Christmas 2009

So for Christmas this year, we travelled down to visit my side of the family in Ojai, California. We only had a very few days off of work, and I even had some placements occur in Utah while I was gone that I couldn't be there for, but we had a great time visiting with my family for the time we were there.

Here's a short rundown of our visit.

Wes slept in a drawer. Seriously. It worked wonderfully as a baby bed, and maybe now in the future I'll be a little more lenient when doing homestudies. Because who really needs a crib when you have a dresser in the room?
Adam had a new girlfriend and he and she spent a lot of time together, and a lot of time entertaining my toddler. Works for me! Here they are making gingerbread houses. Carly loved this and still talks about making 'ginnerbread' houses. She also still talks a lot about Morgan. I think she likes Morgan more than Adam...lol.

The finished product:

I got to visit with friends and have a little reunion. More on that to come in its own post!

As for presents, lets just say that my kids are spoiled. Rotten. Wes got more toys than he knows what to do with. Literally. He is happy with staring at his hand, or at most eating the paper. But we are so blessed to have a truckload of baby toys now. And Carly did better opening them this time around than she did at her 2nd birthday. Back in May, Carly got really distracted and essentially done with opening presents very early in the process. We were practically begging and bribing her to open more. Well this time around she had the idea. She loved her red tutu, her crayons, her duplo blocks, and her microphone. She also got tons of cute outfits...but the tutu rarely comes off anymore. My favorite present this year was from Marshall. He actually got my blog bound into a book! It is sooo awesome! I highly recommend this present to those considering gifts for a blogger. My book is a little over 250 pages, and has all of my writing and pictures from Sept 2006 through the beginning of December 2009. What a treat! It's like scrapbooking without all the effort.

And Marshall made it into such the secret. I think everyone in the family knew but me, and he really had me guessing for the last month what this huge project was that he was working on. Great idea, great surprise, and the perfect gift!

And my favorite part of all while visiting California is to get pictures of my cute kids and handsome hubby at the Ventura beach. So please enjoy a late December day at the beach. The most shocking part of these pictures is probably that Marshall allowed Carly out of the house wearing so much red!