Joy School - Lexie

Recently a group of girls from the ward and I started up a little joy school for our wee little ones at home. I have done this for Jacks, Mickey, and now well it was certainly Lexie's turn. Might I say that Thursdays cannot come soon enough! She is in LOVE with going to "school" and always remembers to pack her back pack (even when said school is in our own home!!). Can't believe how big she's getting. Here are a few photos from her very first day!

Here she is all ready to go. Don't you love her "cheese" smile :) And if you can't tell by the next three pictures that follow, she LOVES having her picture taken! She's such a ham!

Here she is with the group of kiddos that will be in her class until May!

Texas Snow

January 9th we woke up to quite a storm. Rain was coming down in buckets and the weatherman had even forecasted SNOW!?! Yup, snow! Jared and I were skeptical at first, but as we saw the temp. dropping and dropping, we thought, well maybe. Well, maybe became a "certain" when after Sacrament Meeting at church all the kids were squealing as they saw snow falling outside! It was all anyone could do but talk about the snow! My kids were so excited and couldn't wait to get home. Well, after two more hours of church we made it home and the kids instantly went outside. Thankfully Jared was able to find all of their snow gear really quickly and on it went.

The first one out, of course, Jackson! I failed to take a picture of it but he took Jared's sled off the slide since there wasn't enough snow to make a hill. That boy sure is creative!

The next ones to go were Lexie and Mikey! Here's Lexie totally suited up. She was the last one to come in from outside. She was having a blast!

And here's Mickey!

Can you see the excitement in that face?!?

Here's Lexie fully enjoying herself! Last year in UT I had to force her to go out and play just for a minute in the snow. This year, she was in Heaven!

You can't really see what she's doing in the following pics, but she's actually taking snow and just throwing it up in the air. She was having such a blast and didn't move from that spot for like 15 minutes!

Well even though our cold temps. lasted for more than a week, our snow was very short-lived. I think two days later it was pretty much all gone. My kids were totally bummed (Mikaela even was so distraught that she made a snowball and stuck in the freezer for safe keeping!), but if you ask me, that was enough snow for me for the year :)

Christmas Catch Up

The two week Christmas break went by way too fast! So fast, that I never had a minute to blog. So here's a re-cap of our Christmas break :)

My mom came into town for ten days and my aunt came into town for four. Since we only get to see them about twice a year we tried to cram as much fun with them as possible. One of the fun things we went to do was go and watch The Collin County Ballet's performance of The Nutcracker. As a kid my mom always took us to go watch The Nutcracker up in San Fran and I loved it. So I'm trying to pass that down to my kids. They were all great sports and remarkably made it through the entire performance. We did have a bit of a setback with Lexie when we first arrived though. As we were about to get down and enter the center I coerced her to take a bite of pizza so she would have a little bit of food in her stomach. WELL...that backfired! She ended up chocking on the pizza (surprise, surprise) and threw up all over herself in the car! Needless to say, my older two went to the ballet with my mom and aunt and Jared and I ran to the nearest Target to clean our mess up! We did; however, managed to clean up in time to make it back during intermission and were able to watch the second half! What a night to remember! This is Christmas Eve. Every year we have our traditional Pupsas dinner and once again it was so YUMMY!! Here's everyone ready to dig in!

So the kids were so completely infatuated with The Nutcracker that they ended up making up their own performance for us this year. So after dinner we watched their "performance" and cheered for them just as loud as we had cheered for the pros the night before:)

Afterwards we opened up the traditional Christmas Eve Pj's and read the account of Christ's birth from the Bible. The kids gave us no complaint to go to bed...they wanted Santa to COME!

Christmas Morning! I think the pictures say it all!

We had a fabulous Christmas Day and were sad to see it go! That night we ate Panes Con Pavo (another traditional Salvadorian dish) and talked to all of our family that were far away. It was such a great day and we can't wait 'till next year. The only thing I didn't take a picture of, which cannot go unmentioned, is the tooth that Jacks lost Christmas morning! He was so excited for the Tooth Fairy that that night he again went to bed super fast and easy! What a great day!

Royalty Dance Fall/Winter 2010

After Mikaela finished soccer back in October she wanted to jump right back into dance. So we found a local ballet school and enrolled her. She LOVES it and the best part is that she has one of her primary friends in her class and our Primary President is her teacher! Here are a couple of photos from her December mini-showcase. All parents were allowed to come in and watch an entire class and then at the end they performed a little number from the Nutcracker. She was so HAPPY!