I'm Dreaming of a White Day after Christmas!

We woke up to snow! YAY! And it was still snowing....hard. we loved it. Perfect for a pancake breakfast! Here are some pics.

Merry Christmas!

Christmas was great this year. I'll only bore you with a few pictures of Christmas Eve. Here's our family picture at the Providence Love Feast.
Remember this picture from last year? Well, I made matching bow ties again! I know, I can't help it. and this year I went for super cheesy! What do you think??
For Simon, I put his bow tie right on his onesie. Sweet little guy. If you look at the first pic, you can see I also made myself a matching rosette!
And this year, we did something different. We had an "Oliva" Christmas eve lunch. All that means is that I made what I had growing up for Christmas Eve: ham with red rice and beans. I even set the table nicely. The only thing missing was my wita's potato salad. We substitued mashed potatoes because Luke doesn't like potato salad. Yum! I had really missed the traditional Christmas Even meal I had growing up.
Here's Luke cutting our little ham. Which is just leftovers from some ham Luke's parents had from another dinner.
I hope this is a tradition we keep with. I would love our kids to have a traditional Mexican Christmas Eve meal even if we can't be with my family.

Christmas day was fun. We traditionally sleep under the tree on Christmas Eve. So we woke up ready for the festivities. After Isaac's breakfast, we put a candle in a little cake I made and sang Happy Birthday to Jesus. Then we lit the final candle on our wreath and sang Joy to the World. What joy there truly was!!! And it was so sweet to hear Isaac say "Happy Birthday Jesus" Then we watched A Charlie Brown Christmas which is a little tradition of mine. I especially love that it communicates with clarity, what Christmas is really all about. And now Isaac recognizes that song as the snoopy song!

After presents, we had one more special present for Isaac to open. We put the baby Jesus from his Little People Nativity set in a box for him to open. We had him open it last because He was the greatest gift of all. I'm sure the real meaning of that didn't sink in this year, but I believe that God will be faithful to us in what we're trying to teach Isaac.

Then we headed off to Luke's parents house for more Christmas festivities!

It was a fun Christmas. But honestly, I'm so sad it's over. I just love Christmas! and if that's not depressing enough by itself, they're forecasting it to be in the 60's this weekend. Geez.

Jesus brought us lots of snow last night. And its still snowing hard!!

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Merry Christmas!!

Merry Christmas!!

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Look who graduated to the bumbo!

Isaac Friendly Nativity

Good Morning says Isaac!!! We're up and ready for our morning Christmas Bible time. This is the first thing we do in the morning.

I wanted to show you all this fun little Nativity I made for IsaacBoy. I was looking for something he could have in his room to play with without being scared that he would destroy it if left alone. So I found THIS website with all the printables. I love all the little figures. So I printed them out and Luke cut them. I laminated them, put a little piece of velcro on the back and stuck them to a poster board. So fun, and Isaac really loves it.
Every morning, we read through Luke 2 and the passage about the wise men. As I'm reading, I'm handing Isaac the pieces for him to stick. It's a great way to keep his focus and for him to touch and feel the Christmas story.
Today he learned about the special star that the wise men followed to get to baby Jesus. Now whenever he sees a star he says "special star". And when we ask him, "who comes at Christmas?" he happily proclaims JESUS!

We have many other kid friendly nativity sets all around the house. One of which is the Little People. That's the one we use for our evening devotional. Then there THIS one that he also loves. We even have one on the dinner table to we can talk about the Christmas story over dinner.

One funny thing. There's been so much talk about baby Jesus lately that when we ask Isaac "who's this?" as we point to Simon, he says , "Baby Jesus!" Ha! Not quite.

Merry Christmas

Our beautiful Christmas house!

What if Santa was your Grampa?!

You'd still be super scared of him!
Poor little guy. Mike And Sharon were Santa and Mrs. Clause at Chick fil a last week. Am I a bad mom because I can't stop laughing when Isaac's freaking out?

Simon, however, was just fine! I'm sure that will change next year too.
He was even a little unsure of Grams Mrs. Clause!
Here we all are!
It was fun telling other kids that Santa was Isaac's grampa! And hey, it's a good platform in teaching Isaac that Santa is only pretend. Now we can say that it's just grampa dressed up as Santa!

Christmas Party Weekend.

Last weekend, I had our Annual Ornament Exchange for the ladies in my Sunday School class. I love this time and I look forward to it as soon as November come. The only year I missed was when Isaac was born, but I've thrown it every other year. Here are all the ladies as we are in process of making our ornaments. After some fun Christmas trivia, we exchange ornaments. This is the one I walked away with. I love it because it's handmade! Oh, and polka dots of course!
And this is the little birdie ornament that we made together.
I just love this time together. We've had a lot of new people join the class so it was great to get to know some of the newer ladies!

Since the house was already going to be clean, I thought, why not have our supper club white elephant on the same night!! This was also a fun night. This gift exchange was a little different though. Everyone brought stuff from their house that had just been laying around. What fun! Keith got this super awesomely amazing movie......
Just kidding. I never watched it because I knew it would be dumb! But we all had a good laugh. Patrick kept being stolen from so he got to open the most. Here he is with a picture frame with a picture of Marilyn Monroe it!
Curiously enough, I found it a few days later behind Isaac's toy box......hmmmm, curious!

It was a fun day and Luke and I were super energized by all the people in our house. We just love having people over. Especially during the Christmas time!

Isaac Birthday Part 4

Man, I'm so behind in blogging. And I promise this is the last post about Isaac's birthday. We just had so much fun celebrating!!

The last party was the Mehaffie family birthday dinner. And yes, he got a whole other Buzz Lightyear cake.
But we only gave him a little cupcake this time :)
Ruby was obviously loving hers.
And here's Isaac opening his big present from Grams and GP.
And opening some more.
It was an awesome tool work bench!
He's happy to show daddy how it works!
And that's it. I'm sure Isaac didn't have a clue what was going on all weekend. But it'll be special in our hearts always!

Isaac Birthday Part 3

The Saturday after his birthday, we had Isaac's birthday party! It was a Buzz Lightyear party. Why Buzz? Because that's the one thing that we are sure he remembers from Disney World. We came back and he proclaimed BUZZ! everytime he saw a picture. This is the invitation that I designed for him. We had such a good time. We invited some of his little friends and it really seemed that everyone had a great time. I made cupcakes for the kids and a little mini cake for Isaac with a little Buzz on it. And boy did Isaac like his little cake we made.Here's a slide show of the party.

Praise God for two awesome years with our little man!

Isaac's Birthday Part 2

Here's my big two year old the morning of his birthday! He loved wearing his birthday crown! For Isaac's birthday day, we took him for some nuggets and McDonald's. He loves those nuggets, and so do we! Look at him eating. He loves it! Simon just loved looking at all the lights.

And looking at Daddy of course. Here's proud dad! I just love my family.

After McDonald's, we headed over to Cold Stone for Isaac's free ice cream which of course he loved. So awesome.

Happy Birthday Isaac!

Happy Birthday Isaac Part 1

I am the mom of a 2 year old!! Our very first celebration was at Red Robin for Isaac's free birthday kid's meal. This has been a tradition for us since we were first married! Yay birthday! Love this picture. Look at my happy boy!
They even came out and sang to Isaac and brought him a little ice cream sundae! He's still in shock from all the singers.
But he got over it quick and dove right into that ice cream. And boy did he love it!
But he loves his daddy too and just wanted to share. I don't think we even had to ask him to give some to daddy. He just offered some. Sweet little boy.
Luke and I were so happy that night. Isaac enjoyed that ice cream so much and was just to happy. We were so overjoyed with him that night. I can't even explain it. Our hearts were just overflowing with thankfulness to God for giving us our sweet little IsaacBoy!

Stay tuned for even more birthday celebrations!