Christmas week

Grandpa Paul and Grandma Sandi drove all the way here from Wilsonville, Oregon to spend Christmas with us and Spencer's brothers who are also in Southern California. We are the furthest north so we were lucky enough to get them for two whole days before we got together with everyone else in Palm Springs on Christmas Eve. They brought some fun books for the kids and Madeleine and Ian just loved sitting with Grandpa reading.
Grandma is the best at keeping the kids entertained! If she wasn't having Madeleine help her make cookies, she might have been playing the piano and singing. Or she could have been reading to them or playing some other games. And on top of that she would put the kids to bed and get them dressed and bathed and help me with laundry and dishes. What a wonderful guest to have around! You can visit anytime! We all love having you here!
Here's Ian Christmas morning. He didn't care too much about any of the presents he got. He would have been perfectly happy if that delicious candy cane was the only thing in his stocking.
Anytime Madeleine was asked what she wanted from Santa for Christmas, the answer was the same. " Lots of princesses." And that is what Santa brought. She was so cute when she opened it. She exclaimed, "Oh! How did he know?!"
Like I said in my last post, we had a lot of fun hanging out in Palm Springs with our family. The kids had an especially great time! They even got to go swimming one day. I just love to see them play together! I have some cousins that I was really close with growing up and I hope that Madeleine and Avery will be too.

Christmas Lights in Palm Springs

We spent Christmas in Palm Springs this year with Spencer's family. It was super fun the whole time. Good food, great company, nice weather...really great all around. Christmas night, we thought it would be fun to go for a drive to see some lights and Spencer even did a little research before we went to see the good places to go. One place he read about was called "Christmas Village." It boasted over a million lights and the picture in the article was similar to the one above. Looks nice right? Look a little closer. You can see in this picture a few of the huge and very strange robot sculptures. Here's the thing: Sure there were a lot of lights, but other than that, this was not a very Christmas-y display at all. In fact, it was pretty creepy. Look at the reindeer sculpture below.
HELLO! A human skull on the reindeer?! How freaky is that?! Other freaky things we saw were a robot who had one arm made out of a child-size mannequin tightly wound with an electrical cord and mural with a huge Mohammed, a medium sized Jesus and a small alien peeking out from behind Jesus. When we first got there, we were really amazed at the size of the place and how many lights there were and there was a monstrous Santa or two, but as we walked around we felt like we had been tricked. We decided we had been lured there under completely false pretenses. Christmas Village? I don't think so. Evidently they have termed it RoboChristmas, so feel free to search it on the internet if you want to see more of it. Perhaps I just didn't "understand the art," but I was not the only one who had an icky feeling being there. We are all hoping that the kids won't remember it for fear it might give them nightmares.

P.S. After we left the Twilight Zone we took a drive to a normal old Candy Cane Lane that was quite nice.

Christmas lights

We took the kids to see the lights at the LA Temple a few nights ago. I was able to get this cool shot of Maddie thanks to her being able to sit really still and using no flash.
Ian does not sit still so any pics without flash were a blurry mess. He could have climbed on (and fallen off) this rock all night. Too bad it started to rain while we were there. His fun had to be cut short.

these silly kids of our's....

Ian likes to jump in his crib and will do it when we promt him by saying, "Bouncy, bouncy, bouncy!" in a voice that is annoying to anyone but a baby. While we were trying to capture it on video Madeleine came in to show off her lovely singing voice. She does a great "Jingle Bells" twice.

If you watched the whole thing (sorry if it was a little long) you saw how Ian was shaking his head back and forth with incredible speed. You may have even noticed my comment about how tired he was that he probably couldn't even see straight. Do your children do this when they are extremely tired? Another thing I have seen him do is hit himself in the face to stay awake. It's kind of funny and kind of sad at the same time.

When does the change occur in us when we decide we would rather let ourselves sleep than do crazy things to stay awake? I guess there is probably still a little of that in most people. Imagine if you were driving and beginning to nod off. You obviously can't let yourself sleep at the wheel so you start hitting yourself in the face or other assorted insane activities to keep yourself conscious. I think I might like to see a video like that.

Thinking about Christmas

I set up our tree a couple days ago in hopes of getting it to feel a little more Christmas-y around here. Madeleine helped a little. She put some ornaments on, all clustered together so I helped move them to be a little prettier. I think I may have to grow up to be the kind of mom who (when I have space for this) has one tree for me that is pretty and uniform, etc. and another tree for the kids. Is that lame? Or maybe the lame thing is keeping our tree as "mine" instead of letting the kids have at it and getting a tree of my own when we have room for two trees. I guess it will depend on how long we are in a one-Christmas-tree size home. Since the kids are still so young I don't feel too bad about not letting them decorate it. Maybe in a couple years I'll relinquish my interest in the beauty of our tree. Until then, I love my fake, pre-lit, beautifully uniform tree!

Football fun

We had tickets to attend the BYU-SDSU football game on October 27 in San Diego. But because of the wildfires and poor air quality, the game was postponed until yesterday. So, we got to spend the day down in SD with Curtis and Amy and their girls.
Madeleine and Avery were such troopers! A football game lasts a very long time for 2 and 3 year old girls. They sat and watched some, played on the rail some, and did quite a bit of snacking. They seemed to really like the paratroopers who landed in the stadium during halftime (that was my favorite part, too) and the fireworks when SDSU scored.
Ian with his Uncle Curtis, Spencer's younger brother.
Coral feeding Mikaya and Aunt Amy. We are so glad they live out here in SoCal now!