Christmas Part 2

Christmas Part 2 includes our family's Christmas morning at home...just the 5 of us :-) and Christmas Eve at Grandma Sabrina's and Grandpa John's. Picture Overload Alert!!!

Santa came!! The Jolly Old Fellow brought Landon a new green and black bike (just like he asked him for :)) and the girls got Dora tricycles. He also brought the kids Happy Nappers (2 ladybugs and a dragon), a hot wheels motorcycle racing thingy for Landon and Dora guitars for the girls. Each child got a new book from St. Nick as well :) They also had about 7 or 8 gifts each from Mommy and Daddy to open. After seeing the gift outcome of all 5 of our family Christmas', I think I'll cut down on the gifts from us next year. The toy situation at my house right now is out of control!

Chris' mom Sabrina and stepdad Amadeo (aka John) have a big Christmas Eve party every year. There were probably about 20-30 people there...not just family, but some of our family's closest friends, as well. Santa even showed up with his elves! And once again, my children were spoiled rotten with all kinds of great gifts!

Allie.Emily (yes, I'm labeling my daughters again :) Dont want to ever forget who is who!)

Emily.Allie

The day wouldn't be complete without a good wrestling match! Allie is the screamer here.

I couldnt keep Emily off of Anda's walker :-/

Sweet little Allie :)

Great Grandma Anda!

Lots of family and friends!

I LOVE this picture. Em is looking at a photo of herself during Christmas 2009...same date, same place. My how she has grown! Tooooo fast :-(

Emily (otherwise known as sassy pants)

Landon with Caleb and Tyler (Dr. Hood's boys)

Adorable Austin!!

The funniest part of this picture to me is the Woody toy all sprawled out on the floor. He looks like he's been through the ringer...

Emily grabbing the gift from Santa's elf as fast as possible...hence the bluriness. The girls were not having Santa yet again this year.

Allie making her fast getaway.

This kid was hilarious! Rather than doing his duty as an elf, he was way more interested in Landon's Star Wars gift :-) Landon kept looking at him all weird. I could tell he was thinking "Are you an elf or a kid? Did you make this Star Wars toy for me?" hahaha!! The look on Landon's face was priceless. He was really trying to figure this elf slash kid out :-)

We were able to get Em on the elf's lap, but Allie wansn't having it one single bit.

Hanging out with friends and family!

Stay tuned for Christmas Part 3. Still gotta blog about Christmas at Nommie and Poppy's and Christmas at Donna and Grandpa's!

Christmas Part 1

Im thinking my Christmas post is gonna have to be broken up into several different posts being that we had 5 different Christmas celebrations! It was definitely a chaotic, tiring holiday season, but we LOVED every minute of it. Today's post includes some Christmas cookie and ice cream making, a visit w Santa (lets just say 2 of my 3 children would prefer Santa to just go away), and our first Christmas celebration at my moms house in Granbury.

I'll start off by sharing a pic of my nerdy Christmas feet. Yes...I'm the geek who likes to wear festive gear and have my pedicure done to match the season :)

Aunt Steph, Uncle Shaun, and Cousin Keagan gave Landon an ice cream maker for Christmas. We had a fun, messy time making some chocolate ice cream!

We baked/iced Christmas cookies for Santa (and ourselves :)) Not sure why I only snapped a pic of Allie. If I had to guess, I'd say the the other 2 weren't cooperating with yet another photo shoot :)

Landon asked for a green and gray big boy bike without training wheels.

The pretties weren't fans of Santa last year...or this year :-/

Nana and Bud spoiled the kids as usual :-) I'm pretty sure Landon holds the world record for The Fastest Present Opener EVER. Emily was pretty quick too, but Allie took her time. She wanted to play with/try on everything she opened before moving on to the next gift. I'm going to label the pics of the girls just in case I cant tell them apart later down the road. That has actually happened many times before. There are so many unlabeled pics of the girls as babies that I cant distinguish between the 2 now :-(

Emily

Emily, Allie

Allie

Emily

Allie

Allie

Landon and daddy playing football

Emily, Allie

Allie

I'm always behind the camera, so this is the only pic I have of myself...my feet. This posts starts with my feet and ends with my feet. Weird. Oh well, all I know is this pic was taken after the mad dash of gift opening and I was so happy to sit by the fire and relax. Aweeeee....

Stay tuned for Christmas Part 2 and 3 (maybe 4 too). I've got a lot more fun to share!

Girls Annual Christmas Party and a few cute pics of the kiddos, of course :)

Their shirts may say they heart Santa, but in reality, they want NOTHING to do with him.

My new iphone has an edit option for my pictures. I got rid of the red eye in these two, but apparently I uploaded the unedited ones :-/

Emily Grace

Allie Kathryn

Landon Christopher


I have an AMAZING group of girls that I have called my best friends for 17 years now. Every year, we have a Girl's Christmas Party. Last year, we started a new tradition of going down to Heather's family lakehouse in Granbury for a Christmas party/sleepover. We shopped around on the square for a little while, went to a wine tasting at a local vineyard, ate dinner at a local Mexican restaurant, then went back to the house for cocktails and our gift exchange. Johnna made a slideshow dvd of lots of our favorite music and pictures. It was so good!!!! Another neat thing we do every year is write down predictions for the upcoming year, and then read them aloud at the following year's Christmas party. We still have to do that this year though, because we forgot to bring our predictions down to Granbury. Oh well...just another reason to get together again sometime soon :) I love my girlfriends so much and would not be the person I am today without them!! We have been through everything together!! I didnt get many pictures, but I'll be stealing some from Ivy when she gets hers up :)

At the Barking Rocks Winery and Vineyard. We are missing 5 of our girls due to newborn babies, having to work, no babysitter, etc etc. We missed you Kara, Stevi, Brooke, Amy, and Kelli!!! We were so excited Kendra made it in from San Antonio for the party this year!!!!

We made a pit stop at Bootleggers to pick up some important goods :)

I'm back!!!!!!!

I

Am I good at blogging these days? Not so much...

Dear trusty blog readers....sorry that I TOTALLY SUCK at this lately. It's not that I don't want to blog or don't have the time, because I do. I just know this is mainly for the pictures, and I have yet to download all of my new camera stuff so I can upload some pics. I'm so horrible at computer stuff, I haven't even tried to download it myself. I just need to get Chris to do it for me...but I keep forgetting! Ugh!

So...just in case you care about whats been going on with The Stark's, I'll type up a quick post, minus pics of my adorably perfect kiddos :-) I think I'll type up 4 separate paragraphs...3 talking about whats been going on with each of my kiddos and one about Chris and I...or something like that. This blog is my version of a scrapbook, so I need to record what's going on at these ages :-)

Lets talk about Landon first. He's the typical 4-yr-old boy. He loves dirt, bugs, sports, and bugging his sisters. He absolutely adores his babies, but he likes to provoke their little girly attitudes they have recently gotten (more on that later). His favorite food right now is penne pasta (he calls it "noodles with holes in em"). He also loves hot dogs, pizza, and candy. Yep, he's really into healthy choices these days ;-) I make him eat his fruits/veggies and drink his milk, but that doesn't mean he likes it. He is still into sports big time. Landon and Daddy play catch with the baseball or football just about every night. Chris also picks him up from school early about once a week or so and takes him to the golf course for a round of golf. He LOVES sports which I am thrilled about! He also loves being outside. He likes to ride his bike and his scooter. He collects sticks and rocks and whatever else I find in those grubby little pockets of his. He likes to pick up sticks and "shoot things" with them. He says he's shooting the deer....nice. Not sure where he got that being that Chris doesn't hunt. Oh well...it's cute to watch him pretend :-)

Landon is doing great in PreK this year. He has learned soooooo much since August. His writing and drawing skills have drastically improved over the past 4 months. I think it's because his PreK class is much more like school than his 2 and 3-yr-old classes were. They have a full-on classroom schedule just like you'd see in elementary school. He can count and count and count and count and count (you get the point, not exactly sure what number he can count to, but it's alot....that's for sure) and he knows all of his letters and sounds. He can write all of his numbers/letters, as well. He writes lots of common words like, mom, dad, dog, cat, or whatever he can sound out. He also writes all of his family members names. Landon has become quite the little artist, too. He has moved on from the stick figures with legs coming out of the head to people with torsos, hair, ears, etc. His drawings are very cute to mommy!

We are in the process of checking into local private schools for Landon to go to next year. He will be VERY young, probably the youngest, child in his grade. His bday is August 20...if he was born only a few weeks later, he wouldn't even be able to start this next year. Chris is worried about him being the youngest and smallest (for sports mainly, I'm sure). Chris isn't really thrilled about sending him to kinder next year at all. He thinks we should wait, but I would like to send him bc I think he'll do fine. So, we kinda came to a happy medium. We decided that we would send him to private kindergarten. That way, the following year, we can send him to public school and if he needs to repeat kinder, he won't even know the difference bc he'll be in a new place with new kids. Plus, Chris and I both started out in private school for K-3rd grades, so we like the idea.

Overall, our boy is perfect! Don't get me wrong, he definitely has his moments where he will argue or throw a bit of a fit if he doesn't get his way. It's not too often though. Right now, our trouble-makers are 2 little blonde-haired, blue-eyed divas that happen to look just alike :-) I was gonna write about them after Landon, but they are gonna have to wait till tmrw. My fingers are cramping from typing and I'm tired. So, I'm off to bed and I'll pick back up tmrw...or the next day :-) or maybe the next. No, I really am gonna get back into my blog groove! It's my only documentation that I even have kids!

Blog Slacker

I must say I have been the biggest blog slacker ever :-( My camera has been out of commission for some time now, so I haven't been taking any pictures. I finally went to Wolf Camera today to have them take a look at it. The guy told me it was pretty much screwed, so now I've gotta get a new one. Being that it's the holiday season, I can't go long without one, so Chris and I are gonna go to Best Buy tmrw after our weekly sushi lunch date. I hope I leave with a new camera!

We haven't really been doing a whole lot of interesting things around here lately. I know that's about to change though with all of the holidays approaching. I had a house full of sick kids last week, so that was no fun. Poor girls both had double ear infections :-((( They felt horrible! They were feeling a bit better by the weekend, so we dropped them off to spend some time with their Nommie and Poppy, and we took Landon to the Ranger game. Chris' company had a suite reserved for the Sat playoff game. I hope they make it to the World Series and maybe we will get to go again. Landon LOVES the Ranger game. That evening, a few of my girlfriends and I spent some patio time at El Arroyo for Kara's birthday. Today, I took my dad to lunch at Olive Garden for his birthday. It was a fun weekend and start to my week.

This weekend should be super fun. My very good friend Erika is getting married to one of my best friend's brother, Thomas. Chris and I are going to the wedding and then to the reception at Joe T Garcia's. Yum! I'm super excited for a night out with great friends. The rest of the weekend is dedicated to fall fun. We are heading to the pumpkin patch to get some pics (if I have a camera...grrrr) and then home to carve our family of pumpkins. I've also got some crafty Halloween stuff for the kiddos to do. I better have a camera by then so I can document our fun!