Merry Christmas!

What a wonderful time of the year, and so very busy!

In the past month, we've enjoyed so many wonderful things:

-A trip to Sedona (one of the best, in my opinion. My parents really planned ahead and had so many fun activities for the children, it cut way down on the number of fights and meltdowns with all the grandkids. Poor Oliver got sick, and Henry on the last morning, but aside from that, it was a nice, relaxed, fun time. I'm so happy we have this tradition.)

-A missionary homecoming. It has been so fun having Natalie home again, and Jeremy getting to know her, and vice versa. She keeps commenting how he's so cute, sometimes she just can't even handle it! Natalie, I know the feeling! Jeremy has such a fun personality, sometimes I can't handle it!. The day before she came home, there was also a proposal, so there's been the excitement surrounding that, too. It's been fun getting to know Travis' fiancée Anna. She's such a fun lady. My favorite experience with her so far is from Christmas. Jeremy got a tool bench from grandma and grandpa C, and she was so in love with it. She spent some time with Jeremy, building the little tool box it came with. I thought it was adorable to see her interacting like that with her future nephew.

-A birthday. Jeremy turned 3 on the 7th! I have a 3 year old! His birthday has been spread out over quite a bit of the month, with no complaints from him! He has loved getting to open so many presents, and they have seemed to just keep coming! He's been having a blast this month between birthday and Christmas. This will definitely be his favorite time of the year growing up!

-Lots of Christmas festivities! This one will need broken up, too. There has been too much fun for one paragraph!

-A parade, riding in the fire truck. One of my favorite memories from this year. Jeremy got such a kick out of going to the fire station, seeing the great big fire trucks. He didn't want to go up on top of it, but he loved riding inside and throwing candy at the kids on the street.

-Christmas eve with the Maroneys. Lots of fun, especially going to see the temple lights. Jeremy has loved seeing the Christmas lights everywhere this year, so walking the temple grounds was a great treat for him. It was especially endearing to see him holding hands with my mom, looking at all the beautiful lights, pointing out the red spiders, and saying he was going to eat them. He's such a silly boy, I just love it. :)

-Christmas day. What a day! Jeremy was so delighted by his motorcycle from Santa. He spent all morning scooting around the house. Justin and I had gotten each other a rocking chair as our big present, so I had only gotten Justin a few small things beside that: bike lights, a headlamp, a blast match thing for lighting fires. He, on the other hand, ignored the budget and surprised me with a beautiful Greg Olsen print. It's called Angels of Christmas, and it made me cry. It's such a sweet painting of two little kids placing different pieces of a nativity. I love it.

After our Christmas, we headed to my parents' for Maroney Christmas. More presents were exchanged, most notably, the beautiful Greg Olsen prints my parents got for each of their children. My walls are going to look so good once I hang up my new paintings! The print from my parents is called Traveling By Book, it's a boy reading a book, looking up into clouds that look kind of like a castle. My family knows just which prints to pick to pull at my heartstrings.

After Maroneys, we headed to the Clements, where we started our Christmas festivities with a family nap time. Jeremy fell asleep on the way there, so we laid him down, then Justin and I took a nap, too, along with several other family members. After about an hour I got Jeremy up, and we did presents. I already mentioned the tool set Jeremy got, that Anna was so enamored with. Justin got an easy-up, and I got a water bath canner set. I'm excited to make all sorts of sauces and jams in it. :)

Today we celebrated with the extended Clement side. I got to meet Justin's aunt and uncle Robin and Jason. They live in Oregon, and came down to visit. It was a pretty laid back visit, with lunch and lots of visiting. Jeremy loved their trampoline, of course. He spent most of our 3 hours jumping on it, despite it being rather cold and windy today.

It has been such a busy, wonderful month, full of great memories, and I'm looking forward to this coming week to veg out and catch my breath!

One other exciting event this month was finding out that we are having another baby boy! It will be so fun watching Jeremy and his brother grow up together, hopefully best friends more often than enemies. :) I know it'll be crazy with two boys, but I'm so exciting for the adventures that await. Being pregnant has certainly added a degree of craziness to the holidays, since I've had a lot less energy than normal, but thankfully the awful "morning" (all day) sickness subsided just before Sedona, which was the start of all the holiday busyness. All the same, I'm excited to have a less busy schedule for the next little bit. Maybe I'll be able to do some of the things around the house that I need to get done before baby comes!

Christmas time is here!

It has been pretty crazy around here lately. We've had several sicknesses come through this house, making the busyness of thanksgiving week even crazier. Luckily, we were pretty much all feeling good for thanksgiving. Jeremy was a bit run down, but his cold waited to really hit until the day after. Poor guy, we didn't realize how sick he was getting in the morning, while we were running around doing shopping. We dropped him off at Justin's parents' house in the afternoon, so we could do some toy shopping, and apparently he just sat on the couch and watched the Lion King, super lethargic. We got him home, and discovered he had a little fever. Poor guy.

Today he's still been fairly sick, but he has enjoyed watching me put up Christmas decorations. He helped put ornaments on the tree, and had a blast. His ornament for this year is a storm trooper, and he had so much fun playing with it while we fluffed the tree branches. My favorite part was when he laid the storm trooper in a sleigh ornament and told me he was sleeping. I just love his imagination.

He has been getting more and more talkative, which has been fun. We were driving the other day to go to a store. As we turned off our street, he said the store was that way. Being silly, I said, "No its not! No stores this way!" He responded "Yes the store's this way. Mom, you're crazy!" He's right. I am. :)

Hopefully pretty soon we'll all be feeling better. At least Jeremy is still funny, even when he doesn't feel well. I just hope this cold of his is the last sickness we get this winter. I'm ready to really enjoy Christmas time!

Hello, world!

It's been over a year since I've blogged. Wow. This last year has been eventful, too!

Let's see, in December and January, we moved back to AZ. Most of the people who read this already knew that, but now it's on my blog, too. :) We bought a house, exactly 6 minutes from both my and Justin's parents. Jeremy loves being close to cousins. He is always asking to go visit Henry's house, or Samuel's house, or Abbie's house.

He's almost 3 now, which is just crazy! He had a blast at Halloween. He's starting to really get holidays. He dressed up as Mickey Mouse, I was Minnie, and Justin was Goofy. I put everything together myself, and was quite pleased with how they turned out! I even made the ear headbands and goofy hat myself!

He has a lot of different interests, but his biggest is, unfortunately, tv. He's obsessed. I try to limit it, but I'm not always the best. He loves Mickey and Star Wars the most. Star Wars kind of surprised me. He's still so young! But he pretends to be a storm trooper or Darth Vader and shoot the bad robots. He doesn't seem to quite grasp that Darth Vader is a bad guy.

He also has a knack for turning anything into a play gun. The best was when he grabbed my hot pink high heels. He was "pewing", then told me that he was actually shooting pie, with his pie gun. He shot it directly into my mouth. Too bad it doesn't really shoot pie!

He is also very energetic. He loves taking Lacie, our dog, on walks. He loves running into the couch from across the room. He loves running in circles, especially if there is something to run around. Even if it's just a shoe on the ground, he will run endless laps around that shoe!

I'm going to try to post more updates regularly (we'll see how that goes), and I'll include more about me and Justin in the next one. Right now though, it's Jeremy's nap time, and I'm tired too. :)

Look! A bunch of random pictures!