Meet Penny!

Just before Christmas, we added a new member to our family!

Meet Penny:

Ben has wanted a dog ever since we got married, but between babies, grad school, moving, etc., the timing has never been good for us.  About a year ago, I started warming up to the idea of getting a dog sometime in the near future. So, we started planning and I started reading, and we felt like probably some time this coming spring, we'd be ready to add a dog to our family.

Our time line was moved up a little when we found out that a friend of a friend had some havanese puppies she was selling. It was the perfect breed for us and the perfect situation, so we decided to go for it!

Penny is pure bred havanese and was born Sept. 20th, so she was about 12 weeks old when we got her. She has been a really great puppy so far and we are excited to have her in our family!

Christmas!

We had a low-key but really great Christmas this year!

Evan started us off with his Orchestra concert. He did an awesome job! It's been really fun to watch him learn the violin.

A couple of days later, I let the kids skip school and I took them all up to Seattle to see the gingerbread display at the Sheraton hotel. We did this last year and it was really neat. When I found out that the theme of this year's display was Star Wars, I knew we had to go again! The displays were awesome, and so was the tree... complete with Leia buns and a Chewbacca garland.

A few days before christmas, we made "gingerbread houses". I decided to use graham crackers and leftover Halloween candy this year and they turned out great! The kids loved that they each had their own house to decorate. I wasn't sure how well Aria would do, but she totally got into it and did her whole house pretty much by herself!

We are lucky to have Ben's sister's family living near us now, so we spent Christmas eve with them! We had a yummy turkey dinner, opened Christmas Eve jammies, and opened presents from cousins.

Christmas was nice and relaxing, with nothing going on until dinner time when Brein's family came over for Christmas dinner. We always love hanging out in our jammies all day, playing with our new things!

Last, but not least, here are some fun Christmas pictures that I took of the kids (and one of me and Ben).