Christmas Week 2010

We had a great week and a half of celebrating Christmas with our families! The girls have been completely spoiled by their grandparents, aunts, uncle, and us! We started the celebrating by traveling to Shreveport to be with Casey's family. We were there December 19-22. We had a ton of fun with them, and Kailey, especially, had fun playing with her cousin Caden!

Makenna's shirt says "All mommy wants for Christmas is a Silent Night"! SOOO true! :)




On Monday (the 20th) we met Casey's sister and her two boys at Sci-Port Discovery Center. They had a ton of fun playing with all the various displays.






On Tuesday, we had a "baking day". The kids made Rice Krispie houses, and sugar cookies. We also had a family gathering with part of Casey's extended family. It was a lot of fun to just hang out, eat, and play games.










On Wednesday, we opened gifts. The girls got way too many gifts for me to name! Kailey has been having so much fun playing with all the gifts she received. Makenna's big gift from Gran and Papa was the lamb critter chair from Pottery Barn Kids. She LOVES it!





On Wednesday night we traveled back to Temple to spend a couple days as a family celebrating Christmas. On Thursday we just relaxed all day, did a bit of shopping, and then drove through a Christmas light park that night. Then on Christmas Eve, we opened gifts that morning, I baked cookies and cupcakes all day, and then we went to our Christmas Eve service that night. Kailey's big gift was the Bitty Twin dolls from American Girl, however the gift she simply cannot quit talking about, is the claw! She always plays with this claw when we go to Target, so we decided to get one and put it in her stocking. It was $2, and by far her favorite gift!








Casey was in charge of the service this year, and so our family was in charge of lighting the advent candle. It went well, although watching both girls by myself during the service was a task!
(Especially considering the mood Kailey was in, as you can tell!)






We left after the Christmas Eve service, to travel to have Christmas with my family in Kingwood. My grandparents, aunt, and uncles came for lunch on Christmas Day, then after a nap we opened Christmas gifts. Kailey got lots of fun things to go with her Bitty Twin dolls, including my sisters' American Girl Doll bunk bed, they played with when they were little!




In this picture, Kailey wanted to "take a picture with baby Jesus" so she went and grabbed Him from the nativity scene. haha.



After we opened gifts, Casey had to drive back to Temple, because he had to preach on Sunday morning! (the 26th). After he preached he drove back to Kingwood, and we stayed there until Tuesday, the 28th. We just hung out, ate out, and had a good time with my sisters (2 of whom live out of state). The only bummer was that Makenna got another UTI while were there, which made for some not so fun nights!

We had a very Merry Christmas, and are very thankful to be back home safely! We hope you had a great Christmas as well!

Thanks for reading this monsterous post! I will post Makenna's 7 month post soon, because she turned 7 months on Christmas day!

I got Scammed!

Many of you know that I LOVE LOVE LOVE to buy clothes for the girls on etsy. They have the CUTEST baby girl personalized items I have ever seen! My sister-in-law Kenya also does the same for her 2 boys, and recently she recommended another website to me with similar clothes.

Cotton Candy Shop
If you look at it, you will just fall in love with her clothes! They are SUPER DE DUPER expensive, though, so really, I was just admiring them from afar. Now, this girl, Lauren Bergmann,(owner of the shop) not only supposedly sells beautiful clothes, but one of her hottest selling items is her Photo Shoot Package. For the package you get a cute outfit, and a photo shoot with an all-star photographer, for the price of the outfit, plus you get a CD of all the pics. Well I was SO tempted to do this, and Kenya actually signed up to do one of these photo shoots in October.

In the meantime, I became a fan on facebook of Cotton Candy Shop, and started noticing that she did the "comment game" every few days. On the comment game, you could get her clothes for half price, which was the only way I would ever be able to afford them! On Halloween she had a comment game, and was selling Turkey shirts for Thanksgiving on which she made turkeys out of the first letter of the child's name. I was SO pumped. It "guaranteed it would be recieved in plenty of time for Thanksgiving" so I bought 2 of them. $40.00 all together. Well..the days went by and I never recieved the shirts. I soon began corresponding with Lauren attempting to get my items, and she began saying she was sick, etc. and would I mind changing them to Christmas shirts. I said, "sure no problem". Well, to this day I have still not recieved my items.

In the meantime, Kenya went to her photo shoot. On Tuesday Kenya texted me to ask if I ever recieved my shirts. I said "no". She then told me that the photographer for her shoot had emailed her and said she could not release the pictures from the shoot, because Lauren had not paid her!

To make a long story short, there are at least 30 other people who have ordered items from Lauren and not recieved them. We figure the way she operates is she drags you on past the 60 day mark, so that you can no longer get your money back from your bank or credit card. There are some women out over $200, dating all the way back to March! I have tried to give her the benefit of the doubt, because her clothes are soo sooo cute! However, as I have investigated over the past few days, I now realize that I have totally been scammed.

She is actually so low as to fake illnesses to cancel photo shoots, and never reschedules them, and pockets the money! The photographer she used for Kenya's shoot informed us that Lauren told her "if you do this shoot for free for the parents, then I will let you do my next 5 shoots!" Then, she cancels the 5 paying shoots to scam the photographer! She did this to multiple photographers!

Basically, STAY AWAY FROM COTTON CANDY SHOP IN MCKINNEY, TEXAS AND LAUREN BERGMANN!!

Kailey's 3rd Birthday!

We celebrated Kailey's 3rd Birthday this past weekend. She turned 3 on Sunday (the 5th!) It is crazy how fast these 3 years have flown by! It is amazing how grown up she is getting to be! She talks like crazy, and is constantly making us laugh with all of the things she says! She is starting to have such an opinion about life in general. For her birthday I got her a blue outfit, because for the longest time she has said her favorite color was blue. She even told Casey she wanted us to paint her room blue! Yesterday when I got home from school she says, "I don't like blue today, I like green!", as she is wearing her blue outfit. She is fully potty trained, which is a tremendous blessing! She is a fabulous big sister. Yesterday she just went and danced around Makenna in her jumparoo and made her laugh and laugh. She is such a fun girl!

This weekend, we decided we just wanted to have a fun time with her, so we went to a mall up in Arlington to go to Build-A-Bear, Cheesecake Factory, and to ride the Carousel. My mom, my sister Emily, my sister Laura, Casey's parents, Casey's sister Kenya, her two sons Caden and Caleb, and our good friends the Dugans all met us to have a great day! It was super fun, and I am glad we decided to do that instead of have a party at home like we have the past couple of years.

We had a Zebra Minnie Mouse themed party!


At Build-a-Bear, she opted to make a "Hello Kitty", which she loves! She says "Where's my Hello Kitty?" when she is trying to find it. We put the birthday song inside of it too, which is cute!



We had this little Christmas craft to work on at Cheesecake Factory, while we waited on the food.

We got a cookie cake from the mall, to make things easy!

She got tons of gifts! (Dress up clothes, pretend make-up, My Little Pony, Princess Games, Sesame Street games, Minnie mouse clothes, regular clothes, Little Mermaid Barbie, a Play-dough set, My little Pony, a Tricycle, and more! Spoiled rotten!)



Riding the Carousel with Auntie Em:

Family pic:

On the way home we let her pick a snack and she wanted Cheetos. As you can see, she got it ALL over her. Then, she fell asleep....with her hand in the bag!! haha




When we got home she played dress-up and we read her new Minnie Mouse book:



On her actual birthday, she opened her gifts from us at home, we went to church, and then she played with her new toys all afternoon. Really she began to act extremely spoiled by the end of the day, because she truly has been!

For school on Monday, she took Minnie Mouse cupcakes:


It was a great weekend! Here are some comparison pictures for you to enjoy!:

A few days old:

One year old Birthday:

2 year old Birthday:

3 year old Birthday: