Christmas and New Years!

Here's a wonderful picture of Brooke from Christmas morning!  She sure was happy to get some great new toys!  A lot has happened this past two weeks, so we'll just jump right in.

Well, two weeks ago was my last week of work before the Christmas break.  I worked 10 hour days so that I could take off Friday without using vacation so we could drive out to Utah.  Sadly, the weather didn't cooperate, so we ended up at home over the break instead.  We still had a good time, but it would have been nice to be out and see family.

Sometime recently Brooke has decided to make a sour face when she eats any ol' random thing.  I was fortunately able to capture it!

Well, since we were at home we decided to do some cleaning.  We went through everything we had in the basement and started throwing things away and setting aside things we thought people in the ward might want and putting it up on Facebook.  It didn't take as long as we thought to go through the stuff in the basement, but we needed a place to put things we wanted, so we ordered a shelf to hang from the garage ceiling.

Also, our advent calendar/christmas card holder slowly fell off of the wall.  I taped up the string, and here it is in the process of falling, it eventually was completely on the ground to Brooke's delight!

Brooke also loves to help with the dishes!

On Christmas Eve we made Santa pancakes!  Brooke would only eat the beard, but it's hard to blame her.  The part with whipped cream really did taste a lot better...

Christmas Eve was also the day I got sick, which is really lame.  If I get sick, it always seems to be on the weekend, so of course I had to be sick on Christmas as well.

Then came Christmas morning.  The first picture up top was also from Christmas.   Brooke woke Monica and I up around 6, and then went back to bed.  I convinced Monica to not go back to sleep but instead go see what Santa brought us!  When Brooke finally got up she checked out the contents of her stocking.

And played with her new snack holders.

And tried to immediately eat her orange.

And played with all her toys!

Church was great and filled with lots of music.  When we got home we called our families so they could see Brooke and we could open the presents we gave each other together.  One of the families in our ward invited us over in the event we weren't able to make it out to Utah, so we went over to their house for dinner.  It was SOO GOOD too!!  They also do a preschool at their house so there was no shortage of things for Brooke to do.  Everyone had a blast and we are very grateful they had us over!  Thanks Crystals!

Ah, this picture was taken several days too late.  One day we watched Elf and made paper snowflakes.  Here they are hung up in our house.

We also snagged a riveting Christmas photo!

Google put together this slideshow of the Christmas festivites for me!  I know many of those pictures are already above, but it's definitely a good watch.  And you get to see Brooke dance too!

Brooke got a little tape measurer for Christmas.  It took her a little to appreciate it, but she loved to play with it!  Well... until she whacked herself with it and we put it away.  She can have it back when she's older.

Brooke has also started to learn to crawl up and down the stairs.  She is pretty good at coming back down, but it still worries me a little.  She made it all the way up the stairs this week though!

On Tuesday I was finally starting to feel better so we took advantage and got out of the house!  We went over to the new library so Brooke could play and get some more books!  Here she is reading in her stroller on the way out!

Unfortunately me getting better coincided with Monica getting sick.  And sickness is worse for her because she can't take most cold medicines (due to nursing Brooke).  She's finally starting to feel better today, but Brooke got sick on Friday, so then I had to try to take care of everyone!  And I'm still not sure I'm 100% better yet...  It made for a little bit of a lame week off to have everyone be sick at some point or another.  Especially when you consider that it would have been a week at home anyway because I was sick!!  Fortunately we're all looking to be on the mend, and Brooke was sick the shortest of us all thanks to a Priesthood blessing.  She couldn't fall asleep one night because she was so congested, and she was just sooooo sad and crying, so I gave her a blessing and she went to bed right after and seemed a lot better yesterday and today she seems mostly fine.  She's coughing occasionally today, but she's recovering very fast!  It was a wonderful blessing.

Our garage storage shelf came and I put it up.  We haven't gotten everything stored up on it yet, but it will be nice when we're done because our cluttered "storage" spaces (such as all of the basement) will be cleaned up and much more organized.

While Brooke was sick we had to wipe her nose frequently.  One time the tissue ripped and got stuck to her face!  It was very cute.

For New Years we decided to have Fondue, and we think we'll make it a tradition.  We got a fondue pot for our wedding and we hadn't used it yet, but after going to the melting pot we knew we had to!  Also, we didn't have space for it in the kitchen till our house cleaning over haul!  But now we do and it's out and ready to be used.  It turns out fondue is much easier than we had expected.  Here was our dinner.

And here is our dessert!

And here we are ready to indulge!

We had a great night, but I didn't quite make it till midnight.  I fell asleep on the couch, and Monica stayed up!!  That is the opposite of every other night of our lives!  Monica tried to get me up at 11:51 so I had a few minutes to prep, but I just went back to sleep.  She woke me up at 11:59:30, and I was able to stay awake for the next 30 seconds until the new year!  PHEW! It was hard.

Church moved to 9 today, which really won't be hard to get there on time, but it was a little hard to get up this morning after staying up late.

Well, I think that's the condensed version of the things that happened here for the last two weeks.  Thanks all for stopping by and catching up.  Have a great week!

Winter Wonderland

Hello all!  Well this week things were a little slower than last week, but sometimes it's nice to not have to run around all the time.  We did get a snowstorm Friday night/Saturday morning and the temperatures plummeted.  I think the high on Saturday was 4 F, but there was plenty of snow so we couldn't stay inside!

Earlier this week we started working on Christmas treats.  Monica made fudge and toffee to take to people, and we made some ginger bread cookies together.  We of course decorated them!  Here's a tree I made:

And here's the cookie Brooke decorated!  The hardest part was definitely getting her to not just shove candy in her mouth!

And like good parents we let her take a few bites!

On Saturday morning while Brooke was having breakfast the neighbor was in their back yard clearing snow off of their hot tub, and Brooke thought it was amazing.  She totally zoned out for a minute or two.  No noises, didn't look at us when we talked to her, didn't care about food, just stared as the neighbor cleared off the hot tub.

Later that day we headed into the winter chill to play in the snow.  Brooke loves to be out in the snow!  She doesn't do much playing yet.  I tried to hand her snowballs and such but she'd just kinda tap them in my hand and that was it.  So I had to help her throw them at Monica!!!

Teammates!!

Saturday night we got invited to a tamale party!  It was at the Robinson's house (I helped Joe with math last year).  The food was great and we had a lot of fun.  We let Brooke down to roam and she had a blast!  Which is good because we were there till 7 and she usually won't stay up past 6:15!  I believe I heard her say she made 120 tamales!!!  Crazy!  And all the ones I ate were very good!  Robinsons, if you read this, thanks again!!

Well, I think that covers everything for this week!  I hope everyone is doing great out there!

Christmas Parties!!!!!

Welcome back everyone! (Or just welcome if it's your first time...)  I hope everyone had a splendid week!  We sure did.  And I got a lot of pictures of Brooke after getting chastised for last weeks post.  First, Brooke put on her work out clothes this last week and did some exercise with Monica!  She did lift that 2 pound weight a few times, so she's getting swull!

Last Sunday Monica and I had our own Thanksgiving dinner, also known as "dinner" on nights that are not Thanksgiving.  We did this because we didn't get to bring back any leftovers!!  It was a very successful first go at it.  The stuffing came out a little dry, but other then that it was terrific!

On Wednesday SEAKR had their children's Christmas party, complete with Santa!  They had a great dinner of pizza and chicken fingers, all kid classics.  Brooke got to meet Santa for the first time, and was immediately interested in coming back to us.

They also had a present for each child.  Brooke got a Paddington bear!  She really does like it, she was just feeling the stranger danger!  We had a lot of fun at the party and it was fun to see everyone there with their kids.  I don't much get to see co-workers kids.

On Friday night we went down to downtown Parker to see the decorations.  The shopping center had inflatable decorations out again, such as this bear.  They also had a big Mickey that Brooke really liked, but there wasn't a good way to take a picture with it.

There was also some sidewalk chalk out on the street.  I'm not sure what event that came from, but it was really cool.  It unfortunately wasn't complete, but here's an octopus:

And a... design with fish:

And some turtles!!  They were very impressive.

Oh yeah, they also had this whack-a-penguin.  It was motorized and the penguins would go in and out.

After our initial walk around we went to dinner at Indochine, which was terrific.  Brooke was waving at everyone that walked by too!  I let her try my lemon that was in my water, and she was going crazy for it!  That girl loves sour!  Well, after dinner it was dark, so it was a good time to go see the lights.  First here's an old historic church that was across the street from where we ate.

And here's the big main tree in the park!  They do more sparse lights and the snowflakes in a lot of other trees, but they always do the big tree in the corner the most.

And here we all are at the park!  They had a more standard Christmas tree that we tried to put in the background, but it was really tall, so that never worked out.

Saturday night was my work party at Mile High Stadium.  We got a babysitter so we could go again this year (we missed last year since Brooke was so recently born).  We got to go down to the field and into one of the nice VIP boxes.  The dinner was also very good again!  But the desserts were not near as good as two years ago...

Today Brooke wore her Christmas dress to church, and I was instructed to take a million pictures until I got it right!  Here's Brooke chilling at the base of the tree.  I was trying to get her to reach for an ornament cause I thought it would be cute, but she just kinda half pointed instead.

Then I moved an ornament down for her to get, which led to her no longer looking at me or sitting up.

Finally she grabbed a very Christmasy random book from the floor and without ever smiling looked at me.  BOOM! Nailed it! I also need to note that this is the first time Brooke's hair has been long enough to put a barrette in it!

What a busy week!  A lot happened around here.  I think things are going to calm down a little this next week.  I hope everyone is doing fantastic!  Till next week!

Christmas Decor

Hello to everyone!  This week we started getting things looking a lot more like Christmas!  On Monday night for FHE we went and got our Christmas tree!  We tried out Costco this year, and the tree is awesome!  It was a great choice.  And as usual, we tied the tree to the top of Tuna (our '99 Corolla), which got some smiles and points on the drive home.  Once we got home it was time to put up the lights and ornaments!  Here's the final project.

Friday night for date night Monica wanted to make some new ornaments.  We made some snowmen out of tea candle lights.  Here are the final products.  Can you guess which ones I made?  Maybe just one of them?

And here they are on the tree.  We didn't really leave them this bunched together, they were just more photogenic this way.

On Saturday Monica had a training all morning, so I surprised her and made this little stable for her nativity!  I also did a lot of cleaning around the house, which is what I think Monica really appreciated.

On Saturday night we decided to watch How the Grinch Stole Christmas together before Brooke went to bed.  It was her first Christmas movie!  And also the first video we openly let her watch.  She LOVED it!  In case you haven't seen the video yet I have a link to it here.  She loved it for the first while, but then her attention span caught up with her.  She did make it all the way through without having to go to bed, but we had to play with her a whole bunch to get there.

And I think we're basically caught up!  Tonight we're having Thanksgiving dinner.  We decided to make one because we didn't have any left overs from actual Thanksgiving.  Flying is SO HARD!

Hope everyone is doing great out there!  Have a great week.

Thanksgiving

Why hello there!  I hope everyone is doing well this week.  This week I worked a few days before heading back out to Utah to be with family.  Not terribly much happened while I was at home.  I put up some Christmas lights to surprise Monica and a few other random things around the house.  I also tried to finish off calibrating my 3D printer, but it keeps overdrawing power and causing the power supply to shut off.  My guess is because it was colder in the house since we turned down the heat when we left (and I left it down while home).  Fortunately there were various sports and things for me to work on around the house, and of course there were nightly video calls with Brooke!  Speaking of, I think my picture of the week is this one of her after we got off the plane flying back to Denver.  She lost her afternoon nap to air travel, well all but about 10 minutes which she slept on the plane, and as you can see she is quite tired!  Also, airlines still do wings if you were wondering, you just have to request them, and I did!  Look at our little co-captain!

As mentioned we spent the latter half of this week out in Utah, visiting my family this time.  This was our first Thanksgiving with my family since being married as well.  It was a lot of fun, and let me tell you, my Mom makes the BEST turkey!  I don't know all the tricks, but maybe I'll have her write a guest post on how to cook a turkey.  It's much needed information for the future!

Anyway, Brooke enjoyed Thanksgiving dinner!

Though she didn't end up eating a ton.  That seems to just be more of a thing lately.  She doesn't seem to want to eat as much for lunch as she used to.  But she did eat some turkey, mashed potatoes, and managed to mangle a roll somewhere in there.

Being at my parents house was a little overwhelming for Brooke.  Being the only baby around she enjoys playing on her own.  It was hard for her to be around so many other little kids.  All of her cousins wanted to play with her and help her, which was great, but a lot of the time it was overwhelming for Brooke.  We'd have to take her into separate rooms from everyone and once we got there she'd smile and laugh and crawl all around just like she usually does.  We took her on a few walks too, which she loved.  All in all we had a great time!

Friday was Black Friday shopping of course.  Monica went during the day with a small group of my family.  I ended up going out at night, and one of our stops was at Seagull Book and Tape because I wanted to get Brooke a board book for church.  Fortunately they had the one I wanted, and it was the last in stock.  It's a Book of Mormon ABC book and it has a lot of flaps.  One of our friends at church has it and I read it to Brooke before and really liked it.  The art work is a lot of fun, and they tried to be fun and funny with the flaps.  I was glad I was able to pick it up, and on sale!

On the way home we got to the airport around an hour and a half before boarding.  It has taken us longer to get through security with Brooke before, so we like to play it safe.  Well, there was no line.  We just walked right up and through everything.  It was nice to have some extra time, however, because Monica's hand swab set off the detectors.  So out of 6 flights, we have set the detector off twice!  I don't know what Brooke is doing, but it's a good thing we had some extra time.

We still got through with plenty of time to spare, so we walked around the airport.  We eventually ended up at our terminal waiting to board.  While Brooke is in her stroller (or also her high chair) she loves to put her toes up on the the bottom of the tray.  We were feeding her Cheeri-os and playing with her and all along she was keeping her feet up!

As mentioned above she was quite tired on the plane.  I got her to sleep, but not long enough, and when I moved her to unbuckle my seat belt at the end of the flight she woke up.  We made it out to the car without incident and got home as quick as we could.  She aet some dinner and went right off to bed!

Today we started prepping for Christmas decorating, mostly meaning we are getting out our boxes of Christmas stuff.  A new addition this year is a Mongolian Nativity.  My parents bought it when they came out to visit, and they gave it to me!  We set it up on the top of our food pantry.  It's all hand carved, and it's really amazing and detailed!

I hope everyone is having a wonderful week!

Brooke's First Birthday

Hello everyone!  Can you believe that Brooke is already 1 year old!!  How crazy is that?!?!  We had a birthday party for her with our families (we happened to be in Utah on the 17th) which was a lot of fun.  We tried to get Brooke to face plant into a cake, but she actually ate it quite daintily...  She got a little dirty, but all in all not too bad.

Rewinding back a little we come to our House-aversary!  Yeah, this was a packed week.  We moved in 2 years ago!  So on Tuesday we had to celebrate.  The night we moved in we got Japanese take out, so every year we've gotten Asian take out to celebrate.  This year we were back to Japanese (and we'll probably stay there).  This was also the first year we didn't have to drive out in a snow storm to get dinner, but I'm not complaining about that!!  We got some sushi to go with our dinner, and not that the food wasn't good, but the sushi was great!  Turns out I really like Tempura!  That was definitely the best one we got.

On Wednesday we flew out to Utah.  Technically we were flying out for a wedding, but also we were flying out for Brooke's birthday!!  She was so tired when we got on the plane so we hunkered down and took a nap!  She slept for almost the whole flight!  I slept for this whole picture!?

When we landed in Salt Lake I noticed this plane cutout and had to stop and get a picture!  I thought it was great that Brooke and I got to fly a plane together.  Brooke, however, just wanted to be back in her stroller.

When we got to Monica's parents house Brooke quickly took the the piano.

Then on Thursday it was Brooke's birthday.  Of course Brooke got snow on her birthday, just like she called in a blizzard for her birth!  We got a snow suit from Monica's sister the night before in anticipation of letting Brooke play in the snow, and good thing we did cause she loved it!  Also, it's a good thing we went out when we did because the snow melted by the end of the day!

While running around getting things for the party we happened to run into the WeinerMobile!  What a lucky birthday Brooke was having!  She didn't get to eat there though cause it was cold out and Monica immediately ran off into the store after I took the picture.

We got Brooke a balloon for her birthday which she enjoyed playing with.  It came with a clip on it so I just clipped it onto the back of her coat.  It was handy because you could see where she was even behind a couch!!

That night we had a party for her with many guests.  Brooke also got to eat cake!  She'd reach down for the cake and spread out her hand like she was going to take a HUGE handful of it, and then just rake over the icing and lick off her fingers...  She did end up eating some cake, but probably not that much when you consider the amount of frosting she had.

Then on Friday was Melanie's wedding (Monica's sister).  That was the real reason we were out, but it's nice everything else lined up too.  Melanie married Sarva, who if from India.  His parents made Indian clothes for everyone in the family for the reception, and they're pretty awesome.  Brooke looked SOOOO cute in her little dress!  Here we all are together.

And here's Brooke and I dancing at the reception.  Looks like Brooke is a dancer!  And she stayed up WAY past her bed time.  She usually goes to bed around 6-6:30, but she was at the reception until 7:30!!  We had to play with her to keep her happy, but I think everyone had a great time!  And congratulations and good luck to Melanie and Sarva!!

Saturday I flew back to Denver so I could go back to work.  I was on a very new or newly updated plane.  I've had many flights where the amenities of the plane claim that each seat has a USB port and an outlet, but this is the first time I've actually been on a plane like that.  I took a picture to show Monica how high tech it all looked, and figured I'd include it here.

And with that I think we're all caught up.  I hope everyone has a fantastic week and a great Thanksgiving!

p.s. Monica isn't here to proof read this... so sorry for any oddities.