Merry Christmas!

This year I decided to just skip trying to go somewhere or have someone try and take a family picture. I think it was a wise choice. I thought it was difficult when we had one child to try and get her to smile and then get a shot we all looked ok in. With two kids...it is pretty much impossible. We took several sessions of pictures of the girls, in front of the tree and this is one that turned out ok (but we decided to do different outfits for the Christmas card picture). Of course Sophie is not smiling. But if she did...then Sydney made sure to make some awful face or turn her head or something!
Look who figured out how to get up on her knees and rock back and forth. Sophie is checking out a new Little People Nativity I bought online. The girls both love it because of course they can play with it and it isn't going to break.

I think she will probably be crawling in about a month or two. She can already sit up by herself.
So this is the Nativity I got for the girls. We had another one but parts of it kept breaking. I tried several times to fix it with wood glue, super glue, tacky glue, and Elmer's glue...but it didn't work. Because of the splinters we finally had to throw it out. Sydney was devastated so I found this manger scene and it even had the shepherds out in the pasture with another angel to tell them the good news. The star on the creche lights up and sings "Away in the Manger". Sydney has played with it daily and makes sure all the animals are fed and get enough rest and that they pay attention to the baby Jesus!

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White Elephant Gifts...

This weekend we attended a few Christmas parties and received several interesting "white elephant" gifts. Needless to say, this is one of my favorite games and always makes me laugh at some of the random things that get wrapped up! I am modeling this eye magnifying thing we recieved called MagEyes. What can I say...absolutely ridiculous...but I had a thought to possibly put them on while I was reading a few scriptures during the talk I had to give today at church. Can you imagine if the speaker in church just whipped out a pair of these and started reading their talk?
Then we recieved a few DVD's. I think some of these might be those DVD's one might find in the $1.00 bins at Walmart or something. The first DVD is "Santa Claus Conquers the Martians", the second one is "Blooper Bananza 1960's" and the last one was "The Karate Kid" (which actually wasn't so bad). I guess the titles say it all! If anyone is dying to watch any of these DVD's we would be happy to let them borrow them.
The next gift we received was this giant porcelain cat that Sydney promptly named "Snowflake". As you can see from the pictures it looks more like some kind of fish or something from far away. If any of you think this might go with your decor...I would be happy to bring it over. Meanwhile...Snowflake is currently out in the dining area until I find an appropriate closet for him/her.
The last gift we managed to bring home was one of those giant universal remotes. Sydney was also thrilled by this because she can easily push all the buttons, plus it lights up. I guess we won't be losing this remote. At least this remote is nice and new and clean (because our other remote is probably crawling with micro organisms that I don't want to know about).
All in all...we had some good laughs over everything! It was sort of a crazy weekend trying to get everything done and get to our parties and prepare talks that we had to give today.

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Thanksgiving...

For Thanksgiving we went to St. George to visit Mark's parents. It was fun because his whole family was there. It was also pretty crazy with all the kids running around constantly and two babies to add to the hula-baloo! Sophie made sure she didn't sleep very well during the night and managed to wake up at least six times every night. (We were exhausted by the time we got home.) But it was also really pretty in St. George and we loved all the fall colors and the chilly temperatures. Like any Poulsen gathering, there was lots of yummy food and desserts! On Saturday, we all cheered on the Cougars (well except for Mark's Mom...she is a die-hard Utah fan!) and we were excited for their victory over Utah. Mark and I managed to escape one of the days up to beautiful Zion's Canyon to let Sydney run around in leaves and just explore like any normal kid loves to do. We had to bundle little Sophie up the best we could because it was a little colder than St. George.
Sophie had just her little face peeking out from her BYU hat! We didn't have room for a stroller on the trip up so we had to carry her everywhere...including the short hike we took Sydney on.
Sydney was excited to climb on all the rocks but we were just worried that she would slip and fall. I guess that is pretty typical of us!
We hiked to the lower Emerald Pool and waterfalls with the girls. Then we headed back over to the lodge so Sydney could play in all the leaves on the grassy area out front. She loved running through them and making all the crunching sounds!
At the end, we drove back towards the entrance and just pulled off to the side by the river so Sydney could just explore all the trees and leaves.

She ran down to the river to throw rocks and sticks in the water.

We had a wonderful Thanksgiving and enjoyed spending time with the whole family. Sydney and Sophie both came home with colds (so that meant more sleepless nights!) and last week Sophie's cold turned into an ear infection (so we are still suffering without sleep). I think all I want for Christmas is some sleep, six hours in a row would be nice!

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