Paco the Straw Goat riding Gnome & the noodle wielding midget

I'm sure that you are thinking this is a Matthew story, but it's Natalie's :)

Natalie's grade has been studying Christmas Around the World. And her class is representing Sweden. She told us last night over supper that in Sweden, Santa Clause is called Paco (possibly she is mistaken... :)~ ) and he's a gnome that lives in the floor boards until Christmas Day. And instead of riding in a sleigh...he is transported on a goat made of straw. Now if that story does make a beverage fly out you nose...this next story might.

Tonight at supper we went to Olive Garden. Brayden has become really fond of noodles...especially spaghetti. Lucky for him Olive Garden has whole wheat spaghetti and he can have all he wants. Well I guess whole wheat texture wasn't what he was used to so he started shaking his hands. I didn't pay much attention to this at first cause I was scarfing down my food. Then it dawned on me that his hands that were shaking were covered in spaghetti!! Yes, the spaghetti was flying. Unfortunate for the man sitting behind me... the spaghetti was bouncing off him and his nice leather jacket. Oopsie... don't think he notice and I didn't see any in his hair..so we left shortly afterwards :)

Matt didn't have any wild stories to share or funny events due to the major sugar rush he was on early in the day at his school party. And I witnessed it ALL. I became temporary room Mom for the party. It was fun but I was surprised that my son was VERY "Matthew" today and I thought that since I was gonna be there that he'd be a little more mellow...HA! But he had fun and was mellow all afternoon. Kinda figure he won't be asking to stay up late tonight.

If I don't write before the 25th.... I hope you ALL have a WONDERFUL Christmas!

Feeling like Christmas

Well it's definitely feeling like Christmas, but not due to the temperature lately. Now last week, we really got the Christmas bug here. Not only cause we celebrated Christmas with Jim's Mom's family...but cause we had all the decorations in place. The big kids got to go up on the roof and "help" Dad. They were pumped, Dad was a bundle of nerves! Brayden really enjoyed the show and occasionally cheered them on :)

After the outdoor decorating and frozen Popsicle children...and Dad.... we decorated the tree. This year was Nat's year to put the angel on top.

...Not sure where bloggers gonna put this text, still not sure how to maneuver in this new version so bear with me...

And the final touches to get us in the holiday spirit are: We have all but 5-6 gifts to purchase. All the others are wrapped and under the tree. And, Brayden and the kids got to witness the first snow of the season (see picture below...or where ever it ends up). Finally, we got to go to Nat's Christmas band concert. The first concert she's played in and they sounded great. I wish I had be able to get more pictures, but I couldn't get int he right position in the auditorium to get around the music stands AND my stinking batteries were ALL shot and the camera kept going dead. And I took 4 SETS of batteries to keep this form happening. But I did get one shot of her walking on stage..

Hope you are all getting into the holiday spirit :) It'll be here and gone before you know it, so savor this time while you can. It's such a great time of year :) (sappy enough for ya?)

One down, 4 to go :)

Our Christmas travels have officially began. We started off with a bang this year by turning our Christmas with the Davidsons (Jim's mom's side of the family) into a mini vacation. We decided to fly to Lubbock instead of drive all the way to Whiteface (45 mins west of Lubbock). We got some really killer deals on Priceline. We saved $117 PER TICKET on the flight, we got the Holiday Inn Towers for $45 a night, and the rental car for $17 a day. We stayed the night near the airport so we could leave the truck there and take a shuttle and not have to pay for parking. We got up at 6 am and made it to the shuttle by 7:20am. the shuttle was late and we were stressed. We were to fly out on Friday at 9am (part of the draw back of doing Priceline "name your own price", good price...but you don't get to choose your flight time) and they say to be there 90mins early. Well little did we know that this would be the least of our worries. We get to the airport and we are missing one of the bags...and it's one of the ones with presents in it. STRESS! So we get all corralled and stripped of your shoes, jackets, and baby out of stroller at security and then head to our gate to check in. Then try to determine what happened to our missing bag. It took several phone calls but Jim found out that the bag got picked up by the shuttle right before the one we took. He'd gone down to the lobby earlier than the rest of us and that was one of the bags he took. The hotel called and told him that they'd found it. "Lucky" for us we'd had a 90 mins (+/-) delay and Jim was able to go back thru security and get the back and make it back thru with still 30 mins or so to spare!

We finally got to Lubbock and headed on the rental car shuttle to get the car. We got a Buick LaCross...nice car, lots of bells and whistles. But as nice as it was, it wasn't the suburban. Jim packed the trunk and there was no room for the stroller, so I carried it in my lap and half in Jim's face :) We got to the hotel and it was as nice as I'd hoped. We unloaded our stuff and headed to the hotel restaurant (since kids eat free, had to try it out). Had a surprisingly nice buffet and wonderful waitress. We headed back to the room and decided the kids and us needed to unwind and decompress! So off to the pool we went. We swam, boiled in the hot tub, and Jim ans kids sweated it out in the sauna. Afterwards back to the room to clean up and head out for ....whatever....we had no plans and we like it that way...sometimes :) We drove around, looked at lights, and just cruised to let Brayden try to get a nap in. All this commotion and change of schedule was not setting well with him. We met up with Tanner and Jennifer at Cagle's for steaks. It was a bit of a rocky start cause Brayden went into melt down mode. After we finally got some turkey in his belly our sweet baby returned and we had a nice supper and visit.

The next day we headed to Levelland to visit with Angie (Jim's Aunt), Larry (Jim's Mom's brother), and Kendra (Jim's cousin) before we were to head out to Ricky (Jim's Mom's other brother) and Cindy's (Jim's Aunt). We had a really nice visit and ate some fresh out of the oven sugar cookies. They were GREAT! Thanks Kendra, you're one heck of a cook :) Chanda (Jim's brother's wife) and the girls showed up not too long after we got there and the kids (and adults) had a great visit! We had a huge supper (with lots of snacking before hand) and AWESOME desserts. Then we had a special visitor....SANTA!!! Matthew was literally beside himself, but then realized that other might be noticing just how excited he was and tried so hard to play it cool. Even went as far as to say that he wouldn't be sitting in Santa's lap. in the mean time, Brayden was checking him out. He wasn't scared of him AT ALL! It was great. He just loved Santa. he gave him "5's", said hi and bye and few times, then when it was his turn he gladly hopped into his lap. He gave Santa a good tug on the bread too. It was great. Nat was a trooper and was the first big kid to to sit with Santa....she did it to encourage the others... ;)~~~ It worked, and Matt went up there. he was just busting at the seams. Oh man, I wish I'd once again had the video camera! After Santa left the kids opened their gifts and were just tickled pink! Then the adults had the traditional "Oriental" Christmas. Jim and I ended up with what we brought and that's just how we hoped it play out. It was a great time for everyone and THANK YOU Ricky and Cindy for having us all :)

We weren't supposed to fly out till 7:05pm tonight (again, due to the "name your own price" option). But as we drove home last night at 11pm, I told Jim that maybe we could try to get on an earlier flight if there was one. We got back to the hotel and found out there were several. We got up, packed, ate and it was 10:30am so we thought we'd at least try to get on stand by for the 12pm flight. We got there and she said the flight was full, but I found out the full doesn't mean "full". Since 2 of our passengers were kids and one of us didn't mind sitting apart from the others...we made the flight. It was awesome. We went thru security, grabbed some waters and they were having us board. WAY better experience than at DFW!!! An hour later we were HOME!!!

It was so nice to go and see all the family that we hadn't seen since August. We really had a nice visit with everyone. But it it also very nice to get home :) And really nice to be sitting here writing this blog in my pjs when we were originally supposed to just be getting home :)

Brace Face

Here's the braces before and after shots. The one with braces was just after she woke up so her eyes aren't awake yet :)