Christmas Eve 2011

We hope everyone had a very Merry Christmas this past week. We sure did. We are really enjoying how excited Emily is for the holidays this year. She is really into Santa this year. Santa even sent her an email and OMG! She was floored :) It was sooo cute. Pretty sure we watched it about 10x. She also has been very concerned on if she's on Santa's naughty list or Santa's nice list. It seems to work for our advantage sometimes.

All ready for her Christmas party at Gingerbread House (her school)

For Christmas Eve, we went to Kory's mom as soon as he got home from work on Saturday morning. We arrived to delicious cinnamon rolls....yummmmmmmy. It was a really fun time to hang out and watch Em and Zander open presents. They were very good!!!

Bonnie accidentally put her diamond earrings down the garbage disposal a few months ago, so Tom surprised her with new earrings....pretty sure I learned a lesson..put jewelry down the garbage disposal, turn it on, receive even better jewelry!!! LOL! As you can see, she was quite surprised

Here is Zander, Kacey (very pregnant with Maddox) and Emily

Here is Zander opening the gift we got him. It was a giant farm I'm pretty sure Kory bought it so that he could play with it :)

Em felt a need to help Zander open each present he got. This one was a huge garbage truck!!! Kory liked playing with that too :)

Here is Bonnie & Tom opening their gift certificate from all the kids. We got them a gift certificate to a bed & breakfast up in Door County.

Here is Emily with her Barbie gift She LOVED it!!!!! Her very first barbies :)

Family pic - Christmas Eve - 2011

Liz (Kory's step-sister) and her boyfriend, Kevin

Emily and Zander doing stamps that she got from Aunt Liz..such a good job sharing guys!!!!

 After nap time we headed home from Bonnie & Tom's to let Otis out. We made our food and then headed to Aunt Cori's house. It's super fun to watch all the girls open presents together.  We had a great time!!!

When we got there - we realized Braenna and Emily had gotten the exact same toy earlier in the day! (L to R: Braenna, Mikaiya, Emily)

Here is Kory drawing a smiley face on Mike's thumb bandaid

Cute pic of CeCe and Mike

Emme helping Grammy open her presents

Yay! The Walker girls all got Chicago Bears blankets! Love them mom!!!

Braenna gives the best hugs!!!!

Emme super excited (can't you tell???) for her American Girl llama...yes, she got a llama...bet you didn't!!!!

Jeff super excited to open up his gift from Victoria's Secret

Casey was super duper surprised when Mike had her open a gift and inside were 2 tickets to the Bears v Packers game on Christmas Day. They had an awesome time!! I was soooo jealous!!!

Emily got this cute purse from Aunt Cori, Uncle Jeff and the girls. Yes....she changed into her jammies 1/2 way through opening presents.

Here are the 3 girls all ready to put out their reindeer food

Emily and Braenna putting out their food for Santa's reindeer

Mikaiya got a kareoke machine....oh boy! She loves to sing!

Cori pretending she doesn't see Uncle Mike snuggling with her...oh and Bella the kitty!

We had so much fun on Christmas Eve at both families. Our Christmas Eve is always a long day, but I wouldn't have it any other way. I love being able to spend holidays with my family on both sides.

Thanks to everyone for having us and we already can't wait for next year!!!

Emily's 4th Birthday Party!!!!

We had Emily's 4th birthday party on Sunday, December 11th. We had her party at The Little Gym
it was sooooo much fun! She had 15 little friends there with her, along with about 10 or so adults. The first hour was ran by the girls that work there and they did a great job playing with the kids. The 2nd hour was in the party room where we had pizza & cake, and then we opened presents. She had a blast and all the kids were so well behaved.


Here is our sweet little angel.

This is the inside of the gym. There was tons for the kids to do. Mikaiya is in the blue top and white pants on the bars, and Isabella is in the purple next to her.

Here is a bunch of the kids and some parents too - doing some stretches!!

Here is Emily with 2 of her school friends - Olivia in pink and Abby in blue.

More friends! My niece Braenna is in the front in the pink dress.

Here is Em being the Simon of "Simon Says". She loved telling all her little friends what they could and couldn't do :)

This was fun when they blew up the slide for the kids to play on. She let them ride on it until it got big!

Lily and Nora are next to each other, baby Cayl over by Nick and next to him is Anika

Nan made Em's cake and it was beautiful! She did such a great job...oh...and it was absolutely delicious too!!!

Blowing out her candles

Then they put her on a donut so she could open her presents. Keira is standing up in the green shirt and skirt.

All the kids "helping" open presents!

We had such a fantastic time at the party! Couldn't have asked for more. Thanks to everyone who came and helped us celebrate her special day!!

So far in December....

Cori & Jeff hosted a "college friends" get-together at her house the first weekend in December. We had a great time with some old friends.

Here's Emily playing dress-up at Cori's house. I just thought this picture was adorable!!



Katie, Sarah, Cori and Me

Between the 4 of us college friends we have 8 kids!!! The little ones all had a blast playing together. It was sooo much fun to see the kids interact eventhough they don't get to see each other very often.

 We've had such a busy month so far! We've been lucky to not have had any snow yet. Feels weird being almost Christmas time and still no snow.

I just thought this pic was cute of Emme and her Daddy!

 This past weekend we went out for Cori & Amy's birthday's. My mom was in town so we made Christmas cookies on Saturday and then she babysit the 3 girls while we all went out to dinner and then to see a band afterwards.

Cori & Jeff

Kory and I

First attempt at a nice picture of Casey & Mike

Second attempt....

Uh....third attempt...pretty sure this isn't going to be good.....

Last try! Now you know why there aren't many pics of Casey & Mike - it's nearly impossible to get a good one!! LOL!

Playdates, Thanksgiving, Fire Trucks and Decorating for Christmas...

Guess I missed posting the entire month of November. I'm not exactly sure what we did, but I found these cute pictures in my 'November 2011' file!! I guess this will do :)

Emily had her first school friend playdate at our house. This is her bestie, Keira. They did pretty well. By the time her parents came to pick her up both girls had cried at least 1x. They are two peas in a pod. I am sooo not ready for all the girl drama :) Kidding aside, Keira is a sweetheart and I'm glad Emily has so much fun with her!

 Thanksgiving was a blast! We went to Kory's mom's in the morning and spent most of the day there. Then went to my sister Cori's house for the evening festivities. Emily ended up having a complete meltdown at Bonnie's so we left a little early and got her a nap at home before we had to head to Cori's. It actually worked out quite well. Hopefully she learned her lesson and will sleep on Christmas Eve at Bonnie's since we'll have the same day plans again.

I didn't take many pics for some reason, but thought this one was cute from Thanksgiving. It's Emily and Zander playing Ring Around the Rosey. They were giggling and having a great time!

 Cori & Jeff invited us to the annual Sun Prairie Fire Truck Parade. Now...you'd think since I've lived here for 11 years and they've only lived here for 1 year that I would have known about this annual event for years....but I had no idea! So thanks for the invite guys :) It's a really fun parade where all the nearby communities decorate their fire trucks for Christmas. Then they drive them through downtown and everyone waves and cheers. They also have Santa light the Sun Prairie Christmas tree.

Here is Emily - as you can tell she is a truck driver's daughter and does the hand motion for the trunk honking quite well!!! She loved the fire truck parade especially because Daddy remembered her ear plugs!

Here's a pic of just one of the trucks. They are amazing!!!

We even walked and got ice cream afterwards...it wasn't that cold of a night, so we figured why not????

 We spent the weekend after Thanksgiving getting the house decorated for the holidays. We don't do a lot, but we have a few traditions that we like to do each year.

Here is Miss Em decorating the tree. We had to be careful with ornament placement as the tree is right by where Otis looks out the window and his tail wags and knocks ornaments off - so we've lost a few ornaments this year - but no biggie!!! Em did a great job decorating. Oh and I've also learned I am not nearly as anal retentive as most people - I let her put ornaments wherever she wanted - even if they were all in the same place :)

Here she is hanging up our stockings :)

and of course Daddy helping her put the angel on the top of the tree!

Here is our buggy in front of our tree. Yes she is only wearing 1 sock. No idea why!

Happy Halloween 2011

Halloween is one of my favorite holidays, and as Emily gets older it becomes more and more fun! Lots of pictures in the last week. I tried to pick some of my favorites.

Em got a special gift from her G (kory's mom) for Halloween which included a new shirt, pants and a princess memory game! She loved it all.

For the last 3 years Kory and I have gone to a Halloween party at the Mounds Country Club in Fort Atkinson. Our friend Matt is the General Manager there and he throws the best Halloween and New Years parties. Unfortunately, this year, the party ended up being on Friday night instead of Saturday night so Kory couldn't join us. But I was still able to go!!!

Cori and Jeff in their pirate costumes - so cute!!

Me (cowgirl), Brenda (gnome), Cori (pirate), and Tiffany (cowgirl)

Sisters....mom, aren't you so proud????

Matt and Brenda - and she made these costumes!!! Amazing! I love seeing what they're going to come up with each year.

The flintsones

Tiffy and me - we had no idea each other were dressing up as cowgirls. Pretty funny!

Ellie and Tim as sock monkeys. They always have very creative costumes too!!

Ryan and Nan - so glad they came out for the party even if it was their wedding anniversary too :)

 Emily picked out her own costume this year and decided she wanted to be Arial from The Little Mermaid. Funny thing is that she's never seen the movie. So she has no idea what it's all about. Maybe Santa will bring her the movie :)

Here she is all ready to go the party at the PAC

 We have a membership at our athletic club in town and every year they throw the kids a halloween party. It's a small party, but the kids love it.

Mikaiya (angel), Emily (little mermaid), Braenna (strawberry shortcake) making their ghost pops at the PAC party

Love this pic of Emmers. She looks sooo grown up! She's making her bracelet out of fruit loops

Pin the nose on the pumpkin :)

Bowling!!

 Daddy had to work for trick-or-treating this year, so I took Emily over to my sister's in Sun Prairie and we went trick or treating with her 2 girls and a group from their neighborhood.

Here is Em all ready to go trick or treating!! She was soooo excited!

Emily's best friend from school lives near my sister so we met up with Keira for tric-or-treating. It was so fun to watch Em interact with her. They held hands and were just so darn cute the whole time.

Here's the 4 girls (Emily, Keira, Mikaiya and Braenna) at the first house

.....and they're off!!! Seriously they literally ran from house to house for over an hour. I couldn't believe how well they did!!

We had so much fun trick-or-treating and can't wait until next year!!!

Hope everyone else had a very Happy Halloween too!!!