Does Mrs. Claus stay home alone on Christmas Eve?

Life during the holidays totally blows with sick kids. Nate has been sick for a week now and as hard as we tried to prevent it... now little brother is sick too. I think I've gotten slightly depressed at the fact that they (we) are missing out on all the cool Christmas-ness of the holiday. I could make a list all the fun things I wanted us all to do that we've missed out on but the thought of typing everything out makes me sad.

This picture is our cat Pickles wearing a Mrs. Clause hat and collar that Ryan came home with from our Bible Study's White Elephant Xmas party (which I missed) The boys think it's pretty funny to see the cat dressed up. The cat doesnt think it's so funny.

We've watched too many movies this week and worn our PJs all day too many times and we were all getting major cabin fever so last night we bundled everyone up (2 jackets, thermals, gloves and hats) and took the boys to the Thoroughbred lights.

We always go early in the evening for fear of big crowds so it wasnt so bad, just alot of houses waited A LONG time to turn their lights on, and some only had a few on instead of all - weird.

The boys had fun, I think their favorite part was when we pulled them out to take pictures and there happened to be a big pile of leaves in the gutter so they started throwing them all around.

So who knows what we're gonna miss next. Nate seems to be getting much better but Zach seem to be a miserable sickie (cutting teeth at the same time dosent help.) I cant imagine Christmas Day w/o seeing our family but I really dont want to spread it around. Hopefully everyone is well enough to not miss our after Christmas vacation.

Our 2008 Christmas Letter

Welcome to our 2008 family Christmas letter. I know that if you are a regular reader of our family blog then this letter will be totally redundant to you… but that’s ok cuz I really write these letters for myself.
So this year as a family, we did a lot of fun stuff. Of course we went to Disneyland a lot, a couple zoos, got annual passes to Sea World and did lots of fun camping trips with family. After Family Camp in San Diego, Pismo Beach with Jane’s folks, Carpentaria (where our guys got to kayak with dolphins!) with Jane’s family and Big Bear with Ryan’s family we decided to take the leap into the RV world. And since storage was an issue, a tent trailer seemed to be the perfect answer! We got our little trailer in the summer but it took till October to finally venture out in it. It was super cool! We are looking forward to many more trips to come.
Ryan is still teaching at Options For Youth and in January completed his Masters (with an A+) in Education. He took his 4th trip this summer to kayak/camp on the Channel Islands and says that next year Nate will be old enough to go with him. Hmm. Ryan was sad this year when we sold his Tacoma that he has had since 1997! But we needed something to tow our trailer and a 3-seater Tacoma is a little small for family of 4.
Jane said goodbye for now to invitation making this year because it was consuming too much of her time with the boys. She is still running 4 events a year at Flipside and this year became involved in Mothers of Preschoolers (Mops) as a table leader. We had Kiddie Pool parties every week during the summer which was very “cool” and a lot of fun. This year Jane made a lot of tasty cupcakes and started designing t-shirts for moms at www.zazzle.com/MomsRockTheShirt* (yes, type the asterisk in the web address) you should go buy a t-shirt right now for a cool mom you know.
Nate, age 4
Nate is such a super fun kid. He officially potty trained in January (well that’s when he stopped wearing diapers but some days I still wonder) and started attending speech development classes once a week in February. He had a lot of new firsts; 1st dentist trip (no cavities), 1st “sleepover” (with cousin Mei-Mei), 1st amusement park w/o mom and dad (Grandma & Papa Roy took him to Knotts), 1st big boy bike, and 1st team sport (his T-ball team was the Mariners). He’s growing so big, learning so much it’s crazy. He started going to Pre-school 3 days a week in August and he really enjoys it (he tells me he doesn’t want to go EVERY day we go but it’s really that he doesn’t want to get dressed or brush his teeth or whatever it is at that moment). He is totally boy, still into Star Wars, cars, superheroes, and his new favorite… wresting. Ai-yi-yi, mommy does not encourage that one.
Zach, age 1 ½
Zach is our smarty pants. We are constantly amazed at the things he does and seems to know. The kid walked at 9 months! Zach made his pictorial debut in the May08 issue of Inland Empire Magazine when a photographer snapped his photo at our Mops meeting. Right now Zach is super obsessed with Toy Story (last month it was the Wiggles) and asks to watch it all day long (“Buz pees!”) He is a super jibba-jabber and talks and talks, saying lots of different words and word combos. He always wants to be in a tunnel and loves the song “What I like About You” by the Kinks. Whatever big brother is doing, Zachy wants to do too, even if it’s jumping off the couch or playing Star Wars guys.

Big ups to Tara Sos for making us look awesome in our pictures! (see her link on my sidebar)


Ryan decided that this year he wanted to do his own special Christmas Card to the people he works with so this is what he gave out

Aint no party like a birthday party

And here's another party. Saturday was Nate's Family party and iif was definatly weird missing so many Reynolds but Chase and Kenna were both able to make it! What's with all the tongue pictures? I don't know, all I care about is if he's looking at the camera.

More presents.

More cupcakes.

Here's a funny story I never blogged about. When we went to take photos for Nate's invites, I wanted to go to this skate park so they would be all cement-y looking and just different from "out in the backyard" photos like I did last year. So when we got there it was super sunny and harsh shadows so the only shade was in the pipe.

Looking in I wasn't totally sure if we'd be able to get back out but the only way to find out was to try it. So I slid the boys down and slid down myself. Then we did our pictures. Now here's the funny part: I couldn't get us out!

There were 2 levels we had to get up, I got us all up the first level but the second one was about 5 foot high (see the red lines) which I can lift my kids that high but the wall sloped. So try standing 3 feet away from a ledge that's 5 foot high and lifting an almost 4 year old up, then over. Was not possible. So lucky for us, some loser-y skater guy on his way home from the liquor store (totally had the bottle in the brown bag) had stopped to watch us, probably assuming we couldn't get out on our own. So I basically had to hand him both of my children and then he pulled me out. Crazy eh?

The night I died

Friday night Ryan and I were characters in a Mystery Dinner for the Flipside Staff Xmas party. I was Becky Giovanni the bride and Ryan was Stanley Simpson my groom. Everyone had a reason to hate me and want me dead so just after we cut the cake the lights went out, there was a bang and when they came on I was dead on the floor!

So of course I wore my wedding dress (any excuse to use it twice eh?) After 7 years and 2 kids it doesn't quite fit the same and is a little yellow in spots but I still think it's beautiful. Of course I didnt have a place to put my camera so I snapped this photo in the bathroom at church before I changed.

It was alot of fun playing the character and being a really big B!

Morph on over...

After school was Nate's friend party (our house isnt big enough to combine friends and family) Five minutes after Seth got there he was rushed to the emergency room (our parties are crazy) but we still had 21 kids there!

We played an intense game of Stick the Logo on the Power Ranger and celebrated with more cupcakes and Nate's b-day video.

Here he is with Jakob from school and Ranger Kendra.

Birthday in the Clouds

Friday morning I took cupcakes to Nate's school for the start of all his birthday fun. I got to watch all the kids do their sharing time. First they come up and show what they brought (Nate usually brings a couple Star Wars guys) then the kids get to ask questions and they pretty much all ask the same question "Where did you buy that?" even if another kid just asked it, it got asked again. It was funny. The most common answer was Target and that where Nate said he got his SW guys from not "From the really awesome birthday countdown that my mom made."

Since I was taking cupcakes to school, friend party, family party and Flipside Xmas party, I made over 120 cupcakes. It was a cupcake-o-rama over here!

Fore!

Nate turned 4 this Saturday. Here he is eating a birthday breakfast of homemade chocolate chip waffles in the living room. Our guy is so big, we measured him and he grew 4 1/2 inches this year!
Every year Ryan makes an awesome video for our guys B-day parties and I can never figure out how to blog em so this year I just filmed the tv with my camera. The quality super sucks and the end cut off but if you didnt see it in person you get the gist. We used Nate's current favorite song Surf Wax America by Weezer. Here is Nate age 3 to 4:

Just another walk in the Park

Friday morning was Ryan's work Xmas party at the Disneyland Hotel so we all drove out together and me & the boys hung out in the park while he went to the brunch. We walked right on the Jungle Cruise and Pirates then went to check out the reindeer. Then I took the boys to the "Pirate's Liar" Island (aka Tom Sawyer's) they had a blast there! There were priate ships, caves, bridges, treasure and all sots of things for the guys to climb all over and run around on. Ryan met us there and after convincing Nate to do something else he choose to go on Monsters (of course) so we went over to DCA and on our way out of Monsters... suprise we were winners in the Year of a Million Dreams and we all got cool Mickey Mouse ears hats. Guess which Grmpy guys choose not to wear their hats.

Birthday countdown in action!

Today was the first day of Nate's countdown. He was super excited to open it up. There were 2 little Power Ranger figures that I got off Ebay inside. Check out that bed head!

Say "Hello" to Doug

I know I havent posted in a while but I've had alot on my plate, I've done 4 photo shoots (1 family and 3 for b-day invites - 1 where we got trapped in a half pipe at the skate park) got my Xmas letter all done, got 2 b-day party invites all done, 2 Thanksgivings (where I did not take one photo!) and next weekend I'm running the Chili Cook-off and getting everything ready for Child Dedications that same day, not to mention sometime I've got to actually plan these b-day parties. Yowza!
So here's the Reader's Digest version of some things. The Smarts got Rock Band so we've rocked out with them a few times. Here's Nate jammin some Bon Jovi!
The last Lowes build was a football goal that the boys had fun with.
We spent the day at DCA with the Reynolds.
and ran into the Lassiters there!
And here's Doug:
This is our first fakie christmas tree. We always talked out getting one so this year we thought we'd try it out. We got this baby for only $50 at Home Depot so we figure if we hate it and dont use it next year we havent lost alot of money on it. But so far we really like it! I dont know what inspired us, but we decided to give it a name so Ryan came up with Douglas. It's funny to refer to your tree by name "Put that over by Doug" "Can you turn off Doug?"