Oh Crap It's All Over!

Sometime around 8 a.m. Brad and I were awakened by this sweet little voice, "Momma and Daddy, it's Horton. I got a Horton movie!!!" Brad and I jumped out of bed, both of us imagining wrapping paper scattered from one end of the living room to the other. To be fair we just didn't think of this scenario. I went to bed with the camera in the perfect position to be grabbed to capture Aidan's first reaction. Brad was going to let me get ahead of her. We'd get dressed in our comfy sweats, make the coffee, and get in position to open and play all day... all this after Aidan woke us up before going downstairs as she does every morning. We didn't give her any instructions before she fell asleep- LIVE AND LEARN! Luckily, she only opened the one movie, got excited and wanted to share it with us. Yeah, I wish I had that first photo of Aidan in awe, but this is a great memory too.

Here's the confession tape.

The Night Before Christmas...

'Twas the night before Christmas... The Lab was all snuggled all tight in her bed while visions of squeaky toys danced in her head.

Aidan tucked Sadie into her bed on Christmas Eve and I don't think she moved an inch all night!

Gingerbread Houses @ The Davenport Hotel

Even though Cinderella's Castle was the overall winner our favorite house was the "Goodnight Moon" house.

Santa!!!

What a beautiful day we chose to see Santa. We went downtown to River Park Square and even though it was super snowy and super busy it was picturesque.

The Christmas Wish

Aidan's one true Christmas wish was to get this dinosaur to be a friend for her dinosaur Rexi. It's quite a friend to ask for. She has stuck to this request for 2 months, since the first time she saw it. She told everybody that she wants this "mote" control dinosaur. She got right up on Santa's lap and told him that she wanted it. And she talked about how the Elves were in the North Pole "working on it". She believed with all her heart that she was getting this from Santa... Santa could never disappoint her!

Christmas Cookies

The cookies are done! I forgot how much work it is to do cut out cookies, but it is so worth it! These huge reindeer are my favorite, but they use up so much dough and the break easily so I don't make many of them. I haven't done cookies for 3 years now, but I missed making the things that reminded me of Christmas as a child and I wanted to share fun of baking with Aidan. We successfully made cut outs and Chex Mix. I am going to attempt carmels- I chickened out and bought a candy thermometer even though my mom said it's easy to eyeball. I haven't made them since I was a kid. I attempted marshmallow fluff fudge (the easiest idiot proof kind) today, but accidently doubled the evaporated milk. This came after Brad bought condensed milk by mistake and we only had 1/3 of the chocolate we needed. I "quickly" ran to the store and $150 later came home with my chocolate and the evap. milk to pay my neighbor back... ugh! Brad is experimenting right now with my fudge soup. We may invent a new type of candy because he put it in the oven to dry it up a bit... stay tuned. We'll let you know how it turns out. Um... now I am really concerned about me handling molten lava hot carmels.

The world's my Icee

The long awaited snow. I don't know what is up with this kid- she LOVES the snow! Well, more like she loves to lay in a snowbank and eat snow. We have had a few dustings and she will literally lick the railing as she's walking down the stairs- GROSS!

This morning it was still snowing and Aidan was chanting, "Yeah snow! Yeah snow!" We were not so excited to see it snowing and thank goodness it didn't amount to much. I can't believe we had 30" dumped on us in 2 days. We were wondering if we would have a "White Christmas", I guess we have our answer.

Happy Dog Day!

This was a very happy day for Sadie. She loves the snow. Although we were out for less than 2 hours we had to stop Sadie by putting her in the house 2 times because she jumped around in the snow too much. She was limping at times, but choose to not stop playing. We have had such good luck with her health that we freak out at even the thought that she may be hurting. She's around 12 years old now. She is still pretty frisky at times (any mention of a walk or putting shoes on or putting a jacket on or touching keys or touching the front door knob), but looking at these photos I can see she's an old girl. We are very lucky that she is in such great shape and that she still acts like a puppy on days like this. It was so much fun to watch her rolling in the snow.

Snow Day!!!

Yeah!!! Spokane set a new record : 17" in 24 hours. We ended up with a total snow fall of 30 freakin' inches in 1 1/2 days- ugh! Poor Brad spent the entire day yesterday shoveling (and taking the snowblower to be serviced-boo!). Aidan, Sadie and I went out in the morning to play in the snow. It was relatively warm (17 degrees) compared to the Arctic air we had the previous week, so we were able to play for almost 2 hours. I really did intend on taking a few pics then helping out, but our snowblower wouldn't start and for some reason we only have 1 shovel. It's a mystery that we could only have 1 shovel after last winter. Thieves!

Sugar Buzz

Today was a candy for breakfast, lunch, and chicken for dinner with a side of cookies kind of day. We went to our friend Dina's for a gingerbread house making party. These are the cutest little houses and so perfect for little ones. The kids ate candy nonstop. I can't believe that nobody threw up (maybe in the car on the way home). JD came up with a great idea to put frosting into a sugar cone, sprinkle in M&Ms, and eat it with a piece of licorice- Genius!

In between mass consumption of sugar the kids spent some time with Santa! Our friend Michelle lives next to Dina and was having a parrallel gingerbread house party. We normally mix between the 2 houses, but it was very cold and snowy so we just hopped over to see Santa together.

It was such a fun party! The kids all played well together and we got to see all our friends that we rarely get to see. Great day!!!

Giggle

The Icing

Believe it or not this was not as messy as the making of the cookies. She enjoyed this the most and so did I. I only had to breathe deeply a few times and 20ish times I freaked out and yelled, "Not so much!".

Cookie Monster

This is the first year we have done cut out cookies with Aidan. She loves to bake. We knew she would be so jacked to make and decorate Christmas cookies. She begged for weeks to make them. We had lengthy discussions about the shapes, colors of icing, and the sprinkles we would use. Then it was finally cookie making day- OMG! Our sweet little thing became the Tasmanian Devil of baking. She could not contain her emotions, she literally bathed in the experience! It was freaking me out, so what I did to cope was to grab my camera to capture the moment.