Cole turns 10!

Sunday was Cole's birthday. Saturday night he got to pick what he wanted to go do as a family. He chose Bowling. Okay, I'm a good sport, so I participated, but understand one thing, I am NOT a bowler. Never have been and probably never will be. We had a lot of fun though! Final scores, Nick-107, Me-88, Cole-86 and Jacob-77, and that was with the bumpers up. Yes, you read that right. My 10 year old son only scored 2 points less than me. I'm not a bowler, remember. After bowling we headed to Red Robin for dinner. Again, Cole's choice. He picked that place cause they go all out on the singing when it's your birthday. So, when it was time to sing to him, they sang LOUD! Wow, not kidding! Cole gets embarrassed quite easily and his face turned about 5 shades of red. He loved it though and we had such a good time.

Here are the three of them in their stylin' bowling shoes. Don't you love those shoes? :)

They would get down on their knees to watch the ball go down the lane. I guess they had a better view of it that way. :)

Jacob was a bit excited cause he got a spare. :)

Birthday boy!

Here is Nick and Cole at Red Robin. Okay, I think I know who Jacob takes after when he makes those funny faces. ;)

Here is Jacob and I at Red Robin. I think I posed with the wrong kid, haha.

Here is the birthday kid enjoying his ice cream that they gave him when they sang Happy Birthday.

After dinner we went to the Temple to see the Christmas lights. Every year they outdo themselves by adding more lights. It's awesome to see! We've been trying to go for a couple of weeks, but we had rain and then Jacob was sick so finally we had a chance after Christmas to go. We love the Nativity displays from all over the world that they have there inside the visitors center. I did get pictures, but they don't show the true beauty of it at all.

Here are the boys at the Temple in front of the Christmas tree outside the visitors center. It was COLD!

Here is Jacob in front of the big nativity display outside. It's hard to tell what it is, but it really is beautiful!

Then here is Jacob making another goofy face in front of the Joseph and Mary on the donkey.

Here are the 3 boys in front of the 3 wise men crossing on the front lawn.

On Sunday they sang to him in Primary, and again, the red face showed up. I made his favorite meal for dinner and we opened presents. He is really into Legos right now, so he got some Legos for his birthday and some rollerblades. Now him and Jacob can go rollerblading together. On Monday his grandma took him shopping for his birthday to let him pick out exactly what he wanted. They went, yep you guessed it, to the Lego Store in the Chandler mall where he picked out another Star Wars Lego set. I swear that kid is starting up a collection of Star Wars Legos. He has a ton! He's fast at putting them together too.

Here he is right after waking up on Sunday. He still looks a bit tired.

Here is Cole in all his glory opening up presents. He made sure to read the cards before opening any presents. :)

He was excited to get rollerblades, especially since Jacob got some for Christmas. In the picture on the right I caught him making a weird face, but really he was excited that he got Star Wars Legos. :)

He got some Indiana Jones Legos too and apparently they were ones that he really wanted, so he stood up and started doing a little dance from excitement, haha. I wish I would have recorded it. He was hilarious! :)

We took family pictures on Sunday right after church cause I wanted a good picture of us dressed up since Jacob was sick the Sunday before. I don't like my legs in the picture at all. They look weird. These were taken using the self timer on the camera, so I had no way of knowing how they looked before snapping the picture. In the 2nd picture Jacob was mad and so he is crying, but trying to smile at the same time. They didn't turn out as good as I'd hoped. We need someone to take some good family pictures of us!

Here are the two boys. Jacob was still mad so this is the best smile I could get out of him. :)

New Years Eve is his friend party. We are having a birthday/New Years Eve slumber party. He has invited 3 close friends. That is all I can handle, haha. It will be his first slumber party and he is VERY excited about it. I imagine a lot of Wii playing will be going on and other fun boy activities. I will post more about it when it's over.

Santa Claus came to town!

We've had a busy week, obviously, and so I haven't had time to post since the big guy came to visit. So much has happened! Let's start with Christmas Eve. This was actually a pretty mellow day. We didn't have much going on, so we decided to do what we do every year and go see a movie. First we had to visit Urgent Care for Jacob. He had a bad cough that had started on Sunday and it wasn't getting better so I went to see if they could give him something to help. After a visit and a few prescriptions, we were off. We thought we'd go see Four Christmases. Um, BIG mistake! Don't take kids to see that movie. Yes it looks funny, but it's not for kids, we walked out and instead went and saw the Tale of Desperaux. The boys liked the movie, but Nick and I, not so much. Then we went home to enjoy our Christmas Eve dinner, pizza! YUM! We ate and watched the Luke 2 DVD and then read a couple of stories. It's nice to take time to talk about the true meaning of Christmas. Then the boys got to open up one present, like always on Christmas Eve, they got new jammies! Star Wars ones that even light up. Yes, I did good this year and I was told so, haha!

This is on Christmas Eve. They were getting ready to open their present.

Here they are posing with their new jammies on. Jacob was pretty excited about them! :)

Here is Nick on Christmas Eve. He wanted to open this present from me so bad. It was killing him to not know what it was. He really thought it was an empty box. I fooled him good. I made him wait until Christmas to open it. He was trying hard though to make it "pop" open by throwing it around. It wound up being two Suns tickets for the game this coming Friday. One for him and one for Cole. A birthday present for Cole. Neither of them had any idea and they were so excited! HAHA! An empty box...like I'd do that, hmmm or would I? ;)

Christmas day was so FUN! We spent the morning opening and playing with presents. They got some nice gifts from Santa this year, lucky dogs. Our big family gift was a Wii, and that has been the funnest present! I LOVE it! We got lots of fun games with it and we have really enjoyed playing that all weekend. It is the reason I'm so delayed on updating this blog. I've been addicted to Guitar Hero, haha. We even got a Wii Fit with it, and I LOVE that! It's awesome. I tried it out and I'm excited to get going on a work out program with it. Once the boys are back in school I will be using that regularly. I also got the book, The Host, and I'm excited to sit down and read that, also when the boys go back to school. I got a sweet back massager too. It's a Shiatsu one with heat that I sit in a chair and can use anytime I want. Nick also got a new iPod and he has had fun playing with that new toy. Cole got a new bike and Jacob got rollerblades. Jacob has been practicing riding those around the house and is now pretty good on them. He can ride around the block on them and he doesn't even fall down. They also got a few Star Wars toys and Legos. Star Wars and Legos are pretty popular at our house. :)

Here's a video of them when they first walked into the room. All the presents were under the tree except for the bike and rollerblades. They just stood there for a minute looking at them. Cole kept thinking I was going to snap a picture, so he stood there smiling at me until I told him that I wasn't taking a picture. They were so funny. :)

Here they are with their loot on Christmas morning.

Here they are getting ready to open the box with the Wii in it. Santa put all the Wii stuff together in one big box and wrapped it up. Inside the box everything was also wrapped individually so it looked like a big box of presents! They had a lot of fun with that. Cole even yelled out at one point that he loves Santa!

Here is video of them opening the box with the Wii in it. You can hear what they are saying. Nick was getting in on it by helping them open everything and being excited too. I was cracking up! Listen and you can hear Cole yell out how he loves Santa! :)

Here they are going through their stockings. Santa brought them candy, books, a Star Wars DS game, Legos and even a watch in their stocking this year. Good, now they won't be late coming home when they are out riding their bikes. :)

Here are my little Clone Troopers, haha. Nick and I got them the helmets and Santa brought them the guns to go with it. Aren't they funny?

Here they are trying out Guitar Hero. That game is so addicting!

That afternoon we headed to Mesa to my parents house. We always have a mexican food potluck, so yummy! We have a gift exchange with the cousins and that was a lot of fun. It gets wild sometimes, but we all love it. The kids have a blast! Loads of fun with family, good food, good times, GREAT Christmas!

Here they are with their cousins getting ready for their gift exchange with each other.

They each got an electronic lightsaber from Grandma and Grandpa. That was the best ending to a day filled with some other awesome Star Wars toys!

Thanks everyone for a great Christmas! Happy New Year!

Early Christmas!

On Saturday, Nick's dad and stepmom came to visit us from Tucson. We opened up presents from them and that made the boys day! Christmas came a bit early for us, and that's never a bad thing! :)

Here they are showing off their goods. They got giftcards so now they can go buy anything they want the next time we are in town! They were sooo excited! Yippee! :)

Here they are with their Papa and grandma Esther. Thanks guys for coming to visit us! :)

My New Hairdo!

Wednesday I got a new look! I LOVE it! I get my haircut from a lady here in Maricopa who owns her own salon. She has been bugging me to let her color my hair. I haven't had my hair colored since Cole was a baby, so I decided to go ahead and let her do it. I had a 20% off coupon, so that was a great motivator. Well she recommended for me to do 2 colors. She is Asian, so it comes out sounding like 2 cala! She says it over and over, 2 cala, 2 cala. It's kind of funny. :) She highlighted it with quite a bit of blonde and just a little bit of red. She also cut it again and I really like the way it turned out.

What do you all think?

Christmas Concert!

Tuesday night was the boys school Christmas concert. Depite the rain, mud, tons of people, mud, rain, did I mention mud, they did a really good job! They each sang two songs by grade and then they sang two songs with the whole school. They were kind of hard to see at times, so I won't bore you all with the videos that I took, but I did get some pictures at least. I'm just a bit annoyed at the amount of mud that was tracked in my car from that night!

Here is Jacob with his friends from class.

Here is Cole with his good buddy Dylan!

Here is the last song that they sang all together as a school. Luckily Jacob was in front. Cole was 2 heads behind him also in a Santa hat. You can see him if you look close.