Snow in Portland!

This doesn't happen everday here and there were some excited little people at our house today. Hooray for snow!

Christmas 2009!

We usually travel to both Utah and California during the Christmas season, but couldn't fly this year because of Don's ear so we stayed in Oregon. Bren, Megh, Ellie, and Cam were here too and we had a great Christmas together. On Christmas Eve, we cooked a yummy prime rib dinner, made sugar cookies for Santa, read the Christmas story, and sang Christmas songs. It was just right.

Bri often uses the fireplace as her stage and here she is leading the group in some singing.

Christmas morning was great. The girls were super excited...so were the grown-ups.

Bri asked Santa for a RAINBOW CAT this year! Ugh. What? We...er...I mean Santa looked everywhere for a rainbow cat that Brighton said she had never seen before, but that she knew Santa would make for her. Finally, Santa located one in Hong Kong which barely made it here in time. Whew. Brighton was thrilled with her stripey rainbow cat and we were just glad it met her expectations of what a rainbow cat should be and that it arrived before Christmas!

Look out American Idol...here comes Brighton Lily.

It was all giggles and smiles outside on the new princess scooter. Oh the fun!

Bouncy Jingle Bell Singers...

Merry Christmas!

Zoo Lights!

A few more pics from Thanksgiving...

Christmas...Take One

My mom and sister came out for a week since we are staying in Oregon for Christmas this year. It was great to have them here. It was pretty low key. We did get some good shopping and a couple of good resturants in, but mostly just hung out at the house and spent some good quality time together. I loved it.

Grandma bought Bri this purple tree with pink ornaments for her room. Brighton loves it and apparently, so do her stuffed animals.



Brighton went to Grace's Sugar Plum Fairy party. It was adorable. The little girls got fairy wings, decorated magic wands and trees, played fairy games, and even ate fairy food. Seriously so cute and Bri was in heaven.


Grandma knew Bri was headed to a sparkly fairy party so she let her open a present before the party...sparkly pink shoes that went quite well with the rest of her fairy ensemble. Bri loves them. Shocking, I know.




So we celebrated Christmas with my mom and Lex since we won't see them on the actual day. (Mom will be at her house & Lex will be in below freezing temps in Alaska...yikes...um, I mean how fun). We all had a great time together. Yummy waffle breakfast and fun presents for all. Bri was a good little helper and made sure everyone had plenty of assistance opening their gifts. A good first Christmas of the season, or Grandma Christmas, as we called it.

Bri LOVES her grandma and was the saddest little person you've ever seen when it was time for Grandma to go home. Sigh. We miss you already Grandma! Come back and visit soon. Better yet, move to Oregon so we can see you all the time!

November Festivities

So a couple of pics in this post are out of order, but blogger is just not that user-friendly sometimes and is not letting me move them around. Grrr. Oh well, I'm surely not going to start over. :)
Brighton LOVES her Aunt Lexi (so do we) and it has been so fun having her close by. We can't wait to play with her some more next week!

As you can see, the festivities of the last few weeks have worn these two out. November started off with a bang. I had H1N1 followed by ear surgery for Don. Lovely. The rest of the month though, has been busy and fun. Bren, Meg, Ellie, & Cam are staying here for a few weeks and it has been so fun to have them here. Brighton is in heaven having her cousin Ellie to play with at all times of the day. We even had them sleeping in the same room for a few days. They thought it was the greatest thing in the world, but as you can imagine, sleeping was not on their agenda. Lots of giggling, dressing up, and reading each other books though. It was cute so we hated to break up the sleepover fun, but we all prefer non-cranky 3 year olds during the day so Ellie got moved to the playroom. Sorry girls.

Ralf and Nita came up for Thanksgiving and Lex drove up from Corvallis so we had a pretty full house for Turkey day. We had delicious food and it was great to spend time with everyone. We have so much to be thankful for. I took a whopping two pictures on Thanksgiving so I'll have to steal Lex's pics and add them later.

We also celebrated Ellie's birthday while she was here. She is such a little cutie and like I said before, Bri loves her playmate. It is so fun to have them together. Their conversations are classic and for the most part, they play really well together.

So we are all about getting Christmasy the second Thanksgiving is over. We have gone to the same place the last few years to cut down our tree. It's fun. They have treats, llamas, and trees. What more could you ask for? We ended up getting two trees this year. They are all decorated and Christmas music is blasting and will be until New Year's. I love this season!

Halloween 09!

We had a great Halloween this year! Brighotn has been so excited about it for so long! This week was filled with Halloween parties, crafts, pumpkins, and treats. Oh the fun. Bri was Snow White this year. Last year she was Cinderella. I wonder if we will just cycle through all of the princesses.

Brighton had a great time trick-or-treating and got plenty of candy. Good thing, because we got a million trick-or-treaters and ran out of candy so we started handing out Bri's candy. We gave away about half of it along with a box of fruit snacks we had in the pantry before Don made it back from the store with more. Of course, as soon has he got back, the trick-or-treat traffic slowed WAY down. Bri loved handing out candy! She might have even liked it more than the trick-or-treating. She may not have been so excited about it if she had realized she was giving away her own candy though. (Shh, don't tell).

(70's detective, if you were wondering)

Did you know Snow white carried a magic wand? Well she does.

Alexis came for the weekend and helped out with our pumpkin carving. She carved the two on the right. I'm sure you can tell what they all are, but in case you can't...from left to right: The Joker, a cat, turned owl, turned raccoon, Bella & Edward, and Snow White.