New Year!

Was your New Years Eve as wild as ours?

Jordan had to work, boo!
But I salvaged my night by getting the girls to bed at a way decent hour, watching a couple of my FAVORITE movies













and working on a puzzle.
You're probably feeling pretty jealous of how cool I am, but I thought it was the perfect evening!
Here's to 2012, it's gonna be great!

Picturesplosion: Christmas

We spent the days surrounding Christmas up in Washington with Grandma and Grandpa and Auntie Kirsten.
It was so lovely. Just perfect.

This one happened soon after we got home.

I love this gaptoothed little goofball.

The Haps

Some of the Christmasey fun we've been up to:
After last years LENGTHLY visit to Santa in which we spent a looooong time looking for parking, and got to him right as he was leaving for lunch, and then waited an hour to wait in a loooooong line when he got back, I decided this year we were going to do things a little bit differently and I think we landed upon a new tradition.
Jordan has been working lots of extra shifts lately (he is so good) and so Mondays are kind of the only free day we have as a family, so we kind of just kept LaRue home from school that day... I'm the administrators favorite I know it. We got to the mall even before Santa was there for the day, so we stopped at Barnes and Noble to pick up a new Christmastime book.

Then we headed over to see Santa, I think we were third in line. Loved that.
Then came perhaps one of my favorite parts of the morning. We headed just down the road and enjoyed a Krispy Kreme breakfast- DEFINITELY doing that again next year:)
Snowman doughnuts are so cute.
As are the girls who eat them.

Two other random things:

One: girls ready for church a couple of Sundays ago. I mainly wanted to show you our special little tree this year. My friend Salli was kind enough to loan us one of the tops of her artificial trees because thanks to that behemoth of a treadmill, I just couldn't figure out WHERE we would put a normal sized tree.
I think I've got it figured out for next year:)

And Two:
Super good news for these Newbys.....
We got a new (to us) car!My pictures are not great, but I LOOOOOVE it, and think it's so beautiful. It's a VW Passat Wagon, with just enough room for the five of us. I never thought I would be so stoked to have a station wagon, but I totally am! And we've still got the van as a second car for as long as it hangs on.
I will tell you that we don't just have buckets of money lying around (shocking, right?!) so we now have car payments, which we've never really had before, and that makes me nervous, so here's hoping that we're not living in it in the next couple of months;)

So those are the haps around here. I hope everyone is having a lovely December so far- I can't believe it's already the 13th. Yikes!

In Which We Learn That I Should be a Professional Photographer

Oh wait, that's right, I really REALLY shouldn't.

Oh well, even if I take terrible pictures, I have some very pretty (and maybe a little bit silly) daughters.

Hooray for Christmas dresses!

Oh, and thanks to Angie for the super cute hair clips, they're perfect!

I Believe in Olive Fingers

I know, I know, there is NO excuse for her hair, I'm just a terrible mom.

I just love how she says calls olives, oblibs.
In my humble opinion, she's pretty stinking cute.

I hope everyone had a lovely Thanksgiving!

Picture Day

I keep telling her to stop growing up so fast, but she doesn't listen to me.

Pretty, headstrong little girl of mine.

Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice!

Here are our Halloweenie Powerpuff Girls!

I'm pretty sure nobody really got what they were unless we told them, and then it was more of an "Oh, yeah, I see it." Kind of a thing. But we knew what they were, and we thought they were pretty dang cute.

These pictures are not so great, we've managed to misplace the camera again, so all we've got are phone cameras which are not always the best.
Oh well, I hope you had a fun Halloween with buckets and buckets of candy!

The Halloween Trail!

You know how around Christmastime we always go to the Christmas Trail? Well every October the same place also has a Halloween trail. We've never been in October before so this year our friends, the Thompsons decided to take us!
It was so much fun going together!
Here are about a thousand pictures to prove it:)

Matilda Messy Coat. We waited outside while everyone else went through the spooky castle. Tillie was a little bit timid this whole trip.

Adelaide riding a haunted tractor

Jail Birds.
I suspected it might come to this:)

Cute little felon.

Scary!

Spooked!

Eek!

LaRue was pretty bossy on this trip, here she is trying her hardest to get Adelaide to look at the camera. Just one example of many...

Modeling in the pumpkin patch.
So pretty!

More pumpkin patch modeling, this is a more serious look.

We really did have such a good time, and there was NO drama between any of the kids, success!
Thank you, Thompsons!

Bones

Another Halloweeny craft with my girlies!
Great picture, right?
We made these paper plate skeletons while listening to some kids Halloween music on Pandora.
So fun.
After Tillie had cut out the skull, the collar bone and maybe an arm bone she informed me, "Paper plates is boring." Her skeleton was more of a team effort after that:)

Blood at the Pumpkin Patch

On Monday we headed over to the Pumpkin Patch for some Halloweenish fun. We went to Lee Farms where we've had a great time in the past but I have to say that this year I was not impressed.
Rand, Laurie and Grandma Joyce met us there which makes everything more fun, so that was really nice, but the main thing the girls were looking forward to were the pony rides, and they weren't doing pony rides on Monday. D'oh!
Well okay, no pony rides, we can deal with that.

We took some silly pictures

We had some bouncy castle fun
And then we headed over to visit with the goats, that sounds pretty wholesome, right?

Well, all I can say is goats aren't all nice. Moments after these pictures were taken, the mama goat headbutted my sweet precious Adelaide right in the face! She fell to the ground and had a big ol' nosebleed and everything!

I do NOT love goats.

My sweet little baby, holding her little pumpkin. Please note the blood on her face. Tragic. There was more, Grandpa did a good job helping us clean her up. Poor. Little. Thing.

All of the activities were supposed to run until six, but it was only five thirty-ish and they weren't running the cute little barrel tractor train thing anymore. Come on guys, what gives!?
We consoled ourselves by climbing on a different tractor.
After enjoying some hot chocolate and looking at the baby chicks we headed home, a little colder, and a little wiser. I think next year we'll be visiting a different pumpkin patch - no goats.

It's October?

I love this time of year!
And I usually love to decorate for this time of year, nothing fancy or anything, but I've got a box of stuff that I like to pull out.
But I'm not so much feeling it this year. And that is because the box is buried somewhere in what I like to call "The Closet of Doom."
I know, I know, there are absolutely no excuses for it to be like that, but it is like that, and I'm not planning on cleaning it anytime soon, so there.

So I picked up two bags of spiderwebs and on Sunday night the girls and I worked on some black pipe cleaner spiders (found via Pinterest - loving it!)
From the moment we made these little guys, the girls have been asking every half hour, when were we gonna put up their web? Well, today was the day!

So here it is, PROOF that we did a Halloweenie craft, and now have more Halloween decoration than just the Halloween themed box of Kleenex I picked up last week.Yeah, I give it two or three days before the wind and little hands pull it all down, and only one day before it's infested by actual spiders.
The kind that move around.
I'm thinking we'll get Daddy to take it down;)