holiday wrap-up

I gotta admit, despite the financial (okay huge) strain that we've had lately (and okay who am I kidding it's been longer) we had an awesome holiday.
It's funny.. when you are having such a tough time making ends meet, for some reason, the holidays still manage to be joyous and fun. And having an awesome family and friends to help you through it (great for sanity saving) is priceless.
And throwing two little kids into the mix makes it that way. Before we had kids I was usually working insane long hours every.single.day in retail management, basically, counting down the days until things were normalish again and I could breathe. I was always too exhausted to even enjoy Thanksgiving or Christmas. Once you have kids, you realize that it's all for them. That, yes, we as adults still need to get some positive vibes from it all..ya know the whole "goodwill towards all men" thing? Which by the way, why can't people try to be nice every day of the year??
We spent Christmas hanging out at home and then met up with my two sisters to have our usual Christmas meal of Chinese food and sushi. We've done this every year for 3 years now and it has not gotten old yet. Saturday was awesome because we had our "Chanukmas" family celebration with some tasty turkey and all the trimmings.
Anyway, it's a huge blessing to be able to enjoy putting up a tree, still have a roof over our heads, still be able to fill the tree underneath with presents for the kids, and enjoy our twice fixed furnace (it broke again a few days before Christmas). Regardless of how much we can complain, we are still lucky and blessed.
So with that I have to say, I am so so behind in updates and I promise a huge 2008 update coming this week. I have it all in my head I just never have the time to actually type it out. Between James being such a big boy now and all of the new things that he's learning and with Natalie's HUGE bump in her speech lately ("tank hoo" for "thank you" is a new one for example) I find myself sitting or running around with them playing, baking cookies, and just enjoying it all. It's all flying by way too fast. But because I don't own a scrapbook I need to update more! Until then..here ya go:
(oh and the Mr.Bill??? BRILLIANT gift from The Gammy)



















The next four photos are from Sunday ..it was insanely warm that day so it was an excellent day for tricycle training!


(gosh she's so pretty.. sorry..I just think that every time I look at this)


Look! Aunt Lauren was hiding under our tree, too! The coolest present ever.
playing with Aunt Lauren's snazzy new iPhone

(my face looks odd in this one..the angle? but James looks so handsome and...*gulp* looks older)


(see the funny smile? she was busted because she kept hiding behind the tree to play with it.. so so cute and pretty darn funny)