Merry Christmas 2007

Hello everyone and a Happy New Year!!
I know I am so behind on blogging but here I am to update you on everything that happened during the holidays. We had many exciting and interesting things happen, some wonderful memories and some things I would rather forget!

Ryan, Anderson and Erin at our annual Christmas get together. We had a wonderful time!

As you can see Emily was not at all thrilled to be sitting on Santa's lap. She cried the whole time so this is the best picture we could get. Even her paci didn't make her feel better! Ryan was so excited to see Santa, he hopped right up on his lap and told him what he wanted for Christmas. This was our fourth visit to see Santa (4 different Santa's!) and he was still so excited each time we went. It was so much fun to take him this year since last year he screamed when we tried to put him on Santa's lap.

Anderson, Erin and Ryan all sitting on Santa's lap. As you can see Erin just cuddled right up to Santa, Anderson bravely made his first attempt sitting with Santa (guess he felt more comfortable with his friends there too), and Ryan just hopped on up for one more visit with Santa!

My parent took us to dinner at the Founders Inn when my brother came in town for Christmas. Here we are in front of the huge Christmas tree right outside the Swan Terrace. There was a wedding taking place right next to this tree in the courtyard when we arrived. It was such a nice evening!!

Here's the family (I was the photographer).

Ryan was checking out the plate with Santa's cookies and milk. We had fun making cookies and putting them out for Santa. He was so excited to see that the cookies and milk were gone!!

Doesn't Emily look so cute in her pink and purple cozy coupe?! Santa brought her this special car. First thing she did when she came downstairs Christmas morning was open the door and hop inside her car. (Let's just call this the before picture.)

Santa brought Ryan this cool Radio Flyer scooter. He has been wanting a scooter since this summer and was so thrilled when he saw this waiting for him. He rode it all around the house sporting his new helmet!

Ryan enjoyed opening both his and Emily's presents!

Emily was really trying to open this Veggie tales movie.

Look at her little face she is so serious!

We'll call this the after picture! Here's the story: Sunday morning before Christmas she woke up with a little bit of a cough but otherwise seemed alright. Well on Christmas Eve she still had the cough so I figured I better go ahead and take her to the doctor while I could. Well the diagnosed her with croup(sp?) and gave her a prescription of steroids to help open up her airways and help her breathe. I was very hesitant to give her the steroids for two reasons, first I didn't think that her cough was that bad and secondly I knew what Anderson had just experienced with his steroids. So I didn't give her the steroids on Christmas Eve which leads us to Christmas morning. This picture was taken about 20 minutes after the picture of her sitting in her car. All of a sudden she just sort of crashed. She had a fever of 103 and had the chills (she had purple lips and purple hands she was so cold). She just sat down on my lap and layed her head down. She just looked so pitiful! I layed her on Kevin and bundled her up and in minutes she was asleep. Later on I did end up giving her the steroids although I don't know if they really did help much. She reacted fine and had no problems at all. She was still sick throughout the day but nothing like the morning.

Christmas night we headed over to my parent's for dinner and more presents. Ryan is actually playing with Emily's farm, he seemed to enjoy all of her presents quite a bit. We had a great time and got many more presents to take home. Ryan got many more tools to add to his collection along with a very cool tool belt.

She looked much better that night and was playing with toys and having a good time. She got her very own fancy shopping cart!

CHRISTMAS IN ROANOKE

We were supposed to leave the day after Christmas to go see Kevin's family in Roanoke. Well Emily still wasn't feeling good so the day after Christmas I took her back to the doctor to have her checked before we went out of town. Well surprise, surprise she had a double ear infection!! So off to the pharmacy again to get a new prescription. Of course it was cold and rainy that day and I had to drag her out to the doctor and then to Target to get her med's. So we didn't leave until the next day so she could get some good rest in her own bed and I was nowhere near ready to go anywhere.

Ryan and cousin Ashlyn playing nicely together!

Emily playing with some of Nanny's pretty beads. She was feeling much better at this point. Amazing what medicine can do!!

Opening presents at Nanny and Poppy's house was crazy yet lots of fun. There was so much family and all the cousins had their piles of gifts to open. We separated all the gifts and then waited till everyone was ready and then they all tore into them at once. It was so hard to keep track of who got what and who gave it to them and what belonged to each person, and trying to take pictures and video at the same time. As you can see he waited so patiently until it was time and then he had a ball!

Emily had no idea what was going on and was having fun just walking around playing with whatever. I ended up opening all of her gifts with a little help from Ryan.

Here's Ryan with all his cousins: Kaitlin, Ryan, Carson and Ashlyn. He played so hard the whole time we were there, I barely saw him. Except for the many times he got into trouble. I think he was just overtired and was having a hard time listening.

Now Kevin had this fabulous idea (I am being sarcastic) that while we were in Roanoke we should hike to the top of the Peaks of Otter. Now anyone who ever went to Liberty I am sure has hiked the Peaks at least once. I am not saying that I didn't want to do it, it was just a cold and a tad bit rainy day. There were many times that I told Kevin I just couldn't do it, but my sweet pushy husband dragged me all the way to the top. And wouldn't you know it that when we got to the top we couldn't see a thing, there was too much fog in the way. I did enjoy myself although I admit I wasn't too excited along the way, and it felt good to finally make it to the top.

We returned from Roanoke the Saturday after Christmas at 10:30 p.m. We put the kids to bed, unpacked our things and went to sleep. Sunday morning we all slept in until 9:00, so obviously we didn't make it to church which turned out to be a good thing. I went to get something out of the freezer for breakfast and noticed and puddle at the bottom of the freezer. Our refrigerator was slowly dying!!! The puddle was the carton of ice cream along with a few other items. Everything was thawing out and nothing was very cold on the refrigerator side. We threw everything into trash bags and Kevin carted it over to my parents to put in their fridge. Thankfully we were able to save most of the stuff, but now I didn't have any food in the house for the kids. Of course it had to be Sunday so nobody was open that could come fix it. We ate lunch at my parents and had a party to go to that night so that wasn't a big deal. You don't realize how much you depend on your fridge until you can't use it. Monday morning Kevin called Sears and they said they couldn't come until Thursday. I told him that I couldn't wait that long so he would have to call someone else. He called and they said they could come that afternoon - Hallelujah!! We ate breakfast at my parents and we came home to wait for the repair men. They came and were able to fix it for a nice fee, but at least we didn't have to buy a new fridge!

While they are fixing the fridge I decided to go through all the gifts under the tree so I could put them away. As I was doing this I notice these little brown spots on some of the gifts and all under the tree. The were so tiny, about the size of a grain of pepper. I touched a few and they smeared, so I thought they were just pieces of the branches. Well I touched a few more and they moved!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH! I was totally freaking out because it was then that I realized I had bugs in my Christmas tree. I dragged Kevin inside and told him the tree had to come down now and we discovered as we were doing this that they were everywhere. On the tree skirt, on the gifts, in the tree stand water. So we tore the tree down in a flash which just completely grossed me out. After the tree was out of the house, I just vacuumed and vacuumed and vacuumed over and over again. I felt like they were just everywhere. We got the carpets cleaned too which made me feel a little better. Come to find out they were spruce spider mites, nice huh! So much for that big, beautiful tree we chopped off the side of the mountain! An artificial tree is sounding pretty good about now.

Kevin had to go back to Roanoke for business on January 9th so we all hopped back in the car and Kevin went to work and we stayed with Nanny and Poppy. We had a great time and even got to spend one afternoon at Chuck E Cheese's. This was Ryan's first time and he had a ball. He couldn't do a lot of the games, but oh he sure did try. His cousins got to come along which made it so much more fun.