Surviving Christmas

We had a great Christmas this year. We ate lots of good food and got to spend time with lots of loved ones, but we will forever remember this as the holiday of sickness. So many of our family and friends were sick and in the hospital over the last few weeks. Here is a quick rundown of what we were aware of.

Ethan had a cold, that turned into the stomach flu the week before Christmas. He got both of us pretty sick delaying our trip to Cache Valley and making Kyle miss a day of work. Some of our friends had the stomach flu hit them on the plane to Utah causing one of them to go to the hospital immediately after landing. They then, passed it to their entire family. My brother had a scheduled surgery the week before Christmas which eventually lead to him catching a staff infection and many ER visits. My grandpa also had surgery too, but luckily didn't have complications. My cousin's husband almost broke his leg the Saturday before Christmas and ended up in the ER. My aunt slipped on some ice on Christmas day and shattered her shoulder needing a complete replacement. After a Christmas party Kyle and his sister fell ill and later spread it to their dad, who was affected for a few days. Oh yeah, my sister and sister-in-law were trying to get over being sick, as well as my brother who recently had a bout of mono mixed with strep. Whew!! We hope that was all!

Anyway, here are some highlights of our Christmas.


We put bows on Ethan and he didn't like it too much. Here is one of him trying to find them to pull off.
Grandma Taylor gave Ethan this cute outfit for Christmas. This was him right before church today. It was so fun having him all dressed up for the occasion. He is such a little man (though he sure didn't act like one today!!).

Santa Claus is Coming....

Last week, we got a bunch of snow in Stansbury Park. Something like 8". More than the ski resorts did. Ethan kept begging us to take him out in the snow to make a snow angel, but when we plopped him down into the snow, he didn't know what to think of it.

He quickly attempted to make a run for it, but all he got was a face full of snow. We all had a good laugh about it, and then took him inside to get him nice and warm.
Later, we took Ethan to see Santa Claus. We think he took it pretty well.
Ethan has been growing up so fast. In fact, the other day, we found him counting his carbs.
In other news, Jen has been baking up a storm this week. To date she's made:

-four batches of cranberry-orange bread
-carmels
-fudge
-more carmels
-macaroons
-four more batches of cranberry-orange bread
-normal bread
-chocolate chocolate chip cookies
-Chex Party mix
-a cheeseball
-probably some other stuff, but we can't remember

We've had our share (yum), but we've given a lot of it away.

Christmas Goodies

We've been cooking a lot of Christmas goodies this week to take around to neighbors and friends. As you can see, we made a LOT of caramel. We also made a batch of rocky road fudge, some cranberry-orange bread, and a batch of macaroons that didn't look pretty enough so we ate them ourselves.

To burn off the calories, we walked around to the neighbors and delivered them. It's been fun visiting with them, and getting to know them a little better, all while spreading Christmas cheer (not to mention that we don't have to worry about doing our Christmas baking until next Christmas). We're going to make this a Christmas tradition for sure.

In Ethan news, he had a lot of fun playing his bff, Nolan. The two of them were having a great time playing with cell phones together, although he did start crying his eyes out whenever Nolan would start making loud noises. It made him really upset. Funny stuff. We'll have to work on Ethan's people skills (or just make sure he gets to bed on time so he isn't so touchy).

Ethan also had his 9 month doctors appointment, and he is doing swell. He's still growing like a weed and hitting all of his milestones.

Ethan's Winter Walk

Ethan went with Mom and Dad to delivery some Christmas goodies tonight. It was a bit cold, but he enjoyed the ride. This picture was taken after returned home. You can see that his nose and cheeks got a bit rosey from the cold. He didn't like it when Mom put his puppy hat on, but I'm sure he was glad Mom insisted he wear it.

In related news, Ethan is 9 months old as of yesterday. To commemerate the day, Ethan finally decided to oblige his mom and dad by saying "dada." He also started signing back to us the sign for milk.

Mom and Dad are good too. Mom and Dad got a lot of yard work done before the snow storm hit. Dad sawed down another tree and Mom followed by chipping all of its branches. Mom is getting over a bad cold, and Dad is hoping he won't catch it. As you can see it has been an eventful weekend.

Finally, we decided our previous post of our christmas tree didn't do it justice, so we tried again. This one really shows how many lights there actually are on our tree. Sometimes we get dizzy looking at it.



This picture, inspired by Heather Taylor's picture of her Christmas tree, used a tripod with no flash, an open aperture and very long shutter speed to capture the lights. Unfortunately, this method empahasized the lights too much, so we then took a picture from the same position with a flash to capture the ornaments, and did a little Photoshop magic to get the finished picture.