Christmas Eve 2012

Had our usual Mexican food dinner and just hung out as a family. It was fantastic as always but was a little weird this year having less family around than all the previous years.

Homemade guacamole 

 Homemade queso

 Homemade spanish rice

Homemade shredded beef taquitos

Beef tamales and green chili tamales (these will be homemade one day but I am just not that ambitious yet)

It's just so right. Yum!

The ridiculous spread of homemade treats. Chocolate chip cookies, sugar cutout cookies, mince meat pie(not home made), Mexican wedding cookies, turtles, marble fudge and spice cutout cookies. Like I said, ridiculous!

 Little lush. That's a bottle of vinegar by the way. How disgusting would that have been if he got it open?!

 Building Lego towers.

 The boys doing what the boys do.

 Hangin' with Grandma.

 Christmas eve and time for bed so Santa can come. Every year these pictures get harder and harder to make happen. 4 kids, in the same space, looking relatively my direction, with even a semblance of a smile. Not easy!

 Can't you just see the pure excitement in this kid, it being his first Christmas and all?

Aiden is the only one who ended up with actual Christmas jammies this year. I just had a hard time finding them for the other kids and . . . I am cheap.

We have to pretend we sort of like each other every once in a while. :)

All the loot. Ridiculous as always.

Cookie Decorating

This was Olivia's first year decorating on her own. She did a really awesome job for only being 2. We learned that her favorite color is yellow. Every time we asked which color she wanted to frost with she chose yellow. I am glad as the years go by and my kids are better and better at frosting cookies. It's not a job I enjoy. I will stand and cut out cookies for hours but frosting them is not my game. Luckily I have lots of little hands to help.

Christmas Sunday. The second picture is more like how we always are.

Just a cute boy at 11 months old.

How cute are these two? I just adore them.

End of a Decade

So, on the 15th of December I turned 30. A lot of people make a big deal about it. I haven't really dreaded it or anything like that. So my twenties are gone but that doesn't mean anything to me. My life is the same at 30 as it was at 25. I am a wife and a mother and that is my life now. I learned as a child, from my mother, not to fear my age. My mom has never hesitated to share her real age with people. Her attitude is that she has earned every year of it. So, I am 30, so what?! That is still young and I still have a lot ahead of me. I have done a lot in my 30 years and I have earned all 30. Here's to another 30 and more beyond that. Happy  Birthday to me!

I have never hated having my birthday during the Christmas season. I love that everything is always decorated and so festive. It's one of my favorite holidays and all the decor make me happy.

 30 brings my first birthday as a mother of 4. 

 It is always difficult for me to post pictures of myself. I don't love the way I look right now. I am the biggest I have ever been in my life. I also swore to myself though that no matter what, I would make sure there were pictures around of me. I don't want my kids to have no visual memories of me because I couldn't get past my pride and self consciousness. 

 Jay filled my gift bag with this awesome bright pink tissue paper. I wadded it all up and tried to throw. It was rather entertaining because we tried to make it look cool a bunch of time and were never super successful. We had fun though.

 I tired really hard to blow them all out with one breath. They were just too spread out though. I believe it took me a big breath and one puff.

 My mom made these delicious cupcakes. They are probably my favorite ones ever. Chocolate cake with a mini chocolate chip/cream cheese filling. They are so good. So good they don't even need frosting. 

 YUM!

 Aiden ate almost a whole cupcake.

 My night ended capturing this shot of Olivia snuggling (*being a bed hog) with Daddy. She sure does love him and I sure love to see them together. 

 I can't believe how big she is getting.

I have been meaning to show these off for a long time. My mother-in-law made them all and I think they are awesome. She has always had each kid's stocking made and sent for them to have their first Christmas. I just think they are lovely and I love putting them up every year.

Zoey's stocking is super special because it was actually started by her great grandmother. Then Grandma McKinlay swiped it up and finished it for Zoey to have. It is also the most unique of them all. It is the only one that doesn't have classic Christmas colors or a Santa on it. Zoey loves it.

Aiden's is a little extra special too since Zoey and Noah got to help work on it a little last time Grandma and Grandpa visited.