Christmas Part Two

Christmas Day at our house.....

"WAHOOO, Santa came!"

 "And look, he ate his cookies and the reindeer ate some of the carrot AND he left us a NEW fish!" (we had to part ways with our last fish. Poor Tranny, who must have been elderly when we bought him. So nice thinking Santa, Bronco will hopefully be young and vibrant!)

 Merry Christmas Isabelle! We love you!

 

 Merry Christmas Mark! We love you!

 

 Merry Christmas Sierra! We love you and promise we'll let you go play in the snow!

 Mark helping dad shovel before our guests arrive.

 Our first family Christmas at our new house. We had 14 adults and 7 kids and it couldn't have been more fun!

Kids table.....

 Start of the adult table.....

 Dance party, dress up, karaoke, fireman saves the princesses, and whole lot more. The kids completely entertained themselves while the adults enjoyed food, drinks, and conversation!! We loved it and snuck a few laughs while peeking in on the kids.

 Mark spent his entire day and evening at his train table. No joking here. He is madly in love with trains and anything that involves a train. Good job on the train table present Santa!

We hope everyone had a Merry Christmas and enjoyed all the smiles and happiness that appear at this time of year. We feel so fortunate to have such wonderful family to spend it with!

Christmas- Part One

A great Christmas in a great house! We enjoyed every minute of being home as a family for 2 1/2 weeks straight in our new home. We got to do some fun activities with the kids, visit with family, complete some housing projects, and just relax (as much as you can with kids). It was torture having to go back to work!

We spent Christmas Eve at my parents house in Evergreen. The cousins had more fun than you can imagine. We enjoyed a feast before opening presents.

 Belle patiently waiting to open presents.

 

They did manage to open one present the second we walked in the door.  Noah and Will couldn't wait a second longer to show Isabelle and Mark what they got them. The kids rode their new scooters around the house all night and because they were so smart and got 4 of them, there was no arguing on who gets to the ride the scooter. All of them. Around and around and around. Hilarious.

 Mark's favorite time of the night. Dessert. He has a major sweet tooth!

 

 Noah and Belle playing so sweetly, as usual, with their new cupcake decorating set.

 

 We knew Belle and Mark would fall asleep on the way home, so Belle wrote her letter to Santa before leaving. Mark was too distracted to contribute. I wrote word for word what she said and she signed it and added a quick picture of Santa.

 

We had a great evening and the best part was watching the kids interact, laugh, and show every ounce of excitement they could that it was Christmas and Santa was coming. I absolutely love Christmas with kids!

Thanksgiving

Well, it's fair to say there is no way I can keep up with this blog like I used to. Times are clearly busy these days!! So, going back to Thanksgiving.

We had a great week off spending time with family and friends. After doing a few things around the house, we headed up to the cabin for Thanksgiving with Grammy, Pepe, Auntie Robin, Uncle Guy, Phoebe, and Vander.

The cousins had a lot of fun together! We did lots of hiking, cruising through the forest on The Mule, eating, and playing.

On our way home we stopped to cut our Christmas tree with the O'Reilly's and gang.  It's a good thing Belle and Mark like hiking because we did a lot of walking before finding the perfect tree and much of it was straight downhill.  Although I didn't get a decent photo of them smiling, they had a blast looking for the tree.

Watching dad cut the tree.

Ta da! Our tree!

They even picked out their own small tree, which both managed to carry most of the way back up the steep hill. Well, Mark's tree was basically dragged up the hill, which if you look carefully you'll see here. Luckily it was nice and fresh and few needles got lost in the dragging.

Then a trip to visit Santa on the way out. Belle asked for a wand, a table, and a pink car. Mark didn't say much of anything. He wasn't quite sure what was going on, but he managed to pull through without crying.

We had a great Thanksgiving week! Coming soon (hopefully) will be our fun and eventful Christmas post.....

Pre Halloween and Halloween Night

Pumpkin Patch fun with Jamie! Jamie had a day off and took the kids to the pumpkin patch. They both found three great pumpkins to carve this year. Mark tripped over every pumpkin stem, twig, etc in the patch, but still managed to have a good time!
 

Halloween night! Both kids were so excited to go trick-or-treating! Here we have Belle the butterfly and Mark the old time golfer. Isabelle is shouting, "Happy Halloween" to every neighbor out there.

 

 

Excuse Mark's runny nose. We have battled a major case of sickness here at the Mercier household and we're finally on the tail end of it.

 

 My attempt at getting the perfect Halloween shot of the two of them together never worked, usually never does. They were way more interested in heading out for the candy!  Isabelle enjoyed helping Mark walk to the doors and they both did an excellent job at saying "trick-or-treat," and "thank you." Everybody got a good laugh trying to understand Mark saying it, but he definitely knew exactly what to do! The only hesitation was when someone came to the door with a mask on and they didn't thrill him too much.

Pre-Halloween we had a party to go to. At this point, both kids had picked their costumes.....Belle wanted to be cowgirl and Mark a superhero. Within a couple weeks, this obviously changed to a butterfly and a golfer. Dressing up is usually a common theme daily at our house, so this came to no surprise to me and Jamie. (BTW...take one last look at that awesome carpet and linoleum because in one more week it will finally be wood floors!!)