Emmi's 4th Birthday!

We celebrated Emmi's 4th Birthday on December 30th! What a blessing she has been! It is so cute to see her brothers shower her with compliments and help her to grow.

She could not wait to open her presents. She got through them all and was even a little disappointed with all the clothes, until...Daddy brought this out from the garage!!! This was her first bike that hadn't belonged to a brother and had princesses on it!
We had a Cinderella cake for her and she had received the Barbie and horse as gifts.

This is Piggy. Piggy gets lots of love! Emmi has a number of stuffed animals and each one seems to get a special day of receiving all her love! Piggy came with the book If You Give a Pig a Party. Bunnies, bears, cats and pigs seem to get the most attention from her. Although, Daddy says letting her get a stuffed cat is one step closer to her asking for a real cat and that will NOT happen. :) I say let her have stuffed cats all she wants. We'll visit our friends for the kitty fix. :)

Christmas Morning 09

Christmas Morning 2009

This is Princess Emmi at one of her sweeter moments that morning!
This is dog-lover Dawson and his Schnauzer Webkinz.
This was about an hour before Dawson started throwing up.

Calvin is not exactly pleased with all of his gifts, but doesn't complain.
He started throwing up later that afternoon.

Braden just wants anything Star Wars.

Jon sent the three boys on a hunt at the end of the gifts. They went all over the house and ended up in the garage. The two older boys got new bikes and Dawson got a scooter. They were pretty excited after that!

This is Jon and his joy on Christmas morning of putting everything together. :)

This was taken several hours before he started throwing up. Are you seeing a pattern here???

My big plans of a roast for supper went out the window and Braden and I were the only two to eat dinner. Emmi wasn't sick, but had eaten too much candy from her stocking! By the next day all the boys had a smashing headache and were tired, but were on the mend!

Needless to say, it was a memorable Christmas!

Family Pic 09

My friend and photographer, http://tracifalderphotography.blogspot.com, took this fun picture of our family for our Christmas card. Isn't is great? The sad thing is I had the cards for six weeks and I was still frantically trying to get them out one week before Christmas! That is just a testament of how busy we are with church, work, school, four kids and two dogs. (The "two dogs" is a whole other blog entirely.)

Anyway, for the few of you who actually read this and have been wondering what has happened, I'll fill you in with four letters...L...I...F...E! I'll try to catch up a bit, but I have decided to stop trying to keep up with all my blogger friends, who are so diligent about keeping their blogs up-to-date!