Merry Christmas 2013

Of course we started by reading the Christmas story from the girl's story bible.

 

Then the girls enjoyed opening and playing with their presents.

 

 Steve and Vicki came over for Christmas dinner and the girls took advantage of having someone to read to them and their new friends.

Merry Christmas!!!!

Christmas Singing

Julia sang in the church children's Christmas musical again this year. 

She's in the second row from the bottom, second from the right.

 

After shooting a few shots from the balcony, Neil got up close.  Turns out Julia had lots of interaction with Steven besides just singing.

 Julia got a kiss from Grandma after her performance.

Reading with Grandma and Grandpa

Mom and Dad came early in December to help out toward the end of Raquel's pregnancy.  Of course the girls loved this.  The girls get to go to the parks more frequently, and Grandma and Grandpa both read to them.

San Antonio Conference

The first week of December Neil had a conference in San Antonio.  Despite Raquel being over 8 months pregnant, she decided she was good to go with so the girls could get out and go to a hotel for free.  Of course on the way there we made the requisite stop at Bucky's.  (For those of you who aren't from Texas, Bucky's is a Texas sized convenience store famous for their clean restrooms.)

Of course, the girls don't care too much about the cleanliness of the restrooms, they want to stop to see Bucky the beaver.

Fortunately Raquel didn't go into labor early, so the only other excitement on the trip was when the girls got to rough housing and Emilia got quarter sized lump on her forehead.  Neil got out of part of one of the speeches thanks to that one.  No lasting damage thank God.

Decorating for Christmas

Neil took the week of Thanksgiving off and we spent it at home accomplishing a few things, but mainly doing a whole lot of nothing.  One thing we did do was to decorate the house for Christmas.  The girls were great helpers of course.

At one point they had to take a break to make snow angels.

 Without assistance all of the ornaments end up within 3 feet of the bottom of the tree, so the girls got a little boost to reach the higher branches with a few ornaments.

 They paid close attention to Raquel on how to properly decorate things.

 The picture of a happy worker.

Halloween 2013

Raquel had costumes all set for the girls, but once in the closet, Julia saw these outfits hanging there and decided she didn't want her costume, she wanted to be Mulan.  Of course Emilia had to be Mulan as well.  Raquel purchased these outfits 8 or 9 years ago in Korea for Emily and Alaina and Rebecca returned to us for the girls.  We think they worked pretty well for Halloween.  Thanks Rebecca!

Happy Birthday Girls

We had a couple of birthday parties for the girls when we got home from Washington.  We had Emilia's cake eating party at home since we flew back the day of her birthday.  

Of course she just dove right in.

 

The first bite wasn't that big. You can tell from the small smear pattern.

 

 The cake was decorated with Winnie the Pooh characters.  Emilia is trying to clean off Eeyore.  Notice the smear on her ear.

Steve and Vicki also threw the girls a party as well.

 Emilia was pretty happy with it.