Winter Break

With Brian working at a service academy (the Air Force Academy) aka a college, he basically gets a full "winter break". He's been off of work since the 22nd and besides having to poke his head in to work twice he's been home. And it's been awesome! Here's some of the things we've been up to besides having guests and Christmas.

Brady had his first preschool Christmas program. He was super excited to see us in the audience. Heart. Melted.

He knew every word to every song and every motion and it was just beyond adorable!

Brady with his teacher, Mrs. Cooper

and his other teacher, Mrs. Rose

And since the church was decorated so beautifully for Christmas, a sibling shot.

Who is this man child?!

We also hosted an ugly Christmas sweater/white elephant exchange for Brian's squadron at our house. We had WAY too much fun. As in we stayed up until after 3 am. I paid for it the next day but it was a blast!

Layla and I also had a girls day while Brian and Brady had a boys day at a trampoline place. We read as many princess books as we could,

We painted our toenails hot pink,

We put an eensy amount of makeup on (sorry, Daddy!) and curled our hair too.

It was a fun girls day!

We also went to the local mall to escape cabin fever (it was cold and snowy a lot of the days) and found a train. Yippee. I volunteered Brian to ride with them. He was thrilled.

New Year's was very low key. Our plans changed at the last minute and we spent our first ever New Year's at home. It was nice not driving and just being able to relax at home. Neither kid napped so we You Tube'd the ball dropping from 2014 at about 6:30 and they were in awe. They had some sparkling grape juice in their cups and thought they were the coolest kids ever.

New Year's kiss, haha!

Another really neat thing was that there's this group that climbs to the top of Pike's Peak and lights off fireworks every year. Pike's Peak is in clear sight from our upstairs bedrooms so we snuggled with a bottle of champagne upstairs, counted down to midnight, and watched the fireworks show.

My iPhone captured it beautifully...not

But this is what it really looked like. It was a really neat experience and I'm glad we got to see it!  We also took a trip to the ski town of Winter Park. But I'll save that for a post later this week. We're back to the normal grind today which is both good and bad. Good because it's time to get back on our normal schedule but bad because it was such a relaxing, refreshing couple of weeks together!