The Year of the Pillow Pet

Christmas morning began far too early in my opinion. Especially since I waited until the night before to do all the wrapping, assembling, and packing.




I actually got done sooner than I'd thought but still, 4 am felt too early.

Ava, however, filled with excitement and anticipation, could only make it until then before she began her calling from her bed, "Mooomm-yyyyy, is it tiiiiiiime to wake up, yet?!"

Which continued approximately every 15 minutes until we finally relented at 7:30 am; the time the kids usually wake up and also the time we had arranged with my parents to come over.

Max surprisingly was not awake by 7:30 so we went ahead without him. It was probably better that way, otherwise he would have been all over the other kids stuff.

I think everyone was pretty pleased with their goods.

Luke with his flashlight and tool box

Max, later in the morning, just happy to be there

Dad and his new Blu-ray player

Dan's new scriptures

Mom and the apron I made her

Dan's super surprise gift for me, editing software

Ava and her various creatures

Later we hopped on a plane to Salt Lake to spend some time with the Colton side. We told Ava that her beloved Unicorn Pillow Pet was too big to carry onto the plane. She went into mourning but finally consented. As soon as we got seated on the plane, two little girls came walking down the aisle, with their Pillow Pets. You can bet your beef jerky we heard about that for a while.


The snow was so tempting, we finally relented to the kids begging and bought some snow clothes. By the time we got home from the store, however, most of it had melted away.

Lucky for the kids (and our hard earned money) a blizzard hit us the next day.









Poor Luke's "coat" was actually two sweatshirts which acted more like snow velcro than anything else.











We got to spend lots of time with the family and meet our newest nephew, Charlie.




And as usual, we hardly saw the little girl cousins. They'd disappear for hours at a time playing.

Ava finally lost her front tooth.

She had been reminding me of Abby for weeks.






It had been driving us all crazy for days, just hanging on by one little thread, threatening to send me running for the bushes. She could twist the thing all the way around and it made me gaggy.

Tried as she might, she could never muster the bravery required for a clean yank.

One night right before bed, it just fell out.



And we were all happy about that!