Texas Continued...

The week after Christmas was pretty laid back. I did take the kids up to visit my sister a couple times.. Alexa was scheduled to have her tonsils removed so we had one last hoorah before her surgery at a place called It'z (like a better Chuck-E-Cheese).. But for the most part, we just hung out at Sam's mom's house and chilled. 

To fill his free time, Sam actually decided to dig through all of his mom's old photos and started scanning some into the computer.. He came across many gems like these... (and no, that is not Sam in the right picture, it's his older brother Joe, haha):

Meanwhile, I spent my free time painting my nails and catching up on a couple new books that I had been wanting to read. Oh AND finishing my quilt but that will be in another post:

New Years Eve looked a little like this... Oh and didn't get any pics but Jeff, Michelle, and the girls were finally feeling better so they came down and played a few games with us:

 

Somewhere in those two weeks, Sam managed to play more rounds of frisbee golf than he had in the entire year of 2013 collectively, LOL. Dan and Richelle came down from Dallas and Christine and Lehi joined the party for a couple days. Ivy was in cousin heaven, hehe:

  

New Years day on the hammock with my girl:

Christmas in Texas (lots of pictures!)

A few days after Sam finished his last final, we decided to drive down to Texas so we could be with family for the holidays. We hadn't originally planned to go down, mainly because we weren't sure how everything would go with the new baby and how I would be feeling. I still wasn't quite at 100% but I felt strong enough and things with baby had been going well enough that I felt like I could make the drive. We stopped about every 3 hrs or so to feed him and tried to keep our stops as short as possible. Finally, on the Friday before Christmas, we made it to Jeff and Michelle's house in Pearland and the fun began! And I will admit, it was very nice to have family helping out with Ivy and providing fun distractions while being at home and nursing all the time, haha.. 

We stayed there until Christmas, when some of Jeff's family came down with the flu! Sam and I were very grateful that we had gotten flu shots just a couple weeks before and didn't end up catching anything. But with a newborn baby, we didn't want to take any chances so we moved our stuff down to Mom Robinson's house (just down the street) and spent the rest of our trip at her house.  Ivy and Marshall actually ended up getting some sort of little virus/cold anyways but it wasn't the flu and both were feeling better just after a few days, thank goodness...

Just relaxing around the house:

Dad and Trish stopped by for a visit one night before heading out to Durango:

 

Christmas Eve.. This was the best we could get of both of them by the tree with a wiggly toddler and a tired newborn, haha:

Christmas morning!

 

 

 

Later that day we drove up to Kelli's house for dinner with my family. I didn't get any pics with my camera but got a few good ones from my sis Kristin:

Announcement and Ivy

Hope everyone had a great holiday season! More updates coming soon, just wanted to post our Christmas card for this year...

Took these pics of Ivy the Sunday before Marshall was born. Just wanted to get some cute ones of her in her pretty Christmas dress. Love my sweet girl. 

Library Day with Santa and Goodbye to Mema

Back in December, just a couple weeks after Marshall was born, our local library had their annual "Breakfast with Santa" day for the kids. Ivy had been needing some one on on mommy time so I decided to pump a bottle and leave baby home with Mema (Sam was studying for finals) and take my girl. It was so much fun! We are so lucky to have amazing librarians who really care for the kids in this area. Miss Cindy read some stories while the kids ate their breakfast, then they had a few coloring/sticker activities, and afterwards, they had a little area that the kids could go talk to Santa. Ivy wasn't quite sure about sitting on his lap, but she was excited to get the bag of goodies that his penguin helpers were giving out. Hehe. Then a few days later, we received a letter in the mail from Santa, himself! (the library sent them out) Thought it was super cute.

Just a few days later, we said goodbye to Mema and drove her down to the Knoxville airport. We are forever grateful for everything she did for us while she was here!! It really was soo helpful to have her help, especially during those last few days when Sam was studying his heart out for finals. We were sad to see her go but decided that since all had been going well with Baby and my healing, we would drive down to Houston later that week to celebrate Christmas in Texas!