Christmas 2014

This Christmas was absolute perfect! We got to sleep in, it snowed, and we were very abundantly blessed!

We had a bit of a superhero theme this year.

Batman book from santa

All manner of superhero dress-up clothes

(I went to the stores the morning after Halloween and bought all their leftover Halloween costumes for super cheap)

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Danny embracing his inner wolverine, in his new jacket

And then the superheros had to go explore the fresh new snow

However, Ben kept disappearing all day. We would find him hiding with a couple packs of pez. Silly kid, this was his favorite gift. He thought it was awesome that his penguin kept giving him candy every single time!

Then, homemade tamales for dinner!

Batman Lego Movie

The boys really wanted to make their own lego movie after watching one earlier this week. So we gave them their first lesson in stop animation. Will moved Batman, and Ben took each picture. It's a little slow due to the software I used to stitch it all together, but I think they did an awesome job!

Christmas Eve -

We had a blast just hanging out as a family this holiday season. Our Christmas Eve started with some epic family lego building

 We attempted to build a lego tower all the way to the ceiling...

 We got pretty darn close too!

 Then, Ben asked if we could make a lego zoo.

Our zoo eventually included:

1 black monkey

2 yellow lions

3 white polar bears

4 white and black penguins

5 red birds

plus a restaurant and ticket counter

and later 1 blue hippo

Ben wore his santa suit all day and worked on his ho, ho ho

Later in the afternoon we had a picnic in the living room, and made a trip to the petstore. Just to see the animals.

For dinner we attempted a Bethlehem-style. We tried to keep it to things Christ could have possibly eaten while on the Earth.

Now I'm not going to say we were totally authentic, but it was a ton of fun! 

We had:

Homemade Italian Bread

Veggies

Fruit- including dried dates & figs, and pomograntes

Cheeses

Olives, sundried tomatoes, and artichokes

Humus

Honey

and lil Smokies (not so authentic :)

The kids had so much fun dressing up for our ward Christmas party that they wanted to do it again. btw this is Will's "I'm so hungry why are you taking pictures lets just pray so we can eat" face

Ben was so much fun. He would look around the table and see what he hadn't try yet and had to try everything. His favorite was the dates, he was okay with the figs, but didn't like the pomegranates.

Then, it was Santa Clause is coming to town, cookies, new Christmas jammies, and time for bed.

They were asleep in record time, leaving mom and dad to enjoy a quiet evening playing Santa.

Building a lego zoo

The boys and Jenni built a zoo. It contains polar bears and lions and penguins. ( the boys thought the penguins should be in the same cage as the polar bears, not sure how that one will work out) the zoo even has a ticket booth/restaurant.

Artistic Endeavors

The boys are becoming pretty good at art. Yesterday, Ben managed to colors a 3x3 square of carpet with a black sharpie while I was sitting next to him. He's going for speed, and he's becoming quite fast.

Then, this morning I looked over to see this...

Ben's artwork is usually a bit more abstract so I called Will in. He said he was drawing our happy family. The big one is him being Batman. The unfinished one is me, and the last is Ben. Really well done actually. The only problem is that is the side of my couch!

Danny's contribution? "Can we keep it? I mean you never liked that couch anyways.... And it's so cute"

*sigh*

We decided he should redo it on paper so we can frame it and put it on the wall. There was some mild confusion with that when Will said, "I should do it on the wall?" Um...no!

Lol these little boys are really developing my cleaning skills!

Happy Halloween 2014

This year we started our Halloween costumes way back in May when we took our trip to Houston and NASA. The boys were so excited we decided to pick up some patches from the gift shop and make astronaut costumes for Halloween. The boys weren't too sold on them at first, but once it got cold outside they were really excited to be in a nice warm spacesuit!

Our First Backpacking Trip!

 

Warning this post has an insane amount of photos!

We've been planning a backpacking trip for about 6 months now, but last weekend we finally packed our bags and left modern civilization behind.

 

We knew hiking in with two smallish kiddos was going to be tricky so we prepared as best we could. Everyone got a pack. Mom and Dad got really big packs. Will, the pack he fell in love with at REI and would see none else and an itty bitty pack for Ben. Will and Ben had some water in their watertubes (aka camelpacks) as well as a beloved stuffed animal that couldn't be left behind.

 

 The original rule was everyone walks the whole way, but can call breaks whenever the want.... yeah that worked for about 1/2 a mile. Cue superdad! btw his pack weighs about 45lbs and Ben weighs 30!

 It took us about 3.5 hours to hike in 2.5mi. Slow and steady won the race, and we made it! (Found out later we stopped at the wrong lake and our goal was about 1mi further, oh well. We went on a dayhike out there the next day)

 

 Our tent and View from our tent!

 I recently bought a new dehydrator, so I made all of our backpacking food. Everything was dried and cooked simply by adding boiling water and waiting for it to soften. Sounds awful huh? It was actually pretty good. Our favorites were Stroganoff Soup, Bean & Rice Burritos, and Strawberry Shortcake!

 Will had a stick in his hand pretty much the entire trip! It was everything from a pirate sword, to a gun to shoot the old trees down so new ones could grow, to a walking power stick.

 There was some climbing, but...

 Mostly a TON of this! Ben loves looking at dirt, just not having it on his hands.

 Picture taken by Benjamin

 Ben's pretty proud of his seat.

 The scenery was beautiful, but my favorite was seeing all these boys, and holding their hands.

 When you ask Will what his favorite part of the trip was he'll say, "Sitting on the big rock with Dad"

 We packed up a day early to miss some bad weather rolling in, but everything else was pretty much perfect!