Family Christmas 1 & 2

We crashed the Brawner family Christmas this year and celebrated with our part of the Brawners... it's all confusing...but the picture below shows the Brawner clan (all related).

These Brawners are related to us...but we aren't related to the rest!

This is Ginger. My lifelong friend who I've known since birth. She is 7 days younger than me and we've been friends since. She's part of the Brawner clan too. We used to try and tell people we were related but we aren't. The story is: My dad's sister married her mom's brother. Read that over and over again and you'll finally get it! So... we share an aunt, uncle & cousins.


The girls and their spouses

We tried to get a family picture too.... One kid not looking

Same kid not looking... one kid looking goofy

Two kids finally looking.... and one kid --- well let's just hope that this isn't something that becomes a habit for her.

The kids were really excited to open their first round of presents.

Then we celebrated with the Wallace side of my family at my parents house. Here is the kids table minus one cousin, Karlyn who is too little to sit with the big kids.

The cousins and their kids.

Kristy: Brooks & Blaise

Lindsay: Brooke, Hudson & Hallie

Kelli: Lance & Karlyn

Misc. December

Wow it's been a while since I updated this blog!

In early December our church had the annual Night in Bethelehem. The church is decorated like an old Bethlehem town with people in costumes and everything. There's all sorts of things for the kids to do.

Making bread

Decorating ornaments

Goats and other animals are there to pet.

The kids love the event and they also got to make pottery (playdoh), do sticker nativity sets, and take a picture with Mary and Joseph

Brooke had her Christmas program for school and I had my first "I'm a terrible mom" moment all on the same day. I was meeting with a college student who needed to be somewhere at 11. I planned to be at the church at 11:15 so I could get a good seat for the program which started at 11:30. At about 10:45 I checked my phone to make sure that the girl I was meeting with wouldn't be late for her appointment when I noticed my "event" on my calendar was happening NOW. That meant I was in the process of missing Brooke's program which started at 10:30 NOT 11:30! I RUSHED out of the coffee house and made it to the church just in time to see Brooke's teacher scanning the crowd looking for her mom and dad. It was AWFUL!! I ran up to the front of the sanctuary, hugged her teacher and told her my issue and then put on a brave face for Brooke so she wouldn't see me cry! Seriously it was that bad I could have (and did later) cried right there. The dagger to the heart was when Brooke asked me in her sweet innocent way "Why weren't you videoing me?" followed up by "I did REALLY good, Mommy!" I'm a good mom, I promise... I hope! :) Here is the sweet girl after the program in her angel costume.

Goofy face and all. I'm sure if you look close at my eyes you can see the tears welling up!

My only saving grace was that night Brooke had her choir program at church. She got front so I had a perfect view of her little performance. Sorry for the blurry picture...

Visit from the Arringtons

We had our friends Ryan & Ashley and their girls, Kaelyn & Shae come in for the Nebraska football game and they stayed the weekend with us. We had a fun time taking the kids up to campus for the spirit walk. We had all the kids lined up on the curb (including Hudson who didn't want in on the "girl" picture) and at one point a couple came up to ask us what the deal was... triplets, Quads, QUINTS?! We just laughed and explained they came from two families but that there were actually TWO sets of twins in the bunch! HA...

The kids lined up to give all the players high-fives as they walked in. It was pretty cute and one player was sweet enough to reach in past Brooke and give Hallie a high-five as she was a little timid about the whole thing.


The 4 year olds.... one month apart!

All the kiddos. Hudson was less than thrilled to be in on this photo... what a man! :)

We had a great time with our friends and loved that they were our first non-family member guests. We took the kids to the park on Sunday afternoon and then mananged a wrangle all 5 kids out to dinner that night. It was a comic event at times...but as always we just laugh and think to ourselves... This is our life!

Carnival

We took the kids to the carnival a few weeks back when it was here in town. They had a great time riding the rides (the ones they were actually tall enough for) and even managed handling the rain for a little bit.

I tried so hard to get a good picture of the three of them before the fun began... I love this one because Brooke is super excited because she sees a friend from her school clas

This one cracks me up!! She looks like a mini-me with her arm propped up on the door and her casual hand on the steering wheel. Haha.

Here is our sweet adventurous Hallie on this ride. Can you believe she could ride this ALONE but couldn't go on the kiddie motorcycles that go around and around in circles?!

Aggie tailgating

For the OU/A&M game a group of our friends got together for a tailgate with all our kids. We had a great time and the kids did really well being out there for most of the day. We did an early tailgate for lunch so the kids could play and then we'd have time to take them back to our houses before the game started.

Here the kids are with their friend Addison while we were getting all set up.

Our friend Misty brought rub-on tattoos so the kids had fun with that.

Brooke played frisbee with our friend Jordan (he was such a trooper to play with all the kiddos!) What a good dad! :)

Some of the ladies helped me out with all the tags Katie and I had to make for our Advent event at church. We punched 500 tags over the course of the afternoon. THANK YOU THANK YOU!

Some of the kids waiting for the spirit walk... These kids are from 3 families...and we are missing 5 other kids from two other families! We apparently take the "be fruitful and and multiply" very seriously! HAHA

Meanwhile...Hallie wanted NO part of the group photo. Oh the drama in that girl!

LA trip part three

Our last full day in LA before the taping of DWTS we took a tour of the WB studios. This was really neat and I had a great time. Unfortunately my darn camera was on the wrong setting so most of my pictures came out really blurry. UGH!! I really should learn how to do photography. Anyway... for those of you interested...here's a bit of the tour.

This is Sookie's house from Gilmore Girls.

The building with the boarded up windows was the grocery store.

This is just more of the city that is being set up for the set of either Pretty Little Liars or Gossip Girl (I can't remember which)

This is Luke's diner set up now as a General store.

They had a car museum. Here are two cars that are from Dark Knight.

Central Perk from Friends... this is a permanent set. Some museum wanted to have it for their display and WB said no... so they have it in this little room just for tours. It's so much smaller in real life!

Our tour guide had a different style of movie and TV so most of what he pointed out was not something I was interested in or had ever heard of. It was still neat... no celebrities spotted and if we go to LA again I'd want to tour more sets. It's easy to see why if you have the acting bug and you go out to LA you'd want to stay. I don't have the bug but thought it would be really cool to work at one of these studios. We got to walk on two sets - Two and a Half Men & The Mentalist. You can't take photos there because it is all copyrighted...but that was pretty neat to see too. I've never watched The Mentalist but want to now that I've walked on the set of the police station.

Halloween 2010

For Halloween this year we had... Jessie from Toy Story, Minnie Mouse & "Boxman" (otherwise known as the UPS man. That was a random costume but it was so cute! :)

We went to the Fall Festival again this year at our church. Unfortunately (to only me) we didn't get a photo in front of the fall festival photo op station... seriously I was pretty bummed. This year the festival for us was just crazy and we didn't do as much as we normally do. Partly due to the crowd and partly due to the socializing along the way.

But the kids loved the inflatables.

Hallie didn't want to do this obstacle course so she just hung out with me waiting.

They had a roping area and Brooke was really adamant about wanting to try it out... it's only fitting for a cowgirl to get her turn roping the cattle. :)

The kids didn't get near enough candy (okay... well they probably did...but not if they were going to share with mom and dad, haha) so we went trick or treating too. We hadn't planned on doing this so we crashed a party of some friends of ours who were in a neighborhood that was pretty kid friendly. I am happy to report that their candy loot was a success and I've been enjoying it ever since. I even rigged a box for Hudson to carry around as his bag... every delivery man needs to have packages, right?

Brooke LOVED IT! She literally ran from house to house and it was pretty exciting to see her "get it". At one point she tripped in the grass and George and friend went over to help her up thinking she'd be upset and/or hurt... but she just said "I'm okay.." and got back up and RAN to the next house. It was so fun to watch her excitement.

When we got home I wanted to take a family shot... but seeing as we had no photographer and pulling out the tripod at that hour would have been ridiculous we didn't get the shot I'd hoped for... oh well.
As you can see... Minnie lost her ears in all the excitement of trick or treating. I was probably more upset than she was. I HATE loosing things... really I do. It eats me up. I went up and down the streets in the dark with no flashlight looking for that darn thing... and nothing. :( Next year I have got to remember... NO removable parts, hats, headbands, etc. With 3 kids it's a little much to keep track of.