Merry Christmas!

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas! We spent 10 days in Arizona before Christmas and now we're in Utah for the next week. Jackson has been having fun getting to know his family better. He's been such a good boy and had a great first Christmas!

Here are some pictures from last week in Arizona

Yes, we did buy a house...

We're heading to Arizona tomorrow (then to Utah on Christmas) and we're so excited to see all our family and friends! I should be packing and getting everything ready for our flight tomorrow ... but here I am posting pictures of our house...

Many of you have asked to see what our house looks like and I've been putting it off because I still don't feel like it's ready to be revealed yet! I still have a long to-do list for things we need around the house, but the more I talk to people, I'm realizing that list never goes away! There will always be some room that's not finished or a project going on, or more decorating to do, so what the heck. Here are pictures of our house.



View from front door, long hallway leads to family room. Tyler's office and half bath to the right.


Tyler's office, still needs work...


Living room, I'm excited to do something fun in here :-)


Still need to get that dining room table!


Family room -- where we spend most of our time.

Other view of family room (from the hallway that leads to our master bedroom)

Kitchen (one room that is done!)

View from stairs...

View of stairs...


Our backyard pool / view


Patio table / BBQ



Our room plus Jackson!

He then crawled right off the bed ... and Tyler caught him.


Master bath ... I'm exited to finally get cute decor in here one day!




The best little nursery ever!



You could stay here one day!



And you'd even have your own bathroom (off the guest suite)


And the "other room" aka baby #2???

JK I'm not pregnant, but maybe one day.

THE END!

And... we're mobile!

This weekend Jackson learned to crawl ... and my life will never be the same! Let the baby proofing begin!

Boston

As if we hadn't had enough fun in the Northeast after our Thanksgiving weekend in NYC, we drove up to Boston and spent some time with the Cook Family!

We arrived at their spotless home on Saturday night and it felt great to relax after our busy days in NYC. On Sunday we went to church and then drove up to New Hampshire where Dan's parents live and where Tyler lived for the summer of 2004. He was so excited to show me this beautiful part of the country that I had never visited. Of course I didn't think to take pictures, but we had a great evening and a lovely meal thanks to the famous Janice Cook :-)

The next day I finally got my tour of Boston! Tyler and Dan worked in the city that summer and it was fun to see the place where he has such fond memories. Jamie was a great tour guide and the pictures below show what we did that day.








(Jackson at Harvard - the first college campus he's visited) ok actually n/m he's been to BYU


It was such a fun week, but between our busy tourist days and Jackson not sleeping well at nights, ... by the end I was a bit tired to say the least! When we got home Jackson was still not feeling well and he ended up getting croup. Between that and getting his 2nd tooth, it's been a rough week back in Florida. But now he's better and for the past 2 days has been so happy again!

It's so amazing the difference a happy/fussy baby can make. Since Jackson's normally happy, Ty and I aren't so good at dealing with the fussiness.

In fact, here's a story ...

Friday night we decided to go out to dinner. We had a gift card that expires at the end of the year and only a limited amount of days to use it. So even though Jackson was sickish we thought we'd try it out. Big mistake. He was basically fussy/crying the whole time unless we were standing up holding him (and still even then sometimes) . So, after taking a few bites, flustered Tyler and I decided to just get our food to-go and get out of there. But in the rush to get out, we forgot to get our credit card back. The waiter literally had to chase us down in the parking lot to return it.

Then (oh it gets worse) after the 25 minute drive home and Jackson had just barely fallen asleep, we were pulling up to our house when I realized I had left my car at our church. I had met Tyler there before dinner and then we drove together to the restaurant, so my car was just sitting there in the parking lot. We then had to drive all the way back to the church (15 minutes both ways) to get the car. And lastly ... as we were driving to the church I realized I had left my scarf and hat at the restaurant. (It was a cold 50 degree day in Orlando so I had bundled up) Luckily they had found them, so after picking up the car, Jackson and I headed home and Tyler headed back to retrieve my lost items.

So yeah, we don't handle fussy babies well. Please pray all our babies are as easy as Jackson :-)

NYC Thanksgiving!

As you can tell from this picture, our Thanksgiving was a bit different this year! The day before Thanksgiving, we flew to NYC. (Also Jackson turned 8 months old and cut his first tooth) I was terrified that he would be awful on the plane because of his teething fussiness but he turned out just fine. We took the train into the city where we met up with my family. Since Ben and Paige live in up-state New York, my parents and Steven had flown from AZ to Ithaca and they all drove down together.

When planning this trip months ago, we learned that hotels in NYC are expensive, and hotels in NYC on Thanksgiving are crazy expensive! Luckily Tyler had earned tons of points from all his hotel stay while traveling around Florida so we were able to stay at the Crowne Plaza hotel right off Times Square. It was so awesome to be right in the middle of it all!

It was so dang cold! We had to bundle up Jackson for the first time in his life – I don’t think he liked it too much…

Our first night we went over to Central Park, watched the balloons get filled up for the Parade, checked out Rockefeller Square and got some Ray’s Pizza.

Too bad they didn't light the tree until the next week!!

The next day was Thanksgiving and we were so excited to watch the parade and even more excited that it wasn’t raining as the forecast had initially predicted! Tyler went out early to try to save a spot but he realized it wasn’t worth it since so many people were out there already. We went out a couple hours later and got lucky though! Paige, Ben Tyler and Steven were able to stand right behind the barricades on 55th St. and 7th Ave. Since I had a sleeping Jackson in the stroller, my parents and I had to stay back next to the building behind them, but we scored a nice planter box to stand on and could see everything.

Here are the lucky front row kids.

And the view from their spot ...

I took this pic from our spot, not quite as up close, but still pretty awesome.

Jackson woke up about 30 minutes into the parade and wondered what all the commotion was about!

Near the end of the parade Jackson was getting a little restless so we headed back to our hotel and watched the last few floats from up there.

We saw the Dough Boy just as we were starting to head back!

It was cool that we were able to see it from our room (we had requested that in case it was raining) but I’m glad we went on the street to see it up close and personal! The glare is kinda bad, but that's Santa down there!

Jackson and Grammy watching from our room.

Another random note – while we were looking for a spot to watch the parade we ran into Sarah Simmons (Morris) and her husband Calvin! Of all the millions of people we found them, it was so awesome. We ended up having them over at our hotel later that day and even saw them in the Manhattan Temple on Saturday.

I was a little nervous that I wouldn’t get to have a good Thanksgiving Feast but we got to have the traditional feast at the Film Center Cafe... with turkey, potatoes, stuffing, cranberry, and pumpkin pie!

The next day was my mom's 50th birthday, the real reason for the trip, and of course it was Black Friday.

We did some crazy shopping and started at Macys. I didn’t realize how accurate the Elf movie was about getting the department store all ready for Santa! It was crazy how intense they made the 7^th floor! It was pretty neat that Jackson’s first time meeting Santa was at this famous place.

We went to a few other shops after Macy’s, and wow – probably the most crowded I’ve seen stores. I’m not usually a Black Friday shopper, but in NYC, you couldn’t pass it up!

Later that night we went to West Side Story and were able to have the lovely Melanie Layman (Bothwell) watch Jackson for the evening.

The play was great and we had the songs stuck in our head the next few days, especially Steven with "MARIA!"

The next morning we went to the Manhattan Temple, did a little more sight seeing in Times Square and then headed out!

My family drove back up to Ithaca and Tyler, Jackson and I drove up to Boston!

A memorable Thanksgiving for sure!! It’s too bad Michael wasn’t able to be with us, but we’re proud that he’s doing so great on his LDS Mission. The only random part is that he was just a few hours north of where we were, in Utica, New York. He freaked out when he heard we were all there. (We didn’t tell him we were going)