Christmas, Christmas: Part 2

When we last left you, Autumn was making this face.


In anticipation of her Big Santa Gift:


A Princess Dream Castle. Those are the Giant Eyes of Happiness. There were a lot of Giant Eyes of Happiness that night, including baby Hudson (Autumn assures me that it's Baby Hudson and not just Hudson) who I think enjoyed the paper more than anything. Although he also seemed to enjoy the balloon thingie we got him! This photo is more Adorable Tongue of Happiness but there were some Giant Eyes, too.


Ok, guys, how adorable is Boppa? We saw this hat on gap.com and just had to get it for him (I didn't do a single bit of shopping in a store!).


Here's Mike's dad being surprised by his CARNIVAL POPCORN MAKER. :D


It kind of looks like Ryan being overwhelmed with joy at his gifts wrapped in Justin Bieber paper.


Boppa Update: Still cute.


A couple days after Christmas, we trekked to Texas de Brazil. For some reason, Autumn was really into the tongs.


Apparently we had Giant Eyes week. Funny enough, Autumn did some serious chowing down on steak. Medium rare steak.


I've never really thought Mike and Frank looked super alike. I can kind of see where they are similar in body type and maybe, I don't know, hair? But once someone thought they were twins. For real! Apparently the same type of person who'd actually ask me if I am really Autumn's mom, haha. But, I will say this: we watched Autumn stand by Frank for several minutes thinking he was Mike. I caught the moment that she realized that he was not, in fact, her papa.


Boppa Update: Still cute.
They asked me to take a photo of them so I took a few. None of them are edited but this one is my favorite.


Oh! One more funny thing we did over the holidays...twenty years ago, Mike's parents and their friends the Denneys sat down and did predictions about what the kids would be when they grew up. They decided that they would, when all the kids had chosen careers, open the envelopes and put $50 for each kid in the pot. If someone guessed correctly, they got the $200. If they missed, the kid kept the $200. I had a good time watching them and listening to all the guesses. Someone needs to ask Lainey what she guessed for Michael David because, guys, hil-arious.


They actually got 3 of the kids right! Megan is in communications (her mom guessed that right) and Lindsay is a kindergarten teacher (P'd guessed that right). But the oddly specific correct guess of the night goes to Michael David's dad. He guessed that Michael David--who was a BABY--would be a landscape architect. How crazy is that? As far as how Mike came out...he got his $200 mainly because his job didn't exist in 1991!


Of course, that made us think about what crazy jobs our kids will have someday that don't exist right now! Mind-boggling!

Hey, visit the other blog to see my fitness before and after pics!

And, next week! Mike! Being social!

Christmas, Christmas: Part 1

Well, I totally meant to do a mid-week post and then totally didn't. I'm going to try to get caught up this week, though. We're mostly recovered from the holidays and it only took me a week! Ha! I still need to clean up the garland and glitter debris and help Mike carry the boxes upstairs but things are taken apart. It's kind of sad to not have all the decorations up but I left a few fun red things out to leave until Valentine's Day so it's not too bad. If you want to see our decorations, you can click here to see my other blog. I also posted some of my reflections on the past year.

The holidays were quite a bit more fun than I expected. Thanksgiving was, oddly enough, harder than Christmas but I think some of that might have to do with just how excited Autumn was about the whole thing. She even got a good photo with Santa! Here we all are after visiting with Santa. Penny got to come,


so did Lainey,


and, of course, I was there. :) This holiday was the holiday of no one believing I am Autumn's mom. First, the Santa people didn't for reasons I can't figure out. And then New Year's Day, Mike, Autumn and I went to the local Chinese buffet and the waitress didn't think Autumn was my daughter because "she doesn't look Asian enough." Now, don't get me wrong, I know I look not entirely "white" but, really, I don't look that Asian. Anyway, here we are, apparently looking nothing alike, haha.


Mike didn't do Santa but later that day, he and Autumn played I Spy together with her I Spy wand. I thought it was pretty cute when I came upon them behind the table.


A couple days later and it was Christmas Eve! This is the first year Autumn's really gotten the whole Christmas/Santa thing. We read from her storybook Bible every night leading up to Christmas and talked some about how we're fitting Santa into the season. I discovered that while I don't have a problem with Santa, I don't care for the whole "be good or Santa won't bring presents" thing. She and I talked about how I want her to be good, not to get stuff, but because she loves us and wants to behave. :) Anyway, here she is putting out cookies for Santa for the first time.


Santa left her a note and ate the cookies! She was pretty happy except she didn't like that Santa left half a cookie on the plate because Autumn very specifically wanted him to have 5 oreos.


We only got her one gift (a dress up center for her dress up clothes) and Santa just put gifts in her stocking. We figured that between all her family, she'd be getting plenty of gifts. She didn't seem to notice or care that there weren't a million gifts in the living room (the tree is in Mike's office, lol).


One fun thing we did this year that we definitely want to do again...my mom spent the night with us Christmas Eve! We ate popcorn and watched Tangled and my mom got to see Autumn put out cookies and get up all excited. And, believe me, it was a good thing Mike and I showed restraint with the gift buying because my mom went way, way above and beyond!


Oh, my big gift this year? Mike got me a new lens. This is the first photo I took with it!


My family had Christmas dinner at our house. We were excited to have everyone over, especially Donnie and Liz who were here from Las Vegas. Here is Liz having a little milk with her dessert.


Roxie was hysterical Christmas night. She went and got a chair from Autumn's little dollhouse in the living room, brought it to the dining room, said "chair?" and tried to sit in it. Here is Donnie laughing so hard he turned purple.


:) And that was Christmas at our house. If you can believe it, our night wasn't over! We still had to head over to Mike's parents house to open gifts with them...here's a preview of that:


That would be a face of anticipation, excitement, and insanity brought on by it being 3 hours past her bedtime!

Happy New Year!

This is what we did today!


Christmas and New Year photos will be coming soon! Until then...I hope your 2012 got off to a fantastic start! Autumn's certainly did...with chocolate, strawberries, a juicebox, and BACON.


:)

Merry Christmas Eve!

art by Matt Thomas

This baby would be like that bright star shining in the sky that night. A Light to light up the whole world. Chasing away darkness. Helping people to see. And the darker the night got, the brighter the star would shine.
~The Jesus Storybook Bible

 visit our other blog to see our Christmas card!

The Christmas Season has official begun!

I think I mentioned this before, and I know it is so silly, but one of the things I actually like about winter is that Molly is much friendlier. She's pretty much constantly seeking heat sources from like October to April.


The funny thing is that occasionally, you can actually see Molly weighing her disdain for humanity with her need for heat. It really freaks out some of our friends because, usually, she's like this.


Wednesday night, we had our community group Christmas dinner. Molly came in and didn't just sit in the room. She draped herself over Mike's knee and chilled out.


Even weirder, she kept her eye on one of the guys. Whenever Brad would move, Molly would shift so she could see him. /psycho music. We were quite baffled by the whole thing.


Anyway, back to the human Colleys. We went to Birmingham for Christmas with the Italians! We had a really great time with everyone, like usual. Autumn was beside herself with excitement over getting to see Tyler.


Do you like her pink stripe on her eye? She went a little crazy with the markers in the car on the way down. She had marker on her face, along her arm, and on both hands. Oh, and Aunt Mary made Autumn's day even more when she gave Autumn an Aurora doll.


She was so excited she gave Aunt Mary a hug and posed for a photo with her.


We tried taking pictures of the 5 kids but this is how the first one turned out.


When I looked and saw Mike scowling I was like OH NO WE ARE REDOING THIS. The second one went better. :)


He's so silly. This one of everybody (except Kyle WHO IS ON A CRUISE, lucky) is at an odd angle but I think it's cute!


Autumn looks a little stricken there, doesn't she? Hahaha.


And so begin the holiday festivities!

A Winter Wonderland! For A Few Hours, At Least

This is what we woke up to Wednesday!


It was our second snow of the season which is just crazy for Memphis. I'm not complaining. It's fun and pretty and Autumn just loves it.


I had to go to the gym which meant that we didn't have a ton of time but Autumn and I went out and made a snowman while oatmeal was on the stove. Mike was, by the way, seriously disappointed to have missed the oatmeal.


We got a pretty good snowman built, height-wise buuuuut I think I made the head too big and by the time we left for the gym, his head (her head?) was on the ground. Autumn wasn't too upset. She had fun eating oatmeal and giving me updates on how far the snowman was leaning.


We're still doing the weird smiling thing, as you can see. :) One fun thing about the cold weather is how friendly Molly is. She's basically a heat seeking kitty so she spends a lot of time with me since I usually have a blanket or fuzzy sweater on.


I bought this shirt for Autumn a really long time ago. For some reason, she would never wear it but she wore it twice this week! I am sooooo excited because I love this shirt so much I want one for myself.


We've been trying to get a good balance of the Jesus and not so Jesus parts of Christmas so I've been reading Autumn the Christmas stories from her little bible. By the way, if you're looking for a Bible for a kid, I highly recommend this one. The stories are well done and the illustrations are beautiful and have people of all colors and looks. Anyway, I love it when she sits down and is all, "I'm reading my Bible!"


How cute is this? Here she is ready for church in her cute coat, hat, and boots. All courtesy of Lainey, of course!


Tonight she and I worked really hard together dusting the house, getting it ready for some more decorations and our community group Christmas party. She really is a big help and she told Mike, "I love to dust!" I hope she keeps that up, for real. By the time she was waiting on her Sunday Night Grilled Cheese, she was done.


Poor thing! Such a hard life!

Christmas Crafts and Chores!

Oh, man, I have to confess I have hardly taken any photos. We've been really working hard getting the house cleaned up and ready for the holidays. Autumn's been a bigger help than one would think a four year old might be. The first thing we put up was her pink Christmas tree. :) I promise I didn't buy this...it used to be her Aunt Lauren's!


Getting things ready for Christmas has involved things like cleaning out the pantry. Totally random but it's something that got out of control while I was sick and I need everything in its place as we get ready for Christmas dinner with my family and then our New Year's Brunch. Autumn spends entirely too much time asking me when Christmas is going to be here so I decided we'd make a little Advent craft. We've never really done the advent calendar but it seems like a good time to start. We did it really simply with strips of construction paper, crayons, and stickers and then we made a chain with the strips.


Please don't laugh at my drawing! We didn't have any red paper so we decided to decorate the white paper. We used this sticker book that had all kinds of stickers in it. I was pretty tickled by some of Autumn's decorating choices. My favorite is where she wrote the word Jesus and then used black cat stickers! Also, right below, note the Christmas watermelon.


I'm attempting to work on a project for a friend, I'll eventually post it on the other blog after it is done. I'm not so sure it's going the way I wanted but we shall see. Anyway, I went to take some photos. Autumn was going to be in one but she was less than cooperative.


She did the same face today when I tried to take her picture while we did the Christmas craft.


I don't feel too bad because she did this with Elizabeth, too, haha. We got our gorgeous cd of photos this week. Here's one funny one.


Our daughter is a lion.

I do have to include one pretty one!


So cute!