First Christmas in Vegas

Let me warn all my fellow bloggers out there (psst...I'm talkin' to you, Mom). If you don't blog right away, your phone might mysteriously delete half of your pictures leaving you with fragmented thoughts and memories. Sigh. We'll work through this together. 

What we do have is a new cousin to join the boy party. Hey, hey, hey, Baby Kade!

This is where things are tragically missing. I was able to go out to Washington D.C. for Jeff's graduation but the following two pictures are the only ones that survived my phone's vanishing act. 

I was so grateful to get the chance to go out and see where Jeff had been spending his time. It was super rewarding to see him graduate and to cheer him on. I was so proud of him and the hard work he put in to complete his training. Go, Jeff!

Next thing my phone is choosing to remember is our December trip to the Bellagio where we took this picture that was our closest attempt at a Christmas card this year. 

We are closer to Grandma and Grandpa Excell now! We were able to go visit for their annual Christmas Tea and Recital. 

Maybe my phone was trying to help me forget all the painting I did in the first two months of living in our new house. Our whole house was painted in eggshell finish. EGGSHELL. Have you ever been in an eggshell finished house? Filled with four boys? It's the worst. Anywhere my boys touched left a grease mark that couldn't be wiped off. One week in the house and the bottom third of our walls were visibly nasty. It had to go and it had to go fast. 

I made a goal to paint two walls every day and became a woman on a mission. Before too long we had a beautiful semi-gloss grey house that I'm fully giddy over. I'm happy to say 3 months later the house is almost done. I've just got a few closets left to finish and then I can officially say I've painted every inch of an entire house. Bleh!

I kept saying our house didn't feel like home yet because we hadn't made any memories in it. Christmas helped with that! We were thrown right into the biggest memory making holiday which helped our new house feel like home. 

We were loving playing outside at a park without so much as a jacket on Christmas Eve. We could get used to this!

I broke away from painting the house to paint a few sugar cookies for Santa.

We were finally starting to get settled in our new home, but would Santa find us in Vegas? And if he did, would he be able to fill our stockings if we didn't have a chimney for him to climb down? To be continued!