More February 2015 pics

Before Amanda left, we had a chance to get a couple group pics and I thought they were pretty cute! 

That was the best one but I wanted to include some of the outtakes... 

First Manda and sweet Rebekah.. But I guess Gus thought she looked too sweet and snuck in for a kiss. 

I wanted to get in and then we got a few of Gigi and the boys.

Oh yeah! My friend, Bekah, gave Dax a target gift card for his birthday and it was so much fun to go let him look around and pick something to buy. He looked so cute paying by himself that I took a quick pic! 

One more--fun with a box from one of his birthday gifts. They cracked up so much playing with this one!

Loads and loads of pics! Jan/Feb 2015

Holy moly! I was doing pretty good about blogging every so often and then things got busy and I got out of the habit. Or something. Anyway, I really want to document this sweet season and I'd like to do better than loading a ton of pics at once but this will have to do for now to catch up! I think I'll try to do the rest of January and February for now...

Just a sweet snugly pic of Gus.

We love to FaceTime with family and we get to see baby Rebekah a whole lot that way!

One day Gus insisted on wearing the Spider-Man costume out to run errands and couldn't find the mask so he settled on one of my beanies.

It snowed! And the kids were dying to build a snowman. Zach is such a fun daddy and got outside with them to do it.

We get to hang out with some good family friends about once a week. The kids call them Nana and Papa. Papa had a trip to Cuba and we spent several days in a row visiting Nana at lunch time. She fixed the boys up to watch cartoons and read books to them. We all loved it!

And then Aunt B, baby Rebekah and Gigi came to visit for Dax's birthday party!

The birthday party was fun! We wanted to keep it casual so I baked a cake and we had it at the house. We invited a few friends from church and Dax had a really great time. (Except the begging and begging to open gifts before anyone got there.)

Zach was vacuuming and Gus was helping..

Opening gifts

Everyone wanted to hold sweet Rebekah!

Angela made some super yummy and cute cookies for the party! (Even though they couldn't be there.)

 Ok just a couple more and I'll finish the rest later!

That's the party!

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!