It's Christmastime!

We've finally finished getting all of our Christmas stuff together! We LOVE having a house to decorate this year! I only wish that the season was a little bit longer so we could enjoy it more, but we're just soaking it all in right now. We're so thankful for both of our moms who donated a whole bunch of their old Christmas stuff so we could fill our house with fun decor. I would say about 75% of our decorations are hand-me-downs and we just love them!


OUTSIDE:

I made a few adjustments to my ornament wreath from a few years ago, but it's surprisingly still holding up pretty well!

The snowman and tree have since been moved, but we didn't take a pic of them in their new place

When we first saw this house, I told Grant I wanted to put a tree up in that window above the door. There's a landing inside for it to sit on and I couldn't be more happy with the way it turned out!

INSIDE:

I made this advent calendar last year, but we haven't been good about using it :( Hopefully next year when Emily's older we'll be better!

my mom was getting rid of her nutcracker collection and we just happened to have the perfect place for them!

send us your Christmas cards! They will be on display for everyone to see!

olive wood nativity I got in Jerusalem

we still need a tree topper... that's the one thing we're still missing. And our tree looks a little bit silly because we can't put ornaments in Emily's reach :)

all ready for Christmas!

We really can't wait for Christmas to get here! We're so excited to see Emily's reaction to everything! We hope all of you have a very Merry Christmas as well!!

Thanksgiving in Fort Wayne

We had a great Thanksgiving break and I can't believe Christmastime is already here! Even though we were out of town for Thanksgiving, we still decorated our house for the season:

we made a thankful tree for FHE one night :)

Our trip to Indiana was so much fun! Emily loved being able to play with cousins and get lots of attention. She especially loved all of the Zinn boys because they reminded her of her daddy :) 

on our way... LOTS of time on the plane and in the car! She was a trooper!

so glad we got to see some snow!

I loved her Thanksgiving outfit :)

she LOVED her first pickle!

it was her first time getting really bundled up. She didn't know what to do! She walked with her hands stuck out straight and tipped over a lot

go Owen!

bowling with daddy

Emily got jealous when I was reading with Ava :)

All but 3 of the Zinn cousins

She was very excited to see that a doggie came

getting to meet baby Paxton

Grant always insists on taking carry-ons. It's a lot of work, but I'm grateful for such a helpful husband!

Thanks Zinn family for such a great vacation! We're sad it's already over, but we're looking forward to our next visit! 

We decorated for Christmas before we left so we could come home to it. We still have a few things to finish, but pictures will be coming soon! We're loving having our own home to decorate for Christmas this year!

halloween

We had a great time celebrating Halloween this year! Even though it wasn't Emily's first Halloween, it felt like it since we didn't end up dressing up last year. We decided to go with the robber/money bag theme, which seemed to be pretty popular this year from what I've seen on Facebook :) But at least no one else in our ward did the same thing... that would have been embarrassing ;) We had a lot of fun at the trunk or treat last Friday. We decorated our car as a jail cell with wanted signs of me and Grant. The kids in the ward had a lot of fun looking for policemen to come arrest us so they could get the reward money. Grant ended up spending most of the time in the back of the car acting like he'd been caught :) We also decided last minute to decorate the side of the car as the crime scene. We made a safe that had been broken into. It was fun! Here are some pics:

We weren't able to get the best pictures of Emily in her outfit because she was either cranky or not wanting to stand still, so here's what we have to work with...

Wednesday night, we did a Halloween dinner at my parents' house. Fleming and I started working at 1:30 and weren't done til around 6:30. Thanks mom for taking on the babysitting duties! We definitely outdid ourselves from last year! There were a few pinterest fails along the way, but we're happy with the way most of it turned out!

We didn't dress up Halloween night, because we didn't think it was worth it to take Emily trick-or-treating this year. We did go to a block party, though, and that was a lot of fun! And Emily wore her Halloween bow to celebrate the holiday:

We hope everyone else had a great Halloween!