Tanner's Birthday

Tanner's birthday started off with giving his cousin Miles a bottle.

He has always wanted an outdoor birthday party like at the pool or something, but when your birthday is at the end of December that isn't a party anyone wants to go to.  So we rented an indoor soccer field and he invited 12 friends and cousins to come play flag football.  His uncle Scott and I were the quarterbacks and the kids just ran around shouting for us to throw them the ball.   At least that was the play I called.

Scott used a little more strategy and his team seemed to get to the end zone more often.

Next came my favorite part: Costco Cake!  

Tanner got a lot of cool gifts from his friends but the one that really stood out was the Sacramento Kings Jimmer t-shirt.

He had a great day, and we were so glad to be able to have so many family members in town to help celebrate.  

Christmas

The whole Christmas season was really fun this year.  All the kids are at fun ages and were really excited about the whole thing.  We have a couple of advent/countdown calendars and they were super excited to change those each day.

One of my favorite traditions of the last couple of years in Christopher Pop-in-kins.  He first visited our house last year and is so much fun.  He is one of Santa's elves but he has a special assignment to help watch children to make sure they are being good.  He arrives shortly after Thanksgiving and stays until just before Christmas.  Each night he moves to a different place in the house so he can watch and make sure the children are staying on the nice list.  All the kids loved coming down each morning to look for where he was sitting that day.  This picture was one of my favorites, sitting in the fruit basket holding jalapeños!

 By the time Christmas Eve arrived, we were lucky to have all the Wilson's home except for Don and Justin.  Justin came Christmas day.  We missed not having Don here.  But we had 16 cousins from 4 months to 14.  It was chaotic, but super fun.

Someone rented a karaoke machine and that was part of the Christmas Eve fun.

 Rylee really liked someone's voice!

After the singing and dinner, we read the Christmas story and exchanged a few gifts.  In my family growing up, we would draw names and we would get to open that gift on Christmas Eve.  That tradition has continued.

 Once we got back to our house, we opened our new jammies and made some reindeer food.  Each of the kids took a turn throwing some reindeer food.  

 Everyone was really excited for Christmas!!  Cute jammies, huh?

 Marc and I were up until nearly 1 am wrapping the last of their presents.  A few of our kids had been sick and Tanner and Ella were on antibiotics for strep throat.  Around 3 am Ella came in saying she wasn't feeling well so I let her sleep on the floor next to our bed.  Then around 4:00, Sarah came in with the same complaint so I told her the same thing I told Ella.  At 5:30, Tanner came and and started jumping on our bed saying, 'It's Christmas!  It's Christmas!"  To which I calmly replied, yes, but your sisters aren't up.  Mary at least was still asleep in her bed.  Within about 10 minutes everyone was up so our Christmas morning started really early....

 Tanner and Ella each had one enormous present from Santa, but it turns our Santa had been a little tricky in his wrapping.  He had wrapped 5 or 6 boxes and nested them inside each other until they got to their real present.  They thought it was pretty fun!

The rest of the day is picture-less.  Marc and I were too tired to think about pictures.  We had pull-aparts and eggs and grandma's house for breakfast and then went to church with my parents and all the siblings families.  We came home and cleaned up a little of the mess and thought about going back to my parents around 2:30, but we made the mistake of sitting down and decided we needed a nap instead.  We finished off the day with dinner with the family.

It was a great Christmas!

excuses...

This year, I resolve to be a better blogger.

Here are a few pics of what has been going on since our last blog post.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, Marc and my brother Kevin took the kids to Chicago to see the BYU Basketball team play in a tournament.  On the way, they stopped at the Triple XXX family diner.

 Ella had a jump rope workshop in early December.  It was three days of hard work.  We actually hosted three of the staff that came in from other places which added to the fun.  Ella is all the way in the back of this picture.

 We put our shoes out for Saint Nicholas...not sure why that picture is upside down!

 We hosted a gingerbread house party with our friends.  It was a huge success and we hope to make it an annual event.

 This house was quite the masterpiece.  It had a skating rink and the beginnings of  a snowman with the grass showing through where the snowball had rolled..

 Of course there had to be some BYU decorations.  The other house has SC for Santa Claus.  We  cut out little gingerbread people so everyone could put their families around their houses!

 Our trusty dryer, that I bought used nine years ago, finally decided to give us some trouble.  It was unusable for ten days!  We washed the clothes here and then shuttled them over to my parent's house to dry.  Sometimes I just left them there and they came back folded!  I debated about fixing it at all!  This is the laundry pile just in the master bath at the end of the ordeal.  The kid's pile was just as big!

 And in the midst of all the Christmas chaos and busyness, we decided to go from this.....

 ...to this.

 I did not think through what it would be like to do a home improvement project during the holidays.  It's the pits.  On top of the shopping, decorating, baking, and party-going, we now had to choose paint and carpet and stain colors and nobs etc, etc, etc.... 

This will be the new office and we are excited with the result, even if the process was a bit painful.

We also had all of my siblings except for my older brother in town for Christmas and celebrated Tanner's 10th birthday, but those two events deserve their own posts...