Merry Christmas

Dear Family and Friends Merry Christmas!!!

We hope all is going well for you and your family. We love getting to see your blogs, Christmas Cards, chat with you on the phone, and the visits we have had with some of you in passing now that we live out West!

This has been a very full and at some points crazy year for our family so we thought we'd fill you in on some of the highlights from 2009

- Lance Accepting and Externship position for his last year of Grad School in Spokane Washington

- Selling 1st home in Indiana

- Kathleen starting and finishing her own In-Home 2 day a week preschool program

- Mariella Ann Nelson arriving 6 weeks early on April 2nd

- Spending 4 weeks accepting lots and lots of help from Family and Friends while we went back and forth to the NICU while Ella recovered from a lung infection

-Lance finishing up his last year of course work and finals while going back and forth to NICU and keeping life together at home.

- Packing up our house in May and saying goodbye to good good friends

- Blessing Ella in Indiana before leaving

- Driving cross country with 2 kids, a wonderfully generous and helpful Aunt, 2 Cars, a moving Van, and a new-born on an apnea monitor while making stops in Utah, Idaho, and Montana to visit family along the way!

- Unpacking and moving into rental house that was rented sight-unseen and finalized while in transit.

- Kathleen having surgery to remove a lump on her neck that thankfully turned out to be a cyst.

- Enjoying a Summer of Ella getting off her apnea monitor and doing wonderfully, and visits to and from Family.

- Mia getting her first pair of Glasses after being diagnosed with amblyopia (aka. lazy eye).

- Maddi getting potty trained! Yeah only one child in diapers. :)

- Fun fall visiting family in Seattle and Montana while Lance attended a couple of conferences in Indiana and Florida.

- Lance beginning the interviewing process for jobs. (We are hoping to have things finalized by the end of Jan....so stay tuned!)

- Enjoying more visits from Family and Friends in November and December. We have just been eating up this time living close to everyone!

We are so grateful for the many many blessings we have been given and are continually given on a daily basis. Lance and I have decided that being the parents of 3 little girls under 5 is definately our greatest challenge but getting to watch them grow, learn, develop their own relationships with each other, and to see their individual personalities emerge is the most rewarding experience we could ask for. And we are most grateful for the Savior in our life and the blessing we have to celebrate his birth at this time of year.

Ella 8.....almost 9 months old!

So again... a little behind on this but Ella is now almost 9 months old. She weighs 17 lbs now!!! I was shocked when we took her to the doctor. She is just LOVING food and hasn't turned any item down. She loves to sit up and play now, and is just dying to get her hands on anything she can grab....favorites include paper and sisters' hair. :) She loves loves loves her older sisters and it's very fun to watch them all interact. Poor thing has been struggling with some ear infections and is currently battling an ear infection she has had since Thanksgiving! Lucky for us that her Daddy owns his own otoscope and we have access to good medical advice....so we are crossing our fingers that she won't go down the same path as Mia and end up with ear tubes (as wonderful as they are!) But despite the pain she's been in she is still our sweet happy baby who brings lots of joy to our home.

Gingerbread Houses

We love making Gingerbread Houses every year at Christmas and this year was fun because some friends invited us over to make REAL gingerbread houses. We usually do the graham cracker kind with the flat roofs etc etc, but they actually make the gingerbread and go all out with the decorations complete with the evergreen trees. Very fun.

Grandma and Grandpa Nelson Visit

The girls were in awe of this statue. :)

This game brings back childhood memories for me!

We had a fun streak of visitors at our house for 3 weekends in a row and Grandma and Grandpa Nelson were the finale. The girls had a blast going shopping, playing games, reading books, attending our Church's Nativity Celebration, and going to see a Christmas Tree Display at a fancy hotel downtown.

Christmas Dresses

Matching Christmas Dresses are always fun...and so are the Grandma's who send them! ;)

Sitting Up

I love when my kids get to the point where they can actually sit up and play. Ella has started doing this in the past month and she has so much fun pulling toys out of her basket.

Fun Traditions

I love Holiday Traditions and adopting new ones each year.

In Lance's family they have a fun tradition where the cousins all draw names and send each other a Christmas Letter and an ornament. It's a fun way of staying connected and this year the girls and I decided to go the homemade route and found this cute idea from Family Fun Magazine. It was really quick and easy and the girls were able to help by picking out the baby sock hats, and painting the tubes.

In our ward here in Spokane I got a fun idea for a Christmas Book Tradition that we have adopted this year and it's been a huge hit with my girls. Lance's parents always send the same Christmas Book to every family each year and my Family used do this growing up as well so we have accumulated quite a few Christmas books over the years. This Lady in my ward does the same thing so every year on the day after Thanksgiving they wrap up ALL the Christmas books and put them under the tree and then every night the kids get to unwrap a book to read. It's been fun because the girls look forward to it every night but it's simple, and makes me feel like we're getting good use out of our books!

The Girls

Thanksgiving Extravaganza!!!

All of us (minus Ella)

The Guys couldn't get a Turkey Bowl game together so they settled for early morning basketball!

The Turkey Contraption

Reading stories while waiting for dinner.

The Kid's Table! Aunt Jilly helped them make their own table cloth.

Our Table...and yes that is what the Turkey is supposed to look like! After marinating in Italian dressing for 3 days, and then deep frying it, this is what you get, and while it looks a little scary, it's delicious!

I think Aunt Jilly and Uncle Dane were definately the favorites. They were such good sports to play games, hold kids, read books, etc etc etc with all the neices and nephews.

We were very excited to have my family come for Thanksgiving this year. We missed Jen and her family and my Dad, but everyone else was here. We had 16 people total in our little house! It was crazy but so fun. Thanks to a nice big basement I think we were all realtively comfortable. We enjoyed 2 deep fried turkeys, tons of other yummy yummy food, game playing, black friday shopping and a birthday party for my nephew Ayden so we packed in the fun and it was a blast!

Preparing for Christmas

The girls have spent the last month and a half getting ready for our Christmas Eve reinactment of the Nativity. It's a good thing their "Boy" cousins will be coming for Christmas because right now we have two actresses wanting to play the part of Mary. I think Mia tried to convince Maddi that she could be Elizabeth (John's Mother) but that wasn't going over so well (at least on this night). And of course Ella was enlisted to play the part of the baby Jesus, which she did very well!