Let's See...where was I?

The last month and a half as been a blur...filled with fun, family and outings that have kept us on the run since the middle of November....

Allison holding Caroline and Blake holding Ellie

I ended my year leave of absence with Chevron at the beginning of December, and went back to work for 4 days before I took my month of vacation.  I know.  Rough life.  Someone please feel sorry for me.

My mom stayed with the girls while we were at work, and I think all three of them had a great time.

She and my Dad were in town already for the Thanksgiving holidays that was only a few days before, so instead of flying back with Dad, she stayed an extra week.

She taught them how to find their belly-button which they like to search for and show off whenever you ask them to.

She took them around on the wagon that they got for their birthday, went to lunch with them, and did a lot of playing that week.

They both wanted Grandmom that whole week and no one else.  Hmph.

Ellie waving in the back

Thankgiving, the week before, was a total blast.

We had David and Angie also come for 4 days.  They are like siblings to me, and we couldn't have been more thrilled to spend the holiday with them.  Rick was a part of the whole weekend as well, but he decided to stay at his own house instead of sleeping on the couch...call him crazy.

We had 16 people at our house for Thanksgiving...if you count the babies.  (Sidenote:  when do babies start getting counted...I never know what to say when we go to a restaurant and we're asked how many people do we have.)

Ellie, left and Caroline, right

We had 2 international students over that day and also our neighbors.  We were singing the motto, "the more the merrier" this year!

It was our first time to ever host Thanksgiving, and we hope we have many more opportunities to do it.

The weekend before all of our family came in town for Thansgiving week, Blake and I took the girls up to Groesbeck to visit our good friends, the Byrds.

Blake hunted with Wesley, i.e. sat in a deer stand in the feezing cold beginning at 4am waiting for deer to come.

Deer never came.

Ellie

We also watch A&M play LSU that weekend, which we were all anticipating to be a really great game.

It wasn't.

We mostly just hung around with Debbie and Wesley in their gorgeous home that they built last year and just enjoyed being in the presence of good friends in a beautiful setting.

It was a perfect weekend.  Even the hunting and football game was a great time!

And now, to what's going on now, we just got back from an 8 day trip to California for Christmas to visit Blake's family.

It was such a busy week.

We arrive a day late due to 2 cancelled flights.

Blake drove up to San Francisco with all the guys in his extended family for the Monday Night football game.  49ers vs Atlanta.

They had a wonderful time, every single guy came back hoarse, and it will be a memory they will probably talk about for years and years.

Caroline

We had our Christmas Eve celebration with all of Blake's extended family.  It was the loudest, most chaotic, most fun 4 hours I have spent in a very long time.

All of Blake's siblings and their family spent the night at his parents house for Christmas, and we all woke up for Christmas morning with some very excited nephews.  Caroline and Ellie were mesmerized by their cousins.

We got on a plane on Sunday to come home.  The travel this time was easy and uneventful.  The opposite with how we started the week.

And now, here we are.  About to enter into 2014.  What a way to end the year.

(All these photos here were from a walk that we took near where we live a little over a week ago.  I have tons of photos from all these other trips that I'll post over the next couple of days.)

Moving On

These last several weeks have been a whirlwind for me.  Caroline and Ellie decided last week to try walking on the exact same day, and they haven't looked back since that day.

They are trying to walk to any place they want to go instead of crawling, and I think in about another week or so, they will be doing it effortlessly.

That means we won't be having babies crawl around our house anymore.

I also weaned the girls right before Thanksgiving.  It was a month long process that was difficult for all 3 of us.  They cried a lot during those times and since that time, Caroline has turned into more of a thumb sucker than she ever was before.  On my last day of nursing them, I was full of emotion that I didn't even know I had.

What a journey, full of emotion when it wasn't going well in the beginning and then again in the end when it was second nature for us all with me realizing how much I'd miss that time with my babies.

I guess that means we won't be having anymore nursing babies around our house anymore.

I guess we're moving on to toddler-hood.  Blake and I are missing our twin little babies, but we're enjoying this new stage with each of their little developing personalities.

Thanksgiving

Blake and I hosted Thanksgiving this year and somehow we managed to go yet another year without actually roasting a Turkey ourselves.

A couple months prior, we were looking at spending a quiet Thanksgiving with just us, and so we invited a couple of foreign exchange university students to join us for dinner.

Then, David and Angie offered to make the trip down to Houston and spend the weekend with us, which immediately elated us.

Then, my parents decided that they would join in since they basically moved down the road from us a couple weeks prior.  Anchorage isn't exactly close, but compared to Perth, they might as well be living down the street....and I mean that in a good way!

Then, we found out our neighbors weren't going anywhere for Thanksgiving either, so we invited them over as well.

Then, all of a sudden, our quiet and simple Thanksgiving that we were originally anticipating turned into a house with every bedroom taken and 16 place settings for dinner.

It was awesome.  And we hope we have many more Thanksgivings like this.

The guys watched a lot of football that weekend.  I was told that Dallas won, Auburn won the Iron bowl in the last seconds of the game.  And despite us ALL wearing our Aggie gear on gameday, including my 2 percenter self, the Aggies lost.  Hmph.  Maybe it was because I didn't wear my throwback tee with paint all over it.  I'll try that next year.

We girls did a bit of shopping.  We shopped for Christmas presents that led us to spending way too much time in Macy's looking for slippers that weren't too "hungry" looking, according to my mother.  I still laugh every time I think about it, even though I'm still not exactly sure what that even means.  I blame Angie.  When she gets laughing, we're all dying laughing.  We ended our shopping trip with retracing every step we took in the mall looking for my mom's non-hungry looking slippers that got left...somewhere.  We found them. 

Blake and I also took our first Christmas card photo with the twins.  Blake is into the Christmas cards.  It's been a family tradition of his since he was a teenager, and since Blake and I met as a result of the infamous Souers Christmas photo of 2008, we've decided that it's a tradition that we need to