigned. :) The cooking instructor took care of the main course while the rest of us took over the small kitchen.

My awesome dessert team, take 1. Nevermind the fact that Rick is about to take Sarah out with the knife. Poor Sarah...he must have known you would throw out his potato in a few weeks. Hee hee...

Ok...take 2. Rick, Sarah & StephanieDon't mess with this mama-to-be... Hee hee

The soup girls...Teresa & Sarah (yes, there are two Sarah's in this small office)Tom is in awe of Stephanie's husbands mad chopping skills.Scott wasn't too sure about Sarah's baked apple surprise.This is where we ate our dinner. It happened to be a garage (notice the freezer on the right) and this particular night happened to be one of the coldest nights in the area. We all ate in our coats and probably should have had hats and gloves, but we managed.

My only complaint for the evening was that by the time we actually got around to eating our hard earned dinner, it was cold. Really cold. Dispite being cold, the food was all really good.

The Jumper

This outfit was at one time Kim's (Tom's sister). I'm not sure on the story behind the jumper like who made it, but it's been passed down to several girls in the family. After Kim, Tom's cousin Stashia wore it and then kept it for her little girl Olivia. Olivia then passed it to Hannah who passed it to Emerson who passed it back to Olivia's sister, Laila. Got it all?? For as many houses as it's been to, it's in excellent condition. I forgot to pull it out in time for Emerson to actually wear it, so I had to quickly put her in it and snap some pictures. It's clearly too short for her but she was sure cute in it!

It didn't really come up to her knees. It was more of a cropped look on her. :) Emerson is 23 months in those pictures and below, Hannah is 16 months. Probably when I should have put Emerson in it. Oops.

Look at the lack of hair on little Hannah. Aww...she's so cute.

The rest of the Spokane/Idaho weekend

Friday morning Tom and I had great intentions of hitting the Black Friday sales, but we were just too tired to get up at 4:30. Instead we headed out kid-less about 8 and went to Target. We were still able to take advantage of the good deals. There wasn't really anything we needed to be there early for. No TVs on our shopping list this year. :) We headed back around noon and spent the rest of the day with the Stinebaugh clan, minus Kellie and her family. Caryl and Tom made another Thanksgiving dinner. It's important to have leftovers and we didn't have any from Thursday's dinner. There were over 40 people at our Thanksgiving dinner and we actually ran out of some food...which makes leftovers a hard thing to come by. :) We had a really nice relaxing day just hanging out with the family. It's nice to spend more than just a few hours with them since we really don't get to see them that often.

The three 2004 babies.

Logan and Brady

Robin, Kenny Jr & Kenny

Emerson was "helping" Jakob. Saturday we headed over to the Pohl's house for Eddie's "surprise" party. He had a pretty good idea what was going on but we had fun celebrating him. :)

We got him a Costco box of Brownie mix to go with his new All Edge Brownie pan.
This one is for you Caryl. Hee Hee. :)Happy Birthday!After all of the Saturday festivities, Sunday was pretty low key. We hung out with the Pohls and then headed back to Caryls house for a quiet evening. Emmie and I fell asleep on the couch pretty early and Tom, Hannah & Caryl all watched a sappy Christmas movie. Monday morning we spent time with Caryl before heading out to visit Tom's aunt Mary Kay. We didn't head out of town until around 4, which made for a late evening but it was well worth it. Our trips over the mountain really do go entirely too fast.