Ok-
so I am going to TRY and post more often. I really would like to be a monthly blogger, but it might turn out to be a quaterly thing! The holiday season in our house is more of a celebration station. We start out by having Thanksgiving at our house, and then its a mad rush to get in all the Christmas parties and programs along with 2 birthdays and our anniversary. Not to mention trying to get ready for Santa and getting gifts for everyone else-who has the time for all this? At times I wonder how we pull it all off, year after year, but somehow it all works out in the end. So, I am now going to attempt to document all of the craziness of the holidays here with our family circus!

We started December out with our ward Christmas party-which I am only posting, because I am the Ward Activities committee chairman. Which means I spent quite a bit of personal and family time planning, buying, delegating and decorating for the shin dig. We had a primary talent show along with a breakfast. For the talent show, our kids did a lip sync of "Christmas don't be late" by the Chipmunks. They were the first kids of the show, which freaked Gracie out and so she hid behind CJ the whole song. Then later on in the show, she did her Christmas dance routine (with 2 of her friends that are also in our ward and in her dance class) with NO stage fright!

Gracie's school music program was next, on Thurs Dec 13th, with her Christmas Dance recital 2 days later, Sat 15th. Here are some pictures of her programs.

Next we got up that Sunday morning and took a bunch of pictures for our Christmas card. The sun and moon must have aligned because the babies just sat there and looked at the camera! Lucky us-we got several good ones!

The next week was pretty much a trial of my multi-tasking! With Gracies birthday party on the 20th and Cj's on the 22nd-I wondered several times-why do I do this to myself year after year!! For Gracie-she had a "Teddy Bear Tea Party" where all her friends brought their teddy friend for tea. After dinner they dressed their teddy's up in tutu's, headbands and necklaces-whew! Just remembering is tiring!! For CJ, he had a "Christmas" party theme-everyone got to make their own faux gingerbread house. We didn't get to take as many pictures at his party-since me and Greg were both fully employed with helping the houses stick together so the kids could decorate them! Here's some photos of both their parties.

So, after the birthdays, I just wanted to breathe. Thank goodness I had most of my Christmas shopping done, so the few days before Christmas were fairly calm. Christmas morning was fun to see the kids get so excited for Santa's surprise!

So to finish the month off-we invited our family over for New Years Eve-we provided snacks and Suzette and Collin provided the fireworks for the kiddos. The Mortensens also came over to join us. As you can see from the pictures, it was a cold night. The wind picked up right around midnight, so as soon as we rang in the new year, it was time to go in! Happy New Year 2008!