Ruidoso Winter Vacation!

Nana and her youngest sweeties. This was on our balconony and the ski mountain is behind them, it just doesn't show up with on this one.
Going up ......

At the top ......

All ready to go ........

What a ride !!!!

We had a fantastic family get-away to Ruidoso to do some skiing with Davids family. The weather was perfect, not too cold or windy, and the snow was the best for Ski Apache in years. While we went skiing during the day, Nana stayed with Avery and Cayla. Aves was very upset to learn that Kaegen and Kreek were skiing and she was not. So Dave and I planned time to take her tubing and to play in some snow (since there wasn't any at the cabin) and she loved it. She was giggly the entire time we were gathering our tubes and making our way up the hill. Even with others squealing as they passed us, she wasn't afraid one bit. Plus the sweet old man that gave us our tickets had a full grey beard with a curly ended mustache and claimed he was Santas cousin and would report that she was a sweet girl to the Jolly o' man. Once we were at the top of the hill getting ready to go down on our first run she asked, "Can I scream?!" And so she did the whole way down. It was so great to see such a sweet smile on that girl all morning long. On the way back to the cabin she said, "I want to go to sleep now,"...needless to say, she slept 3 hours that afternoon. Ash took several pictures of us on the mountain with her camera so when I get those I will post more.

This is Aves going down a tube shoot "by ALL myself" as she would put it. And yes, she screamed all the way down .... so much fun!

Thanks to the James' for a fabulous winter vacation!

Christmas Morning...

What a fun year this was for us to watch Avery enjoy Christmas. There were no tears shed this year as she saw Santa. In fact, I wasn't sure she would even say hi to him this year. So when we passed him in the San Angelo mall, I had no intention of getting her picture made yet (you know, she didn't have a Christmas shirt on or matching bow in her hair, oh my). But I wish I would have gotten it on film. She had the sweetest twinkle in her eye when she saw him and walked right up to him and touched his coat to get his attention, grinning ear to ear. She crawled right up in his lap and asked for a horse! Luckily this smart-thinking Santa explained that his elves could only make toy horses and asked if that would be ok instead, shwew. I think he could have told her anything at that point, she was just so happy to be with Santa! We also got the best smile out of her while sitting in his lap....it was such a sweet moment.

She gave many "ohs" and "ahs" when she found the horse that Santa had left. Right away she asked if she could sit on it and was thrilled to find that it actually moves and neighs and makes clopping hoof noises. Its the neatest thing and can pick up some speed when on the side walk. She named it Max like the horse in Tangled and feeds it imaginary apples. She also got a tent play house, a bath time Arial doll and the soft princess Disney dolls Belle and Sleeping Beauty or "booty" as Aves calls her. She was loved it all and we so much enjoyed the smile on her face.

A happy horse-owning girl and a proud daddy enjoying the scene.

No arguing for this pose. She was so happy!

I've been finding mysterious pictures on my camera from very low angles.... and I'm thinking it's not Dave.

Raw family portrait, no judging, this is how family portraits are suppose to look on Christmas morning.

Inside her play house. She insists you knock so that she can say, "who is it?"

Cousins ready for pictures to be over with and presents to be opended!

Finally a group picture with the James, a bit blurry but still a keeper.

And of course there has to be a silly one!

So cute, enough said.


Once she opened these gloves, she wore them the rest of the day and napped in them the next.

A Truly White Christmas...

The rest of Christmas Eve was spent at my aunt and uncles (or Yaya and Lonnie, as some of you know them as) with our big bunch of family. It was so wonderful to have snow on Christmas Eve....and not just a little snow....it snowed all day long! We built an awesome snow man plus had plenty of snow ball fights and even made a few snow angels or snow blobs are what they really looked like.

Great-granny Nanny and Cousin Judy...

My three year old baby genius princess...

Two pretty ladies...

Her absolutely favorite part of having snow is eating snow!

Snow blob...I mean angel?

Uncle Lonnie adding on the tomato eyes and carrot nose.

Cohen and the final product...

Christmas Eve with Nani and Pops and DeeDee, too

Our pretty little sweetie ready to open gifts.

Dave was trying to hand out gifts but any time any one is in this position she tends to saddle up and so "go horsey, come on".

Playing with her Beauty and the Beast figurines.

This gift came with a warning before it was even opened...can you see why?!! Thank you Nani and Pops! ha! She does love it though!

Another blurry one, but so glad to have DeeDee with us.

Pops and his famous Jimmy Buffet Hawaiian Christmas shirt, so stylin'!

Christmas Baking and Bird Feeder Project

Peanut Butter-covered Pine Cones rolled in bird seeds. The perfect messy yet oh so fun hand made gift. We hot glued red ribbon with white snow flakes on it to the tops for a hanger. I think mom and I had as much fun doing this as Aves did.
Baking with Aunt Tisha and Nani.
Since Aves can't help herself but eat massive amounts of cookie dough, we gave her a pile of flour all to herself to keep her entertained. It was one of those fun kind of messes where she had to be stripped down to undies before she left the kitchen. What fun!!

Were you all starting to wonder if we even had Christmas this year? Well, I'm sure by now you have all learned to not count on any of my blogs to be on time! This was a wonderful yet completely chaotic Christmas this year. We loved the snow and putting up the decorations. We had a contract on our house to move the very week after Christmas (yes, one week after Christmas) so things were just mentally stressful for me. As I decorated for Christmas, I boxed up anything in its way, you know, to save time once the holidays were over to just pack up Christmas and furniture. So the first three weeks of the holidays besides all the wonderful get togethers and time spent baking for each event, I boxed things up, took things off the walls, cleaned out closets, made several trips to the new home we had found AND the day that I completely packed up Averys room just 6 days before Christmas, the buyer for our house decided to back out and not buy our home!! Can you sense some frustration here?! So needless to say, we are still here with bare walls and a garage full of boxes. Oh well, God must certainly have other plans for us at the moment, just wish I knew what they were...