Christmas 2011- Columbia Edition!

We knew it was going to be difference this year, because it’s our first Christmas far away.  But we were lucky enough to be able to take a whole week to celebrate!  We started in Columbia, because Ruthie was graduating the weekend of the 16th.  Jess even came in from Colorado, and it was great having all 4 of use together! :)

So, obviously we started off the trip with graduation on Saturday.  Despite being a December graduation, the weather was beautiful, which made it much less painful to take pictures around campus!  I guess it’s because I went to school there, but I think MU’s campus is just beautiful, and I love being there.  Lots of good memories, and it just says CoMo to me! :)  Anyway, Jess took most of the pictures, so I don’t have many, just a few of the girls on the columns.  I’ve been wanting to take pictures of them there, because I think it’d be fun to have pictures of them as kids on the columns to compare with the pictures of them at the columns in their graduation gowns, you know, when they graduate from MU. Hehe… a mommy can hope! 

P.S. I’m not really going to be able to use this second picture, because, yes, those are plaid boxers in front of the columns… not our’s.  Apparently someone had a little too good of a time at the columns before graduation… hopefully Jess will have some good ones, or I’ll be doing some work in photoshop! :)

And, gratuitous shot of my girls and their daddy on campus… love my family!

After graduation festivities on Saturday, we went to church on Sunday.  Then we spent the next couple of days just hanging out in CoMo.  We did some last minute Christmas shopping with Jess, went out for dinner with Tim, Mal, & Grandma Jo, and went out for lunch and to see Santa at Bass Pro with Tim & Mal.  And, of course, laid around the house, ate too much, and generally had a good time hanging out with our family. 

Audrey’s favorite thing to do at Grandma & Grandpa’s… maul Sassy!  Sassy is the most tolerant animal I’ve ever seen, she just let A do whatever she wanted.  Which included things like Audrey holding up her back legs and doing the wheelbarrow… yikes! 

A and her favorite toy! :)

Love the Bass Pro Santa, because they give you a free pic, and it’s not an arm and a leg to buy more.  However, I don’t think I’ll be buying more this year.  Here’s the picture I took… yeah, not a framer!  Pretty hilarious, though.  Audrey, not a fan of Santa.

We did manage to get a cute one of the girls in Santa’s sleigh, though!

Audrey got a wicked cold, so she didn’t feel very good for most of the trip.  And she was definitely too worn out for shopping!

Of course, it wouldn’t be Christmas without a rip and tear session at Grandma & Grandpa’s house!  We all got together on Tuesday night to exchange presents.  We started with breakfast for dinner, of course.  We were cracking up because when we set the table, all of the food was tan- breakfast casserole, cinnamon rolls, biscuits, pancakes… carbs, anyone? :)  And it was all delicious!

Laney got the passing out presents job (although, as it was going to take about 4 1/2 years for her to get it done, Ruthie and Grandma helped). 

Before the ripping and tearing, though, Laney had to “open” her big present from Grandma & Grandpa.  Dad had brought in a bike and covered it with a blanket.  After she passed out all of the presents, Dad told her he was cold, so she pulled the blanket off.  She was QUITE excited…

And, of course, she had to take it for a little spin!

Audrey pretty much opened her first present and was done opening.  She was totally content to push the shopping cart from Aunt Ruthie around the rest of the night!

Dad won the biggest present award…

But, it was really just a Black and Gold Auctions car magnet, buried in packing materials… good call, Josh! :)

Anyway, we had such a good time hanging with the Price’s in Columbia.  It was great to have all of the Price kids together, especially since Jess is pregnant, fun to see her all excited!  Can’t wait to see all of the pictures she took, so look forward to more pics… and, of course, Christmas 2011, Springfield and Kentucky editions! :)  Hope your Christmas was as fun and filled with family as our’s!

It’s Beginning to Look a lot Like Christmas!

 

Well, anybody who knows us knows that we LOVE Christmas… so we’re always excited to get the decorating done, and this year was no exception!  Last week we set up our tree and even got lights up on the outside of our house one day that Josh and I were off work and it was nice outside!

The actual decorating of the tree I don’t have many pictures of, because, well, I spent most of the time trying to keep Laney and Audrey from dumping the giant tote of ornaments, tearing apart the packaging, and just generally wreaking too much havoc!  And, really, it was a good time decorating the tree now that both of them were excited about it.  We definitely have some sections at about 4 year old height that are a little ornament heavy, but we’ve never tried to have a perfect tree, and giant patches of ornaments are part of it! :)  Audrey didn’t really get the whole hanging up thing, so she would just set the ornaments on the tree branches, which was also pretty funny!

Once we got the tree up, I did manage to wrangle the girls into a picture, and it actually turned out pretty cute! 

 

And then, because I love a Christmas tree and sparkling ornaments, I had some fun with my camera and some of my favorite ornaments.  The pictures aren’t all great, because I was messing with the manual settings on the camera, but some of them turned out cool…

One of my absolute favorite ornaments.  Love its simplicity.  A good reminder when life gets crazy!

If possible, I would probably cover my entire tree in ornaments from the glass blower’s shop at Silver Dollar City.  This is one of the first ornaments Josh and I bought on our first Christmas trip there, and I still love it!  And, miraculously, the little yellow things in the middle are still attached! :)

Another SDC glass blower ornament… I wasn’t kidding, I’d probably buy one of everything if I had the money!  Love the red, love cardinals…

And, when I ran out of glass ornaments to buy, I would buy about a million of these glass icicle ornaments and hang them all over!

But, of course, there has to be room on our tree for lots of ornaments like this one!  Wouldn’t be Josh’s tree without them!

Our new family ornament from last year… neat to see this one from 2010 and the one with only 3 stockings from 2007!

Funny story about these… when we got married, I got to keep all of my ornaments from growing up, but Josh didn’t.  So there were lots of “Liz” ornaments on the tree, but no “Josh” ornaments.  So, we bought these two matching snowmen, and they always hang together. 

And here’s the final tree!  Complete with presents… I love Christmas!

And our stockings, made by Grandma Judy!  Yes, I know mine is way bigger than everyone else’s… it’s had almost 30 years to stretch out! :)

And the house from the outside… I love having the tree in the front window.  And, yes, the windows look like they’re crying… so I’m not the best at outside lights, but I wanted to do the windows! :)

So, there you go, the Looten house is ready for Christmas!!  Which is good, since Christmas is starting early this year… everything has to be bought, wrapped, and ready to go by next weekend!  Merry Christmas to all…

Halloween 2011!

Well, Halloween has to start our with carving a pumpkin… which we almost didn’t get done this year, but decided at the last minute to do it Saturday night.  We just hadn’t had a night to do it!  It was Audrey’s first time “helping” carve a pumpkin that she really kind of understood what was going on, so it was quite entertaining to watch her!  So we spread out the newspaper, put the girls in comfy clothes, and off we went!

Our rule during pumpkin carving… everyone has to touch the insides at least once! :)  Audrey went first…

Happy to reach in…

… and then wondering what the heck we made her do! :)

And then Laney, who knew what she was getting into, and was not interested, so Daddy had to “encourage” her!

Yep, pumpkin guts are still gross!

Audrey also thought she’d try the taste of fresh pumpkin…

Our other favorite part of pumpkin carving is trying to get a picture of the girls together on the porch with the jack o’ lantern… always a challenge! 

My favorite this year: they both look like ragamuffins, Laney’s hair is in her face and A’s smile is crooked… but they’re laughing and having fun and it’s real life… definitely the best!

Daddy’s masterpiece… Laney always picks the shapes and number of teeth, and Daddy has to make it happen… oval eyes, a triangle nose, and 5 teeth this year!

Since we don’t do major things for Halloween, that’s about all we did as far as decorating… but we’ve had the girls’ costumes planned for weeks, because as soon as Laney got her dress for her birthday, she wanted to wear it for Halloween!  Free costume = awesome! :)  Since we didn’t have a million houses to visit, like last year, we weren’t really sure where we should go trick-or-treating.  But some friends from church invited us to go with them to a little town south of here that does a big trunk or treat, plus is fun to walk and trick-or-treat.  So, we got the girls home, changed them, and headed south!

Audrey was not feeling so hot, and was not happy about being put in a costume!  We tried a sucker to make her feel better, but, well, it didn’t really help!  Angry Cinderella…

Cranky Audrey made getting a picture of the girls together impossible… this was the best one I got! :)

My favorite picture of Laney from the whole night.  She was so excited about her costume.  She’s wearing a dress she got from Yaya for her birthday, earrings, and the headpiece the flower girl wore in my wedding.  I pulled down the wedding box to see if she wanted to wear my headpiece (she was a princess bride, after all), and she decided she wanted the one with flowers instead.  I must admit, it looks pretty adorable!

For some reason it just struck me as funny to see Laney holding her dress up… she just looked so big!

Daddy and his girls!

We were afraid we wouldn’t get much trick or treating done b/c of Miss A not feeling well… but she seemed to perk right up once she figured out there was candy involved!!

So cute!

Also adorable…

So, the Veirs have twin boys, and they decided to go as KISS.  It was pretty hilarious to see KISS helping little Miss Cinderella with the trick or treating…

Laney and her friend, Layne!  Laney was being a total goof, clearly…

Anyway, so we definitely missed visiting our family, but it was fun to do actual trick or treating with the girls this year.  And it was actually really fun to raid the dress up box for our costumes!!  Hope everyone else had as much fun on Halloween as we did!! :)

Tim’s Bday!

Well, as if we needed an excuse for a long weekend in Springfield, it also happened to be Tim’s birthday!  It was the last weekend of Fall Break for us, so we got to leave on Thursday and spend all day Friday, Saturday, and part of Sunday there.  It was nice to not be rushed, and we got to hang out with Grandma De & Grandpa Don while we were there, so it was a good trip all around.

We spent Friday late morning/early afternoon at Grandma De & Grandpa Don’s house.  We had lunch, visited a lot, caught up on news, and played outside, of course!  You can’t keep our girls inside!  Anias was already hibernating, so we didn’t get to visit with the turtle, but the girls found other ways to occupy themselves.

Like picking the flowers with Grandma

And coloring with sidewalk chalk!

Audrey is sooo interested in doing whatever Laney does that she kept coloring right on top of Laney’s picture… which just made Laney scream, of course.  They were pretty cute (and quiet) for a minute or two, though…

After a good visit with Grandma & Grandpa (and when the girls were making it clear it was naptime), we headed back to the Looten’s to rest, and wait for the rest of the clan to arrive!  When everyone got there, we had Tim’s birthday dinner… some seriously delicious mexican food!  And, of course, strawberry cake! 

The birthday boy and his cake… for some reason Mom didn’t want to put 32 candles on the cake… weird.

Funniest thing the whole weekend was Audrey and Grandpa’s chair.  Every time he got out of it, she raced over and climbed in.  She was NOT interested in sharing, either- Grandma tried to sit in it with her, and she said no.  Nobody else could get away with stealing Grandpa’s chair, that’s for sure!

Speaking of not being able to keep our girls inside… that is especially true of Miss A.  She spent the mornings out on the porch with Grandpa!

Saturday we headed to Silver Sollar Ditty to play for the day.  As always, it was a good day, and we had some absolutely BEAUTIFUL weather.  Probably would have been warm enough for water rides, but we managed to steer Miss E. away from them!  Actually, one of their favorite things to do was to hang onto the fence and watch the boats go by in the Lost River.  It entertained them through lunch, which was pretty sweet! :)

Grandma & her girls, watching the boats

Watching the boats meant a few rare moments of stillness for Miss A, and I couldn’t resist getting a couple of pictures…

Then the girls discovered that there was a little puddle where one of the waves from the river splashed over onto the sidewalk.  And what did they do?  Jumped in with both feet!  Water babies…

Of course, it wouldn’t be a trip to SDC without a trip to Geyser Gulch and the ball vacuums.  These things could occupy the girls for HOURS.  It’s amazing.  Wish I had one on my spare room, I think it’d be worth it…

So, funny story about this dog… Laney has really latched onto it lately, and it was actually a gift from Josh to me when we were dating in college.  Kinda cool that she’s so fascinated with it.

Great angle on this shot by Josh!

And once they got tired of the ball vacuums, Laney had to try the climbing net.  Unfortunately, she was a little short for some of the jumps, so guess who got to join her!!  What a good daddy…

Laney also spent a lot of time hitching a ride with Grandma Jo!  Love the totally blue lips from rock candy.  Laney has discovered the joy of pure sugar on a stick. :)

Yeah, I don’t even know.

Grandma & Miss A.!

We left the City and headed to Mr. G’s Pizza in Branson.  They have really good Chicago-style pizza, and we really had a good time visiting.  After dinner, we headed back home, and Laney picked Megamind for everyone to enjoy (which, I actually think everyone did enjoy- it’s a pretty good movie!). 

Sunday we went to church, and then Tim and Mal & Mom and Dad headed back towards Branson to check out a wedding venue (Yay, Tim & Mal!).  Since they were going to be there for awhile, and we wanted to get back at a reasonable hour, we packed up and headed home while they were gone.  The trip back was a little rough, but we made it by 11:30 or midnight.  And it was worth the late night to get to see all of our Springfield family for a long weekend!  However, now we’re glad to be home for a few weekends… it’s been a VERY busy fall.  Maybe our schedule will clear up this winter… ha, ha.