Outer Space Vest

At our new church, Evergreen, they have the second largest Awana club in the state. (I only gave that info because it was mentioned last night and I thought that was kinda cool!) Awana is a program for teaching kids about God and the Bible, with a big emphasis on Scripture memory, from what I have gathered. :) Zach was already familiar with it but I wasn't raised going to Awanas, and we haven't been in a church with that program.

Since moving here, we've been attending church on most Wednesday nights and the boys have been going to the "Puggles" class. It's the youngest group and basically just fun nursery time. For some reason I thought they both fit into that category. We recently found out that Dax is old enough to go to the "Cubbies" class. We took him for the first time last week and when I dropped him off, I noticed all of the other kids were wearing navy vests. That night he had a lot of fun and was talking about it still the next day. While he was talking about his new class, he said, "All of my friends were wearing vests." I felt kind of bad for him, not wanting him to feel left out. So I said, "That's cool. Maybe we can get a vest for you too!" He responded, "I don't want one. I'll wear my outer space vest."

I laughed to myself because it reminded me of Zach and the stories I've heard of when he was younger.

Sure enough, last night as we got ready to head to church, Dax wanted to wear his vest. We don't know why he calls it his "outer space vest". It has a picture of a monster and nothing about rocketships or outer space. That's probably one of the reasons I think it's funny. After I put his vest on, he convinced Gus that he needed one too. We put a vest on Gus and went to church. I cracked up so much over it so I wanted to share! Here are several pics of them, vested up and ready to go...

Can you tell that Gus is saying , "cheese!" ?? :)

Christmas Eve 2014

We had such a great Christmas! This year was different because we have never been at home for Christmas. (At our own house, just our family.) When I realized that was going to be the case this year, I got kind of excited to think about starting our own family traditions!

For a couple weeks I tried to think of anything and everything that I would like to do (or EAT) on Christmas...It was really fun to dream up a special day for us!

First I'll start with the day before...

Christmas Eve we hung our homemade ornaments. It was a recipe/project I found on Pinterest and it was kind of a fail. They never really dried out like they were supposed to, so I'm not really sure they'll be a lasting piece of my kids' childhood but it was fun to make with them! We had handprints from both boys, a heart with '14, and a "D"..

I also had grand plans of making yummy sugar cookies and I'll definitely be using a different recipe next year. The boys loved getting to use their cookie cutters and put sprinkles all over the iced cookies!

We finished up the afternoon watching a movie before the candle light Christmas Eve service at church. The boys wanted to hold the candles so bad and that made me way, way too nervous so we lit a couple at home to let them have a turn.

We all went to bed excited for the morning!