Christmas Eve

We had a fun Christmas Eve.  Bryan went to work in the morning and then came home in the early afternoon.  We had been invited to Don and Kathy's house for dinner.  It was fun to see their family.  

The kids were a bit sad that we weren't doing our usual pizza under the Christmas tree tradition so we picked up a pizza on the way home so Courtney could get the pizza taste before bed. ;)

We went through our usually Christmas traditions...we played the chimes, made cookies for Santa, read Christmas stories...

...opened our Christmas pjs, read "The Cremation of Sam McGee," and then got ready for bed.

Christmas pjs:

Courtney decided she wanted to sleep in Ethan's room so they could get up early in the morning.  Ethan has a chair in his room that is like a bowl so Courtney slept in that with a bunch of blankets.  She said it was comfortable.

More Light Sabers

Ethan decided he needed to compete for the "coolest cousin ever" award with his younger Pack cousins.  So he decided to make the little boys their own light sabers.  We had a bunch of PVC pipe in the garage so Ethan cut it to a good size for little guys and then we hung them on the line so he could spray paint them.  We went to Home Depot and bought more spray paint (so each one would be a different color), glow in the dark duct tape and some black duct tape.

Ethan spent the next day spray painting the PVC pipe hanging on the line.

When they were dry, we put the duct tape on the ends and then they were ready.

They glow!!

Temple Lights

We went to the Temple to look at the Christmas lights and the Nativity display.  It was cold and we didn't prepare too well but we had hot chocolate so that was great.  We had to take the traditional arch Christmas light picture of the kids.

In the visitor's center they had a huge display of Nativity pieces from all over the world.  It was really cool to see them all.

We love to see the Temple.

Light Saber

Ethan was bored during the break so he decided to make himself a light saber.  He actually made 2 of them because his first was out of a cardboard tube from the middle of wrapping paper.  We figured it wouldn't last long so Ethan made one out of pvc pipe.  He even painted it.  I love it!

Fiesta Fun

Courtney won a $25 gift card to Fiesta Fun.  She wanted to take her best friend, Sammie, with her to have some fun.  She was also using it as Sammie's Christmas present.  So one day during the Christmas break we picked up Sammie for a fun morning.

We got to Fiesta Fun as soon as it opened so we wouldn't have to wait in any lines.  The girls found Santa and had to sit on his lap:

We decided to play "Skittles" bowling first.  We got a lane and then I had a big bag of Skittles with the rule sheet.  Before each time they bowled they would have to put their hand in the Skittles bag and whatever color they pulled out would determine how they would bowl.  One color meant they had to bowl in a different way.  For example, one color meant they had to spin around before they bowled.  Another color meant that they had to bowl granny style, etc.  They had a great time!

Ethan didn't bowl with us because his toe had just been fixed and he didn't really feel like being goofy with the girls.

They had to take a picture with the huge polar bear.

After we finished bowling, Courtney had some money to play some video games.  They had a lot of fun going around playing while we waited until it was our time to do laser tag.

Ethan had fun playing some video games also.

Ethan found a glitch in the Pac-Man game...it didn't require any money to play it.  So he hung out on that game for a long time.

After video games, it was time to play laser tag.  They had a lot of fun with the group they were with.  Ethan won and the girls did a great job too.

We were finished but we still had some coupons left for free stuff.  So we went to Zeppe's.  It's a frozen Italian icee place we hadn't been to before.  They were so good but they were HUGE!  Ethan was in heaven and the girls had a lot of fun watching him enjoy eating.

It was a fun day!

Ethan's poor toe

Ethan can't seem to catch a break.  About a month ago he started complaining that his big toe on his right foot was hurting.  We looked at it and noticed that i appeared to have two ingrown toenails on his big toe (one on each side).  The poor guy had been ignoring them as long as he could because he didn't want anyone else poking at him.  But finally they got bad enough that he finally agreed to go to the doctor.

I called around to find one that had an opening and got him in at the beginning of December.  The doctor poked his toe and, without numbing him up, cut out two large ingrown toenails.  Ethan was a trooper.  The doctor told us that Ethan has wide nail beds (which is hereditary) and that this probably wouldn't fix it permanently.  Because both Bryan and I have had to get ingrown toenails fixed, we figured Ethan would eventually have to have his fixed too.

After a couple of weeks it was obvious that Ethan's toe wasn't getting better.  So I made an appointment to have his ingrown toenail fixed and his wide nail beds thinned.  So we went to have that done before Christmas.

This is what his toe looked like before having it fixed.

This is what it looked like after the doctor injected it 7 times to numb it.  Ethan's toe didn't want to go to sleep so the doctor kept having to inject him with another shot.  The poor kid was still in pain but he did the best he could.

The toe nail they took out was huge and there was a lot of blood.  We couldn't believe how far in the doctor was able to stick his instruments.  He put some toenail killer on the end of a small dowel and kept shoving it in to kill the nail bed.  We were both amazed at how far it could go into his toe.

When the doctor was finished, he put some bandages on Ethan's toe and it looked HUGE!

Ethan spent the rest of the day with his leg elevated.  It was strange because it was his right leg instead of his left that was elevated.  He is still recovering but he hasn't been hurting anymore.  He has a follow up next month to make sure it is healing well.

Caroling

The young men and young women in the ward usually go caroling on the Sunday before Christmas.  Ethan likes going and they always have a lot of fun.  Our ward is a lot smaller than it was last year so it didn't take as long for them to go to all the streets.  They met at the Church, loaded onto a truck with hay bails and took off.

After a while we could hear them singing so we went outside to wait for them to come by.  Courtney had fun playing with some neighbor kids while we all waited.  They had a blast riding scooters, playing on the pogo stick and riding bikes.

When the youth came by someone stopped to talk to me about one of my visiting teaching sisters so I didn't get a video of them singing but they did a great job.  I did get a photo of the truck as it went by.