She is too big!!

Claire just had another birthday. I can't believe she is getting so old. What happened to my little girl? She was so excited to because her primary teachers made her a treat for her birthday. I am so lucky that my kids have some amazing teachers in primary. 

Claire didn't really have a birthday party this year, but she was able to invite 4 friends over to watch a movie. She decided she wanted to have her friends come over in their pjs and have some pizza. They had a great time. Again...we are so lucky that our girls have such amazing friends. She wanted to make cake cones for her friends. I think they turned out really cute!

Mia was so excited to give Claire the gift she picked out for her. They even paused for a picture.

Since we had Echo's first birthday to celebrate on Claire's big day, we did some celebrating the next day too. Claire was thrilled to celebrate her bday at school. She decided she wanted to make these really cute butterflies for her class. They turned out a lot cuter than I expected.

For her birthday dinner she chose corn dogs and french fries. This made me laugh (and it made my family laugh too). When we were little we got to pick anything we wanted for dinner on our birthday...I picked corn dogs once as a kid and my siblings have never let me live it down. Guess Claire is a lot more like her momma than I thought. Here is her cake we made!

Claire was so awesome to blow out all of her candles, but what made me proud is she let her little sister help blow the candles out too. Even on her birthday, Claire amazes me with her loving heart.

Christmas

This is a picture of the girls in their Christmas dresses. They looked so beautiful. Thank you Grandma Lois for such amazing dresses. These girls love them so much!!

 The girls loved their Rudolph noses. They got them a year or so ago from Santa, but had forgotten about them until we opened the Christmas boxes and they had fun with them.

Instead of making and exchanging ugly sweaters this year we decided to decorate ugly sweater cookies. Here are some of the ugly sweaters along with a few other fun cookies.

 Thanks Ginet for showing us the melted snowman cookies. The girls loved these! Although I should have made them all girls because Claire and Mia thought they could only eat the girl ones because they are girls.

Claire's school teacher gave her magic reindeer food with the instructions that we needed to sprinkle the food on our lawn on Christmas Eve. They girls had so much fun doing this. Claire was such a great sister to share with Mia and let her sprinkle some magic food too.

Christmas morning is always so magical...especially with younger kids. We all had so much fun opening our presents.

 

 

Bryan gave the girls Just Dance 2014 for the Xbox One...guess that means he has to keep one of the Xbox Ones he was going to sell. I am not so sure I like this idea, but too late now....the girls and Bryan are so excited by this, as you can tell!!

Thanks to the amazing gifts from Grandma...we are able to have a concert in our home every day.

These are the nightgowns I made for the girls; along with the matching nightgowns Grandma Nancy made for their dolls. The girls love that they not only match each other, but they match their dolls.

After opening presents at our house and then opening some at Grandma Lois and Papa Don's house, the girls were ready for some Christmas movie time....as you can tell Christmas really wiped Mia out!

Thanksgiving Weekend

My Mom, Dad, Brother and Nephew all took the long drive to come and spend Thanksgiving weekend with us. It was so much fun!! I loved every minute of having some of my family in town. I just wish they lived closer so we could spend time together more often. Here are some fun pictures from this weekend. Here are the girls with KeKoa. They loved spending time and getting to know the bugaboo more! 

 They loved doing fun crafts with Grandma Nancy. They wouldn't let mom help them (even though mom showed Grandma Nancy how to do it)...they wanted the time with Grandma.

 Here are the kids with my Brother and Dad...they are waiting to be amazed!

 

They are now amazed at our geyser!

We had plenty of time to do what we do best...be silly and crazy!

We had the mission president stop by and visit...he was my brother's stake president not too long ago.

We were able to go and spend time with Santa and some of his reindeer. They kids enjoyed feeding the reindeer apples. They loved every minute of it. They even got to tell Santa what they wanted for Christmas. 

 

 

Of course all of us adults wanted to visit Santa too. So we took this chance to have a group photo.

This last picture just says how much fun we had all weekend!!

We had so much fun. Thanks again for visiting. I just wish we could do it again sooner rather than later!

Halloween

 We started out this past week taking the girls to the pumpkin patch. Here is a picture of our little family on the hay pyramid. 

The girls got to go on a couple of rides. It was so cute to watch them have so much fun!

 We had a great time together as a family and it was so much fun. Playing around and finding just the right pumpkin.

 We had fun in the corn maze. Bryan and I let the girls pick which direction we went. This year we went in the entrance and came out the exit (last year that didn't happen).

Claire is so proud of her pumpkin. This year she drew her pumpkin's face and then she carved it.

 Mia also drew her face on her pumpkin. Bryan had to help her carve it...it was pretty heavy duty and he had to use a drill just to start the carving process. Thanks daddy for coming to Mia's rescue.

 Here are our pumpkins...Chase (paw patrol), Dora (Dora the explorer) and then fun faces.

Claire wanted to be Snow White this year. We even did her hair black for it. I made her costume and I have to say I am really proud of how it turned out and that Claire loves it as much as she does.

 Mia really wanted to be Sophia the First. She loves that show. Thanks Grandma Lois for helping us create her special dress. If you look closely we even did her hair brown to be like Sophia. 

What a fun night, but I am exhausted. Our ward trunk-or-treat and chili feed was fun and turn out great (at least I think it did). I am just glad my girls had a great time. These smiles mean so much to me.

It's Getting Cold!!

It is getting colder and colder...time to start dressing warm. That means times to get scarves. I absolutely love making these scarves, but I would love to sell them. I keep making them and I need to sell them. I have a few more than this pictures shows.

Starting from from left to right we have: baseballs, footballs, pumpkins, popcorn (the yellow is actually textured to poke out like popcorn), carrot, lemons and limes, gingerbread men, cookies, ice cream cones, grapefruit, cupcakes, pears and a rocket popsicle. I also have a pencil and a piano keyboard. I am working on a crayon too. I think they would make great teacher Christmas gifts. Let me know if you want to know any more about that. Yes I can ship them too.

Preschool

Mia began going to a co-op preschool this week. She is the youngest in the class, but I am so happy for her to be able to get out and be with kids and learn lots. Here are some of my favorite pictures from her first day. I love this one because her backpack is as big as she is. 

It is her first official first day of school picture! She is so cute!!

Here is Mia and I just before she went into Teacher Alicia's house to begin school.

And she is off....

First Grade

We can't believe it, but Claire is a big first grader. She is so amazing and smart. She loves going to school and learning new things. I love seeing her excitement. Here she is with her pack it lunch bag (which I later learned was for Mia and Claire's was supposed to be the purple and green one...oops). She is all ready to go.

This is one of my favorite pictures. Here Claire is getting ready to get on the bus and in front of her is her best friend from her kindergarten class. They are lucky enough to be in the same class again this year. They even wore the best friend necklaces they have together. We are grateful for this friend. Claire had a rough time when her best friend all growing up moved. Just can't believe she is gone all day long now.

Mia doesn't like the Claire is gone all day long. I have tried to do lots of fun things with her to get her used to being home with just mom. She will start preschool next week which she is so excited about. So for today I decided to teach Mia to ride her bike. I was getting frustrated, but as you can see from this video she finally caught on.