A Touch Of Tyrell

  I must say... I'm living my dreams.  Jake comes home every night in a shirt and tie with plenty of energy left to play with little Everett. They play and wrestle together while I cook dinner. Then we eat (Everett even ate fried rice tonight!) and we tell each other about our day. Most nights we have enough time to all play together before Everett goes to bed. We'll play blocks, Lego's, cards, balls, trains, cars, watch cartoons, color, or we'll read books. Tonight we played trains and cars.  Playing trains and cars with Everett is so fun. He makes all the noises and usually makes up the activity. (He loves when he plays the 'bad guy' and we chase his car with the police car.) Sometimes he laughs until he hiccups. It's the best! Tonight we played on the couch. We had a lot of fun. And Everett made a lot of noise. I have an awesome video but I can't seem to upload it.... so here are some pictures of his totally cu...

  Everett licked the bottom of his super dirty shoe. He's usually pretty good about sitting down to put his shoes on before we leave the house. He will get his shoes and then sit down. I was tying his first shoe when he grabbed the other one and just licked it. He made an ugly face and then stuck out his tongue with a whole bunch of nasties on it. He's a boy.  If he doesn't have his pacifier in his mouth be will put anything else in there... apparently even the bottom of a shoe. Speaking of shoes. I bought him a second pair of those sock/shoes for Christmas. They are like socks on top but they have rubber nubs on the bottom for traction and you can wear them outside. His first pair was size 18 mo. but he wore them out already and he has pretty big feet so I bought size 24 mo. this time. I think they might have been a little too big because he wore them to the gym on Monday and walked out limping. He's been limping ever since and it's the saddest. thing. ever...

When I made Everett's hat out of a sweater I thought he had the cutest hat in town... then my Mom sent this hat for Christmas and now I'm positive that he has the cutest hat in town. 

Ev and I went for a bike ride the other day. It's been an unusually nice and sunny winter. But it's also been very cold so I put on a sweet ear warmer that my little sister made for me before heading out the door. I stuck my favorite hat on Everett (even though it looks like a girl hat... okay, okay it actually was mine in high school but who cares!!!!) The hat is so cute on him and he was so excited to go for a bike ride that I wanted to snap a quick picture with my phone. I asked him to smile: LOL! If smiling means s how all your teeth and cry then mission accomplished! When we got back from our bike ride I wanted to take a picture of my awesome new ear warmer. I pulled out my phone and Ev was right there ready to click the button a million times... which he did: (All those pictures and there isn't even a good one of my ear warmer. Oh well, there's about 10 good funny faces though!) He loved clicking the button so much he had to do it later with dad, too: ...

Christmas morning started early again this year.... but not as early as last year! The neighbor dogs started barking at 5 this morning so we just started opening our presents hours and hours before the sun came up. We had Everett open his stocking first. A Scooby Doo toothbrush.... matchbox cars... and trains!!!!! And we didn't see Everett for the rest of the day! He was so content with his cars and trains that he pushed the rest of his presents off the couch so he'd have more room to play with his cars. I even got him Mega Bloks and he didn't want to touch them! So Jake and I opened our stockings from each other.  I totally and completely surprised Jake this year with a GoPro camera. He's wanted one for a long time so I thought I would get it for him.  There is a funny story behind the Christmas gifts we got each other this year. I went to Best Buy to buy his gift and as Ev and I were driving out of the parking lot we saw Jake pull in. He made ...

Saturday was so warm and sunny. It was so nice.  Jake made some Christmas nachos for lunch, Everett took a LOOOOOOONG nap (3+ hours because he slept terribly the night before) and then we headed over to spend Christmas Eve with the family.  We had Chinese food for dinner and it was SOOOO delicious. Then the little kids got to open their presents from their grand-(and great grand)-parents.  On the way home we toured a few neighborhoods with Christmas lights.  Later, when Everett was in bed, I let Jake open his Christmas Jammies! LOL! He bought a pair of grey Nautica sweatpants right after he got home from his mission (Christmas 2004) and I made him throw them away a few months ago. He's been wearing them for the last seven years and I hated them. HATED THEM!!! So I bought him some new sweatpants for Christmas. He was pretty stoked!

     I can't get over how much I love this pictures! (Taken and edited by Amy)

For the twelfth day of Christmas we made a family wreath out of twelve hand prints. 4 of Jake's, 4 of mine, and 4 smeary, blurry hand prints of Everett's. It's so cute! I love it and I'm sure I will cherish it as the years go by and remember when it was just the three of us (this is not an announcement... but I assume our family will get bigger at some point in the future) . And it even matches the new decorations I put up. I was having some problems with our Christmas tree this year and the decorations just weren't working for me... so I re-decorated and took the Christmas tree down yesterday. It seems like a silly thing to do but I just couldn't handle it anymore. (And I like the new decorations WAY better anyway!)     Since we didn't have a tree anymore I made a tree out of our presents... but then I decided to at least put a little tree on top...   Look at all that sunshine!!!! Ahhh, it's love! I've loved celebrating the twelve da...