Christmas Preparations

December 2013

After Thanksgiving, the month of Christmas preparation began.  I hope our kids look back on these times fondly as I still do to the Christmases of my childhood - and maybe even carry a few of our family traditions on to the next generation.  Our Christmas season began with - what else? - the decorating of the Christmas tree.  As my family has done for every year I can remember, we brought home a live tree.  Daddy always has fun of getting the tree in the house, in its stand, and covered in lights:

This year, he had some help from Miss Olivia:

 

 

It has become a tradition to get an ornament each year for each kid.  This year, Jack was old enough to pick out his own.  You'll never guess what he picked? Leonardo, the Ninja Turtle, of course!  We let him pick out the perfect location on the tree:

For Livi, we picked Abby Cadabby from Sesame Street:

They had so much fun helping Mommy hang the ornaments on the tree.  This was the first year that Jack was really interested, and careful enough to hang even the most breakable ornaments:

 

Poor little Livi got a little too excited and fell in the empty box that held the lights:

My beautiful Grandma Rose moved out of the house she's lived in since before I was born and into an assisted living facility that could help keep her active and healthy.  Before her move, my Mom spent several weeks in Tennessee helping her sort through many years of memories and find homes for the important things.  We are honored to have received these 2 ornaments, which of course were placed prominently on our tree, as they will be every year from now on:

The finished product!!

Tommy also took on the job of decorating the outside of the house:

We didn't go as all out as some houses do, and the house is too tall for us to be able to put lights around the roof ourselves, but I like the way ours turned out.  The picture doesn't do it justice, but we put lights on each of the trees in front and changed our floodlights to red and green:

This year was the first year that Jack wrote a letter to Santa.  He wrote the first part himself, then followed the dotted lines that Mommy made for the latter part.  It says, "Dear Santa,  I want a ship, Ninja Turtle phone, Ninja Turtle car, Dojo Raphael.  Livi wants princesses.  Jack."

I love it that my sweet boy wanted to be sure to tell Santa what Livi wanted as well.

Our Elf on the Shelf, Betsy, returned for her second year to visit our house and report back to Santa each night leading up to Christmas morning.  They can't touch her, or she will lose her magic and not be able to fly back to Santa, but they can get close.  Here they are after finding Betsy looking out the window on the stair landing:

Betsy wasn't always as creative as some other elves, but she managed to find a new hiding place each and every morning from Thanksgiving to Christmas eve.  I documented a couple of her hiding places to show Daddy when he was out of town one week:

 

Santa came to school one day for pictures.  At first, Olivia screamed and screamed, but you would never have known it from the picture:

One Saturday, we met Nana and Papa at the Gaylord Texan.  We didn't actually walk around the ICE exhibit this time, but they have so many other fun things to do.  These giant Kung Fu Panda ice slides are one of those:

We bought a pass that allowed us 10 runs down the slides for Jack and an adult.  Mom joined him once, but mostly, this was father-son fun.  Papa managed to get a picture of them on one of their rides:

After sliding, we took a walk around the hotel.  They always decorate it so beautifully for the holidays:

We stopped for a couple of group photos:

 

And then made our way to the cafe for gingerbread men and hot chocolate.  Here's Jack with the unfortunate gingerbread man before he met his demise:

 We didn't manage to get a picture of Livi with him before he became a snack :)

Happy holidays from the Mhire family!

Family Thanksgiving Fun!

November 2013

I'll admit, it was kind of nice not to have a holiday that didn't include a multi-hour car trip.  Not that I would trade those holidays for anything, but sometimes its nice to do something a little lower-key.  On Thanksgiving morning, we headed over to Fort Worth to spend the day at Nana and Papa's house with the McCarthy cousins.  Nana had a busy day planned, but we all took some family pictures outside while we still looked presentable.  Here's our family:

Brandi, Ryan, Lincoln and Charlie:

And Nana and Papa:

We headed inside and took a few more cousin pictures:

 

Then all the fun could begin.  The kids love to play with Nana's little people jungle:

Here's a cute shot of my big girl sitting in a barstool before our Thanksgiving meal.  Nana made a great Thanksgiving meal.  We brought some extremely sweet sweet potato casserole.  It was Charlie's favorite!  I can't believe we didn't get any pictures of the actual meal.

Nana also made these adorable cookie turkeys for dessert.  She's so creative!

After Thanksgiving dinner, Nana had another fun activity planned.  She had us bring over a bag of tiny trinkets we didn't need anymore.  She supplied the glue guns, styrofoam cones and gold spray paint and we had fun with our craft project.  It was supposed to be for the kids, but after a few minutes, they were on to other things, so all of the adults enjoyed some craft time!

After we decorated our Christmas trees, it was time for the gold spray paint.  The second picture gives you an idea of what the finished product looked like.  They all turned out really well!

Everyone had fun playing in the backyard while Tommy added the finishing touches to everyone's artwork:

Jack and Lincoln also took the Jeep for a spin around the neighborhood:

Happy Thanksgiving!  We have so much to be thankful for!

Early Thanksgiving Celebrations

November 2013

I was spending Thanksgiving with Tommy's family here in Fort Worth, and Katy was going to Kansas with my family.  At Christmas, my family was going to Jackson to spend the holiday with Grandma Rose, while the Katy's family would be in Charlotte with the Davises.  We do our best to divide our holidays between all of the grandparents who love to see our families.  Unfortunately, sometimes that means my family and Katy's family miss each other completely.

So I was so thankful when the Davis family decided to fly into Dallas, spend a few days with us, and drive up to Kansas for Thanksgiving.  They arrived on Saturday afternoon.  Saturday and Sunday were pretty relaxing - it was nice for the cousins to get to spend some time together without constantly running around.  We did a little shopping, but mostly hung out around the house.  Jack loved showing his toys to the cousins, who especially loved his marble towers and car tracks.  Livi the book lover brought her books to whoever would read to her, and plopped down in their lap for story time.

Of course, the boys also loved their electronic gadgets - leap pads, I-pads, they know how to work them all. I love how focused they are in this picture:

Sunday morning was chilly, but it didn't stop the boys from wanting to play outside:

Our garden was overflowing with poblano peppers and the temperatures were getting close freezing, so they had a great time chunking poblanos:

My parents arrived from Boerne on Sunday afternoon and the whole family headed out to Chuy's for some Mexican food on Sunday night.  Yum!

I took Monday off of work, so on Monday morning, we headed to downtown Dallas to the Perot museum. Someone was very excited!

We arrived and took the glass-enclosed escalator up to the museum, pausing when we got there to take in the beautiful views of downtown Dallas:

 We spent a lot of time in the dinosaur hall and playing with the activities around it:

Livi was much too little to do anything last time we went to the museum, so it was really fun watching her enjoy playing:

 Of course, the boys had fun, too:

 

They have a pretty amazing mineral hall.  I think I walked Jack around to every single display case and read him what each mineral was:

Livi enjoyed them, too:

At the end of our trip, we headed down to the bottom floor of the museum to the children's museum section. Everyone had fun playing with plastic food, water toys, cars, slides and the construction area.  

When it was time to leave, I was with Livi and assumed that Jack was with his cousins.  He wasn't.  It probably only took me a minute or two to find him in another corner of the kids area, but I'm not sure I've ever felt such a sense of panic as I did when I realized I didn't know where he was.  Being a Mommy is hard sometimes.

After spending the morning and early afternoon at the museum, we had just enough time to come home and make a delicious early Thanksgiving dinner (ok, so they are eating PB&J in this picture, but I'm sure they looked pretty much the same eating Thanksgiving dinner):

On Tuesday morning, it was time for everyone except the Mhires to head to Kansas, but no morning with Grandpa would be complete without smoothies.  All of the boys got to assist with the smoothie making:

We got one last family picture before everyone headed out.

Happy Early Thanksgiving!

Sidekicks, Too!

Winter 2013

Jack had such a good time playing soccer in the fall, that when Coach Lynsey said she would also be coaching Carver's indoor team, we decided to sign up.  We played at Blue Sky Sports Center in The Colony.  Indoor soccer is a much faster moving game, and when the kiddos get bunched up (as they tend to do) there isn't anywhere to go other than into the wall.  At first, my little non-aggressive guy wasn't a fan of that, but he quickly learned that the walls also meant that there was no out-of-bounds and  to use that to his advantage.  This season, he also learned that he could stop the other team from scoring by standing in front of the goal.  I may have a little defender on my hands!  Here are a few shorts from a couple of his practice sessions:

Warming up before the first game:

 

And some game time action shots:

Like I said, using the wall to his advantage as he goes for the goal:

At the end of the season, everyone got a medal.  Jack was really excited because it was his first medal!

Here's the team - Jaida (the one and only girl), Liam, Jack, Carver, Dhilin and Alex:

I told you someone was proud of his medal!