Bye bye 2014

Who knew a year could by so quickly. I am glad it happened, but I am glad to start a new year. It gets me all motivated and stuff. Like running, yeah I started doing that at 5:30 am again. November and December were kind of unmotivated months for me, and January, well it makes me all "let's do this!" again!

But in other news we had a great holiday season. This year we had the opportunity to celebrate Christmas morning with just our kids. We love our families, but starting some of our own traditions was important to us, and this year turned out quite nicely. And we still got to see lots of our family members who were in town.

So let's just commence with the pictures and hope that I cover most of the important things.

This year we got a real Christmas tree. Lucy put the star on top, Sam "helped" putting the ornaments on the bottom. It felt very iconic and it was very exciting to finally have a real tree in our house.

Then there was our Church Christmas party. It was nice dinner with Santa visiting at the end. Sam made that pretty iconic too. Lucy is just peachy, Sam is NOT impressed!

This happened, and I just let it go. They played in the sink for an hour or so. I think they miss having their little garden bed where they can get messy and play around. I miss nice weather too...

And this is just cute pictures of my kids falling asleep on the couch. No story, just cuteness.

We have a craft day once a week with our friends. It was our turn to do the craft. This is what we made, Nativity scenes with a peanut as Jesus, grapes for people and graham crackers and animals crackers for the rest. It was fun!

Sorry, just another cute picture of my kids.

 

We took daddy on our favorite hike. This is when it seemed like winter was just around the corner. Lucy found a puddle and told us she had powers. Her powers are that she can break ice, which is the opposite of what Elsa can do.



 

Sometimes my kids behave and let me take pictures of them.

On Christmas Eve we made the trek up to Nelson for the annual grinder night. It was fun, but remarkably quiet. A lot of my cousins are spread across the country. We were also missing the Miguels! Sad day. But it was still a lot of fun. We finished the night with the name game. Always a family favorite.

This is another classic picture, sorry it is blurry!

 

Onto Christmas morning. So our plan was to get up when the kids woke, which is always around 6 am and talk to them about Jesus' birth--read the story and talk about it. We also received some awesome nativity blocks that worked out great for this activity. Then we went downstairs had them open their stockings. Everything went really smoothly.

After we did stockings we had breakfast, opened a few more presents and got ready to go to the Coops. I didn't get a single picture from that, but let's just say it was awesome too! Grandma and Grandpa Coop, Grandma Nancy, Annie and Tod, Heather, Nathan and girls, and Joe were all in attendance. We opened presents, ate lots of food, and enjoyed Christmas day together!

Here are some of the things that we have seen since Christmas.

Then on Friday Jimmy went back to work. Bummer, huh?! But on Saturday we all got in the car to go the Temple. It was the special sealing day at the Temple for Danielle and Poul. As many of siblings who could be there, were there. Chris and Gretchen were having fun with Sammy.

And daddy and Sam photo-bombed a picture.

I love these two! This is picture is a very accurate portrayal of them.

We were super excited because Gretchen and Chris came to stay overnight with us before they left the next day. Too bad Gretchen was as sick as a dog. But we went to the park and they took me and kids out to lunch. We liked having them around. Now they are back in the warmer regions of Arizona.

Okay, now things are going to get random. Yes, we love the puppet theater!

And I wanted to document daddy painting Lucy's nails.

And this was just last week. We did get a little snow, and the kids were super excited. We are glad we have these kids. They always keep things interesting.

 

As far as New Year's goes, we went to the Coop's. Jimmy was at that point very sick, so basically we played games and watched the ball drop and then went to bed. Kind of anti-climatic, but it was nice. Jimmy got New Year's day off, which was good because he was basically dead to the world, and consequently took a sick day the next day. We were happy to have him around even if he was a sicky. And that was the end of 2014. Though I might figure out other things to mention later, such is my memory these days...