Evelyne's First Christmas! (2015)

My beautiful little family on Christmas day!

Oh goodness, like our lives in general, Christmas this year was a total blur! Every day was something fun to do and something good to eat! I'll start with the weekend before Christmas...

Josh and I got to attend my work Christmas party at the Palms Hotel ballroom. It was a blast! My favorite part was getting dressed up and spending alone time with my handsome hubby kid free!! Oh, and I got numerous compliments from complete strangers on my dress :). That's always a plus!

My Aunt Gena and Grandpa Cooley and his wife Diana came to town! Everyone came over to our house to visit and play with the kids! We spent hours playing and talking and then later went out to Chili's for dinner. The kids did great the entire day and I had so much fun catching up with everyone! Grandpa is suffering from multiple health issues and who knows how long he will be with us. So I was happy my kids got a chance to play with him. Austin loved coloring with him! Grandpa used to be such a good artist!

Everybody ooohh'ing and awe'ing over Evie :).

Little Eve loved Aunt Gena!

I have an amazing family!

Art lesson with Great Grandpa Cooley.

Eve chowing down on the rib bone we gave her to keep her entertained at dinner. I was surprised at how much she loved it! She freaked out if anyone tried to take it away from her! Kinda like a rabid dog hahaha.

We went to Grandma Helm's house and had a Helm family Christmas party! My cousin Heather and her son Alex came to visit from Texas, and Uncle Ken and Aunt Diana were there as well! We had fun eating and opening presents. Grandma was so happy to have her family around her and the kids loved all the fun antique Christmas toys she had gotten out for them! Austin's favorite was the train! Eve loved all the dancing and singing bears :). The Helm side hardly ever gets together so this was a very special night. I only wished my Dad could have been there... but Uncle Ken did a great job of taking over his role with presents, even if Austin is still to this day scared of him and refused to look him in the eye ;).

We rarely get family pictures together so we took a lot!

I may be biased, but my baby boy has the most beautiful blue eyes!

Good ol' Uncle Ken. He's always been a little rough around the edges.... scares the heck out of Austin ;).

The train!!

Helping Grandma open the presents we gave her!

Helping Evie open her presents as well... what a nice guy.

Eve seemed slightly confused by all the present opening since this year is her first Christmas.

Snuggles with her new Christmas Bear!

The good picture...

And the goofy pictures....

Oh Austin, for the life of me I don't understand why you refuse to smile for pictures!

Love my Sadie.

Sisters make life bearable, and I have two amazing ones!

Each kid got a chance to cuddle with Great Grandma :).

Somewhere in the week before Christmas we received presents in the mail from Grandma and Grandpa Ronnenkamp and had a little pre-Christmas fun! Then we Face-Timed with them to show them how much the kids loved their gifts :).

Evie loved her present!

Austin and Mommy got new aprons for our fun in the kitchen!

On Christmas Eve, Austin and I spent the day baking sugar cookies and making frosting! Then, when Dad got home, we had a cookie decorating party!! It was so much fun and soooo yummy! Austin and I have a special place together in the kitchen and I will take any excuse I can get to bake with him! After that, we all climbed in the car and drove around the neighborhood looking at all the Christmas lights! Eve fell asleep, but Austin was seriously soooo adorable! Listening to his excitement over each decorated house was like experiencing Christmas for the first time all over again! He would scream, "OOOoohhh! Look at that!" and "Wow! See that?!" We got a kick out of all his cute little phrases and asked him all sorts of questions trying to get him to say more :). After that, we ate dinner and put the little ones to bed, but not before we left a plate of our creatively decorated cookies and a glass of milk for Santa. Then Josh and I had our own special Christmas Eve which involved watching the new Christmas Vacation movie while cuddling and drinking egg nog in front of our pretty Christmas tree :). It seriously was the best Christmas Eve and I didn't want it to end!

Looking through his recipe book for the cookie recipe!

Austin was so cute! He kept getting excited about the baking we were about to do and would suddenly give me a big hug and kiss! I loved every minute of it!

Stirring the ingredients.

Showing me his messy hands!

Licking the beaters clean :).

The best part of baking right here!

Using our new cookie cutters to cut out fun Christmas shapes!

This boy was in heaven!

Dad showing off his awesome cookie decorating skills!

After we drove around looking at the Christmas lights, Austin wanted to play with the Christmas village Great Grandma LaFeber made for Josh!

I love the beauty a child brings to Christmas. So innocent and so happy!

Christmas morning we had to wake Austin up because Dad, Eve, and I couldn't wait any longer to get to those presents! Austin was groggy but it didn't take him long to realize that Santa had come! This was Eve's first Christmas and we were actually impressed with her present opening skills! Austin helped us out with opening all of our presents as well as his own. Then we ate a yummy breakfast of pastries and egg nog :).

Checking out her stocking.

"Do I open it, or eat it?"

Merry First Christmas sweet baby Eve! You make my heart melt with your perfection!

Austin opening up his stocking presents.

He was very excited about all the candy!

Helping Mom open her gifts.

Eve helped Daddy out too! What good kids we have!

After the clean up, we got ready for our company to come over for Christmas lunch! Great Grandma and Grandpa Porter, Grandma and Grandpa Porter, Briana, and her boyfriend Trevor came over and we had a pretty good little party! Austin and Evie made out like bandits with toys. Our house was a sea of wrapping paper! Then we ate lots and lots of food and enjoyed talking and laughing. It was exhausting but so fun!

PRESENTS!!!

Grandpa Porter helping Eve with her big present!

Someone LOVES his Grandma!

Baby Eve's first baby doll!

Trying to figure out how to get the baby out of the box. It was actually really difficult!

And for the grand finale! Austin got his first bike! He was soooo excited about it and to this day calls it his Christmas bike :).

Great Grandma and Grandpa Porter are always there to support us at family parties. They are quiet, but we love them very much!

Oh how I LOVE my Mommy and sister! Sadie had to work on Christmas day :(.

The day after Christmas was the Cooley family Christmas party in St. George. Like all the previous parties, this one did not disappoint! Grandma Wiegel rented out the club house in her neighborhood and we had so much fun eating, dancing, playing games, and laughing very very hard. Austin was acting so shy the whole time and was super clingy to Grandma Porter. I think all the people and the noise level were a little overstimulating for him. Eve, however, basked in the attention and awed them all with her smiles and beauty. Very typical of them both! It's funny how you can have two kids who are polar opposites of each other. By the end of this party, we went home and it took us two days to recover from Christmas! Seriously, we couldn't have been more tired from all that fun!

Cousin Lara teaching baby Eve how to walk to Great Grandma Wiegel!

Cousins Cody, Kaden, and Austin getting their food on!

Cousins Jessica and Nathan goofing around with the camera.

The big family picture!

Eve never got her nap in so she fell asleep in my arms just in time for pictures....

Our smaller family photo. As always, Austin wasn't smiling.

A little girl time with Sadie and Aunt Heidi!

Sweet dreams sleepy baby.

Where there is Uncle Brian, there is karaoke!

Food, food, and more food! (Trevor, Briana, Jessica, Nathan, Gena, and Brian)

The fun table! (Josh, Ashly, Chandler, Dave, Heidi, Cody, and Kaden)

Aunt Amanda had plenty of potty training advice for me which I was more than willing to receive!

My sisters picture with Sadie since she couldn't be there for the one on Christmas day.

On Christmas day we took some family photos of just us before the whole gang showed up. I'm fairly proud of how well they turned out! Especially with how difficult it is to do it yourself when a baby and toddler are involved!

Goodbye 2015!

Enjoying our crazy New Years Eve party as just the three of us this year! It was so nice to be able to enjoy each others company without a huge group of people over at our house! And Austin was being such a character! He gets sillier the more tired he gets ;).

I have mixed feelings about saying goodbye to this year. Yes, we went through some incredibly hard trials that could have bulldozed us to the ground if we let them. But we also had some incredibly beautiful moments that seemed to make up for all the bad. Josh's Dad died, but Evelyne was born. My Dad was almost killed and will never be the same mentally or physically, but Sadie and I got to spend more quality time with him while he was stuck in the hospital than we have in the past ten years!! Josh and I have struggled with keeping our heads sane and our bodies functioning with the craziness of having two kids only 21 months apart, but we have also had major breakthroughs in our relationship and have learned to love and support each other even in the worst of times. I personally have struggled with so many things this year... body image after having my second child, trying to maintain a house of order and cleanliness while chasing a naked two year old through the house or wiping up poop and spit up from the carpet, while also maintaining a career and trying to salvage what little time to myself I can find. That seems to have been the hardest part of this year for me. I have found myself taking care of EVERYBODY else but me and it has been hard to say the least. Josh has been excelling at his job with Wells Fargo which has been a Godsend because we really needed him to find a job he actually likes and stick with it! However, he has struggled with the fact that he barely makes more money than he did when we lived in Utah as newlyweds, and if you  know Josh, that is a hard pill to swallow....

Although Art's death was incredibly difficult for all of us, it also opened up an amazing opportunity that neither of us had ever really thought of, or had the money to pursue. Art left us with enough money from his life insurance policy to pay off our townhouse and still have money left over in the bank! At first we were thinking we would use it to sell our home and purchase a bigger place, one with a back yard for Austin to run wild in. But then I was confronted at work by a friendly Nurse Practitioner who planted the seed in my mind to go back to school and get my Master's Degree! I gave her all of my excuses, and explained how I don't know if I could handle one more thing added to my plate. But somehow she talked me out of all my negativity and I found myself coming to Josh with the idea. For about two months we have talked, planned, prayed, fasted, and finally I came to the conclusion that I am going to do it! The amazing part is we actually have the money from the life insurance we recently received to make it happen! We both have felt like this was the one last gift from Art to help us out in life. He was always there to help pay for things when we were broke, or to just be there as a counselor when we needed advice. Now, even in death, he is helping his family. I tear up every time I think about it. So I have started the application process and should know in a couple months if I got in or not. I decided to do the part time online program which will take a year longer to complete, but it is very important to me that I am still able to be there for my family.

Josh has been told by his manager that he should be receiving a promotion sometime this year (fingers crossed) because he is doing such an amazing job! Let's hope so because my going back to school means more expenses and we already have more than enough of those!

As for the kids, they have grown beautifully over the past year. Eve has been such a blessing to our family and we all adore her. Because of her birth, Austin has been forced to grow and learn how to share attention which has been amazing to watch. Yes, we still have moments multiple times a day when they are both fighting for our love and affection and will literally be fighting and pushing each other to get to my lap. But behind the sibling rivalry there is so much love. Austin becomes genuinely concerned when he hears Eve cry and Eve starts crying the second she sees that her brother has become hurt (which happens a lot since he is a very active little boy). I have pondered a lot about whether we will have more kids, but for now, I think we are both happy to just enjoy these two. I don't know if our sanity could handle another crazy LaFeber added to the mix!

We celebrated New Years Eve at home and had a great time! We put the baby to bed and then stayed up with Austin for a while. He was in such a silly mood! He kept wanting to wrestle with me so I let him have it!

Wrestling the A-man down to the ground!

His giggles cracked me up!

Oh Austin, you make life exciting!

After we put the goofball to bed, we spent the rest of the night having our own little party! Austin kept coming out of his room and spying on us from the stairs. It reminded us both of when we used to spy on our parents. We had fun talking about everything that has happened in 2015 and playing board games. We laughed hard, ate Christmas candy, and had a really great time! It was so nice because Josh and I rarely get moments like that alone. It made us realize that we need to make more time for us to be silly together in 2016. We didn't quite make it to midnight but we did watch the countdown in New York City on the TV. It's funny how having kids makes you more exhausted than you have ever been in your life! 11:00pm feels like 3:00am!!

I hope and pray that 2016 will be good to us. There have been tons of scary events going on in the world, but I have faith that God will keep us safe. It also helps that we inherited a bunch of food storage from Papa Art :).