Kenny's Home!!!

Two years really is a long time to be away from home! Coming home for my brother must have been quite a shock.My parents bought a house while he was away. Derek and I bought a house, peyton is huge now and we had Jax. Janeane and David are wayyy pregnant, Audge and Damon had Kinsley, Sarah and Jeff are dating and Brad is home from his mission. A lot has changed in the two years he's been gone.

What a great welcome party!

Kenny's flight was supposed to come in at 9:45am so we were all there bright and early, but apparently it wasn't so bright because they sent his plane to San Jose to refuel because they couldn't land due to fog. It was a three hour process for them to get to San Jose, refuel and fly back so we had plenty of time to take pictures and fool around while waiting at the airport. My dad was actually taking the kids on "rides" up and down the escalators to keep them entertained. It was funny.

Finally, after what seemed like forever Kenny came down the escalator! He was so excited to be home and around family that he hadn't seen and barely talked to for the past two years!

He said seeing Peyton was such a good way to start the hellos. I guess she yelled, "I'm three now!" when he picked her up. He thought that was cute.

Our whole family together in the same place for the first time in 3 years! It's pretty exciting to have everyone together again! Can't wait to see what the future has in store for us!

Brody's Birthday!

One of my friends had a birthday party for her son Brody. The kids love getting together for play dates and parties!

Jax, Mia and Brody

Cuteness!

They are so funny together.

Kinsley's 1!!!

Can you believe a year has already passed since I blogged about the birth of my very first niece? The baby in the picture above no longer exists... luckily the little girl she is becoming is just as fun and just as beautiful! 

She is such a sweetheart! Damon and Audge threw a huge party for her. She loves mickey and minnie mouse so they threw her a minnie party. Audge pretty much made every decoration herself and it turned out amazing! She put a ton of work into it, but it really paid off.

These kids are just so cute when they get together. Now that Kinsley is WALKING(yay) it's that much better! They play more and more and Kinsley can definitely hold her own.

They had a lot of fun at the party. Conveniently for Jax the cookies were placed on the edge of a table within reach. Everytime I turned around he was walking through the house with a cookie in his hand.

Peyton also had her fair share of treats! Audge made oreo cake pops shaped as minnie mouse that were so good.

It was cool to see Damon's side of the family. Kinsley is lucky to have a big family on both sides. The cousins on Damon's side have so much fun with her! Before the party I was trying to explain to Peyton that Kinsley's other cousins were going to be there and Peyton looked so sad as she said, "but Kinsley's my cousin..." it was cute. Then Derek told her that she could make friends with Kinsley's other cousins and that made her feel better.

I have so much love and respect for my aunts! They are amazing women. I hope that Kinsley feels the same way about my sister's and I when she is older. I think she is blessed to have aunts that are so close.

It's kinda funny that Audge and I had girls first and Janeane is about to have a girl. When my other siblings have children will they have girls first as well? Someone has got to have a boy other than me. Jax needs a boy cousin...

The bounce house was a huge hit with all of the kids and even some of the adults! My dad even got in it with Peyton at one point. Peyton was in it almost the whole day. I took the kids in before everyone arrived and they were having fun just crawling over the bumps and trying to stand up.

Both of my kids didn't really want anything to do with their cakes on their birthdays, but Kinsley dug into hers. I love this face! I think I had even already wiped a little cake off before this picture was taken. She was covered and it was precious! I'm very happy that this little girl came into our lives a year ago. What did we ever do without her?

It's been a while...

Okay, I know it's been a while and I was doing really good about blogging everything until recently when I broke our laptop. Embarrassingly enough I was sitting on our recliner while facebooking when all the sudden I felt something crawling up my leg. I hit it with my hand and then looked down and saw this huge centipede laying there. I freaked out and jumped out of the chair throwing the computer to the floor face down. The screen is no more. This kind of stunk because our desk top computer has been easily overheating lately so we haven't been using that. Basically this was our only source to cyber world. I dug out my old laptop and it surprisingly worked better than I thought it would, but was still super slow and I had no intentions of uploading pictures just to slow it down even more. Was my hubby mad at me? Of course... but he forgave a little when I figured out how to ghetto rig our laptop to our desk top screen. Is it lame? Yes, very, but it's been working until we decide to break down and buy a new one. Anyways, on to the rest of my post. We have been keeping very busy so this post will be mostly pictures and I'll try to refrain from going off too much about anything and everything.

The kids have so much fun when we get them all together for play dates. We've been pretty frequent with them too and it makes for some good memories.

These girls are super cute together!

Peyton and her BFF Mya

Jax and Mia

Kinsley(the fry addict), Jax and Mia

No joke, I gave this girl a pretty long french fry, looked away for a second and by the time I looked back it was gone. She loves them!

My son will find anything to make you laugh and then keep doing it...

over and over again.

Then Peyton will eventually join in on the fun.

We started off Thanksgiving at my parents house. It was fun to get everyone together, except Sarah who had to work, her boyfriend Jeff, and Kenny who is on his mission. He's coming home on Kinsley's first birthday by the way! December 20th! Just in time for Christmas! We're pretty excited! The kids like playing with Uncle Brad.

Every year the "men" in the family go on a shoot out Thanksgiving morning. When I say the men I mean all of them(uncles, cousins, dads, and sons). It's a pretty big event and something they look forward to. I think Jax may still be too small to go, but it was cute enough to take a picture of when my dad came home. Sorry if this worries anyone, but the gun is obviously not loaded and it was all in fun.

Two of the biggest things I'm thankful for!

My cutie pie!

Kinsley and Grandma

The cousins... so far! Janeane is due February 1st so we're just waiting impatiently for the next one to make her entrance! :)

After my parent's we went to Derek's aunt and uncle's for round two. Then we stayed the night at his parent's and the next day we went to cut our tree! The kids looked soo cute all bundled up!

They loved the snow and making snow balls. Peyton was having a lot of fun throwing them at Grandpa's truck.

Amanda and Grammy "helping" Peyton build a little snow man.

While the guys and Amanda were off scouting for trees Grammy built this snow man. It was a great photo opportunity! We got a pretty tree, but I didn't get a picture of it. I will work on another post in a few days with our decorations and tree.

It was so pretty driving back down the mountain with all the fog rolling over the valley. Derek got out and took this picture and I thought it was awesome! Anyways, that's pretty much what we've been up to, excluding the fact that we all came down with a pretty bad stomach flu that spread like the plague, but we're all better now and looking forward to some really fun holiday traditions!!!

Family Pictures!

I finally decided it was time to get our family pictures taken! They turned out so good! Here are a lot of my favorites!

We had the same photographer that took the kid's pictures when Jax was born do them. Jax was the hardest to get to smile, but I guess that's what you would expect from a one year old. There are soo many pictures that I love! My kids are getting so big! Below is one of the pictures from a year ago:

Compare that to now:

It's crazy how much children can grow in a year! I'm so happy with my little family. We are far from perfect and have many bad moments, but I would be completely lost without my husband and my children. They give my life meaning and I love them!