New Year - 2012

2012 is off to a great start!  We returned from our trip to Ohio on December 31st.  While in Ohio we had a great time.  We enjoyed a very relaxing vacation, spent time with the Diamond/Suttles clan, and the kids were in heaven with so much family to play with for a week.  Thank you Grandma/pa D for such a wonderful time.

As much as we enjoyed Ohio, on January 1, 2012 we were happy to wake up in Austin :-)

Matt and I celebrated 7 years of marriage with a nice dinner date on the 1st.  We reflected on the past seven years - lots of memories and the years have flown by for us.

For 2012 we are happy to live in an amazing city, Austin TX...  

 ...and we are lucky to parent Jack, Ainsley, and Kara, who make us smile, laugh, and count our blessings every day.

Merry Christmas 2011

Christmas was a magical holiday this year with so many exciting moments for the kids.  Here are a few of the highlights of our Christmas weekend.

Jack & Kara made a gingerbread house together at the Austin Children's Museum:

The day before Christmas eve we visited the Zilker Christmas tree.  The kids enjoyed drinking hot chocolate and running underneath the lights.

The Zilker tree is not actually a tree, it is just lights hung from an Austin moon tower. The kids decided it looks more like a volcano than a tree...inside the Zilker volcano:

After the Zilker volcano we stayed the night in a hotel downtown (we won a free nights stay in a raffle a couple of months ago).  All five of us stayed in one room together and had a blast.  It had been a long time since we stayed in a hotel together.  This pic is in the hotel lobby on Christmas Eve morning:

Christmas eve we baked and decorated sugar cookies:

Christmas morning was full of excitement and fun! This was our first year to do stockings and they were a big hit.

Pa bought Ainsley a remote-control T-Rex..."Roar!"

Kara pulled in a lot of princess loot and was in princess heaven!

Our family Christmas lunch:

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Happy Birthday, Ainsley!

Today Ainsley Ann turned 5 years old!

Ainsley enjoyed a really great day today.  We started the morning with special presents from Grandma and Grandpa D and the Lowman's.  After Sunday school and lunch we got to the much anticipated highlight of the day -- a party with her friends from school at Pump It Up, full of bouncy houses and slides. 

A few pictures from the party:

Tonight we had a small family party with a pinata.  Since it was raining and very cold outside the poor T-Rex had to hang from the second floor. 

Ainsley has literally been asking about her birthday for six months.  Tonight when she was going to bed I said, "Did you have a good birthday?"  She replied with, "Yes.  When is my next birthday?"  Gotta love a child's love of their birthday :-)

Deck the Halls

Oh what fun it is to decorate for the Christmas season!  The kids are having a blast and honestly we are too. 

The decorating began the day after Thanksgiving.  We dug out our old tree of yester-year (yes, we are fake tree people) and found our old box of ornaments that we hadn't seen in four years. Not only are we fake tree people, turns out we are lazy fake tree people -- our fake tree is pre-lit.  Just put the three pieces of the tree together, plug it in, and whalah!  Instant tree! We had forgotten all about the pre-lit feature and were happy to save the extra hour of Matt stringing lights, Kim taking them off and re-stringing them, and then finally letting the ornaments join the party. 

This was the first year that Jack actually participated in the tree decorating.  Jack has hit a warp-speed growth spurt over the past month and this was a fun moment for us to watch since it is big deal for him to participate in this kind of group activity. The funny part was he thought all of the ornaments should be in one cluster...

It was a lot of fun to see all of our old ornaments.  Such good memories!

The finished product (complete with our homemade tree skirt, which is a very long family story):

Matt played Christmas songs on the piano as princess Kara danced around the tree:

Matt has a true love for large Christmas yard art.  I fought this love of his for seven years, and this year he finally won.  Giant inflatable Santa (complete with lights) now lives in our front yard and greets us (and our non-Christmas-celebrating neighbors) every day. 

Ho, ho, ho...

Next up was tree trimming along 360 with our besties, the Lowman's.  We picked a large tree along 360 near Spicewood and let the kids go crazy with decorations.  Below is Jordan and Ainsley hard at work:

Kara in action:

Our stockings are now hung by the chimney with care...

Lastly, our Elf on a Shelf (huge thank you to Marie for introducing us!) is here.  Our elf is named Milky Chippy.  He perches himself in a new place each morning and the kids look for him in earnest as soon as they wake up. 

Happy Thanksgiving

We had a really great Thanksgiving holiday this year.  To kick off the holiday we were able to enjoy an old tradition the weekend before Thanksgiving -- Friends Thanksgiving (after a three year break).  We enjoyed sharing an evening of food and laughter with great friends.

For Thanksgiving day we planned a menu of our favorite holiday foods. The menu we decided on: fried turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, sweet potato casserole, corn, asparagus, cranberry sauce...and for dessert pecan and apple pies.  I had so much fun cooking everything, but I was most excited about the pies.  I love homemade pies :-)

 Ainsley helped dad brine and season the turkey:

Here is the turkey (nicknamed for the day "Batman") ready for his hot bath (and hanging out with good company of pies and wine!):

Jack hung outside with dad while he fried the turkey:

Some good friends of ours joined us for Thanksgiving dinner.  We had a kids table and an adults table, which the kids were very excited about:

After dinner we let the kids make smores outside:

There is so much we are thankful for and many people we owe thanks to in our lives.  This was a fantastic Thanksgiving and tomorrow we officially start decorating for Christmas... 'tis the season!