Happy Birthday, Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year!

Happy New Year!! I hope you all had a great holiday season! As usual, December was crazy but wonderful for us! :) Between birthdays, holidays, and blizzards we've managed to stay very, very busy. For Ethan's birthday he told me he wanted "pizza and cake!" So that's what we had. :) Brandon and I took him to the store and let him pick out a present and his own cake. He chose a Spiderman toy set for his gift, and a very rich chocolate cake for dessert. Then we all braved the snow and met at the pizza place for a fun little birthday party for my big 5 year old boy! Here's a few pics and a short video of his birthday:

This year Mom and Martin came and celebrated an early Christmas with us. We had a great visit with them and Ethan and Annabeth had a ton of fun opening the gifts they brought. Here they are opening their new skateboards:

Christmas morning we had our traditional Christmas breakfast with Dad and Amy. They had TONS of snow at their house...Brandon had to shovel the driveway just so we could get in! It was absolutely beautiful, though, and I loved having a white Christmas.

After that we headed out to Mom and Dad's (Patti and Jeff's) house to have Christmas with them. This first picture cracks me up...Ethan looks really mad about his gift! Actually, he's mad that we're not letting him open it yet. :) He finally got to open it after I tortured him with a few pictures and he loved what was inside (a basketball hoop!) Annabeth loved her gift as well...a big-girl bike!

Even with the several feet of snow this year, we were able to spend Christmas with all of the families. Brandon had the entire week off, so we were also able to catch a few movies and spend some time together with just the four of us. And just as I'm always very excited to see Christmas come, I'm also happy to see it go. I hope that everyone out there had a great Christmas and may God bless you all in 2009! :)