Goodbye 2018, Hello 2019!

On Christmas Eve Grandma and Grandpa P and Taylor and Jen and family gathered at our house to celebrate.

A few had already taken off their ugly Christmas sweaters, but you get the idea.

The food was delicious and the company was great.

Everything was great until water started to drip from one of our can lights in the kitchen.  We ran upstairs and found that a flap got stuck on the upstairs toilet and there was water everywhere. We pulled up the carpet, got 2 wet-dry vacs going, and called some neighbors to get a bunch of fans to help dry the upstairs hallway out.  Not exactly how we wanted to spend our Christmas Eve, but it definitely could have been a lot worse if we hadn't discovered it so quickly.  Once we had the fans going and finished doing all that we could do we came back downstairs and picked up where we left off. Here we are getting ready to act out the nativity.

For some reason I didn't get a lot of pictures, probably because the kids were in constant motion and I knew they would turn out blurry. It was pretty chaotic, but the story was in there somewhere.  After Grandma and Grandpa and Taylor and Jen and kids went home we opened our Christmas Eve presents. Surprise! They were pajamas.😀

Jameson was the first one up in the morning at 6:00 a.m. and he made sure everyone got up to open presents.

This is AJ's second Christmas so he knew exactly what was going on and really loved opening each present. He loved his Paw Patrol toys.

Britton loved his soccer goal rebounder.

Jameson was excited for his Nintendo DS

Jenna loved getting tickets to Hale Center Theater's "Wizard of Oz" and "Wicked" at the Eccles.

Korinne got 4 days of ski passes to Cherry Peak and is excited to be able to ski more than once this winter.

The day after Christmas Adam took Jenna, Korinne and Jameson to St. George for a few days, and I stayed home with Britton, who had to work, and  AJ.  

Gramma, Korinne, Jenna, Jameson, Grampa

Don't take my picture!

Swimming at Aunt Bethany's pool

One of Jenna's friends wanted to practice her photography skills so we took AJ outside for a little photo shoot on a snowy day a few days after Christmas.

He has grown so much and is only a month away from celebrating his 4th Birthday!

Before we knew it 2019 was upon us and Jameson's birthday was here! Since his birthday falls on a Sunday this year we had a friend party for him on Saturday. He decided he wanted a Mario Kart party so Adam made all of his dreams come true.

Adam ordered some cake topper toys from Amazon and even made some specially labeled snacks to go with the theme. Adam's Mom and sisters are big party planners so even though he isn't quite as grandiose as they can be, he is still a few steps above me when it comes to planning parties.  I was more than happy to be the helper bee and let him take the reigns.

The boys played pin the mustache on Mario.

And Mario Kart Bingo.

Jameson wanted cake and root beer floats for his party.

Presents!

He had 12 friends at his party and continued to play with a few of them for hours after it was over.  

AJ doesn't have a great history of handling other people's birthdays very well so I was expecting him to be in meltdown mode for most of the day, but he surprised me and handled it a lot better than he ever has before.  He enjoyed being part of the party and has loved playing with Jameson's new toys.  

Today is Jameson's actual birthday, but since we did all of our partying yesterday it has been pretty quiet.  Both he and AJ started in their new primary classes today and AJ is now a SUNBEAM!  Yeah, 2 hour church could not have started at a better time for him. 😁