Christmas!

There's so much to catch up on but I'm actually really excited to record our December and catch up the blog because it means I get to relive the fun times we had...and they were so fun.  I think I'll start with our Christmas time, then go back to Disneyland because it deserves it's own very long post.

Christmas was wonderful this year.  Here are the highlights:

- We decided to surprise my Mom and Dad and just show up at their house before Christmas.  We had told them that Glenn didn't have enough vacation days at work and that we'd be coming to stay for a few days after Christmas...but we found a way and made it home the Thursday night before Christmas and were able to stay until New Years.  It was the longest we've been home in years and it was SO nice to have so much time.  We told Tate we were going to surprise Nana.  This was the conversation in the car,

  Me: Tate, you're going to go to the front door and when Nana answers you're going to say, "Can we stay with you for Christmas?"  Okay?

   T: Mom, she's going to say, "yes".

   Me: I know she will, babe.  But let's ask her anyway, just to be funny.

   T: Okay.  But she's going to say, "yes".

So we showed up at about 8 at night and it was a very nice surprise.  Dad answered the door and just stood there and didn't know what to say.  Mom heard Tate and yelled, "Yes!" from the other room.  It was so fun.

- The day after we arrived was Finn's first birthday.  It was really nice to be home for his day so we could have family to celebrate with.  It was a smallish celebration.  A few fun little presents and some yummy cupcakes.

 Finn had lots of help opening presents.  And I think he was thrilled to have his cousins around him.  The biggest hit of the night was this ball popper for Finn.

Tate, Mya, Sadie, and Finn huddled around it all night.  My favorite was watching Tate, or whoever happened to be watching the balls pop up from the hole, get smacked in the face by the little plastic balls over and over.  Hilarious.

Finn was surprisingly not that into his birthday cupcake.  He was pretty hesitant to get his hands dirty and kept looking at us as if expecting us to get a fork and help him out...but we didn't.

Eventually he got a few bites in his mouth and then he promptly got bored and started throwing cupcake on the floor.

At which point the cupcake eating was over.

- On the Saturday before Christmas Tate started throwing up.  He threw up all day.  Poor kid couldn't even keep water down.  It made for lots of snuggling and movie-watching, but it's always sad to see him so sick and begging for food all day.  On Sunday all of the Hansen sibs drove down to St. George to see Adam bless his baby Abigail.  I'm glad we were all able to be there for him.  It was a sweet blessing and sweet to see baby Abby on her big day.  Glenn and Ian stayed home with our little boys and Tate got bad enough that Glenn finally took him to an urgent care clinic to get him some liquid zofran.  Once Tate got that good stuff in his system he started recovering really quickly.

- Christmas morning was so fun this year.

(Glenn, Finn, Mallo, Ian, Kenzie, and Tate)

Santa brought Finn a little Lightning Mcqueen walker/ride on and a little pluto stuffed animal.

Tate was super spoiled this year and got a cars race track, a remote control Lightning Mcqueen, and some fun cars that he saw in Disneyland.  Here he is with his R2D2 and C3PO cars.

Every year has gotten progressively more fun with our kids at Christmas.  Tate gets more of the magic and seems more excited with surprises.  It was great.

Favorite quote of the day: When Tate opened his ice cream set he got so excited and said, "Ooooooh I can smell the taste!"  Then he played with his little ice cream set for about 20 minutes and invited each of us to his ice cream party while serving us ice cream cones.  Precious.

The one down side of the day was poor Finny was sick.  He had a fever all day and was just miserable.  Glenn and I kept commenting how bad a sign it was that he was snuggly and wanted to be held because that must mean that he felt terrible.

By that evening his fever got up to 103 and we were stripping him down for a cool bath.  That seemed to help a bit.

- The day after Christmas my dad's mom, Grandma Hansen passed away.  Ian was good enough to watch the boys while we went to the hospital to see her and say goodbye.  It was sweet to be in that hospital room with family members arriving all afternoon.  We caught up with each other and reminisced about Grandma.  Glenn commented later, that she was clearly a very loved lady to have so many people in her room with her at the end of her life.  It was a sweet experience.  She passed away that night and her funeral was just three days later, on Saturday.  It was a nice funeral.  Stories were told about my grandmother that I'd never heard before, and some I had.  She was a great lady and left quite a legacy.

- The next day we made an urgent care visit with Finn because his fever hadn't gone away and he'd developed a pretty nasty cough.  Adam was coming with his new baby and we wanted to have a diagnosis to tell him so he wouldn't be worried having Abby around Finn.  Well, that's not exactly what we got.  The doctor took a look at Finn and said it could just be a cold, but it could also be RSV or whooping cough.  Awesome.  So he gave us some medicine that would take care of it if it was something more serious.  Poor Ad and Cami were pretty worried for a few days, understandably so.  But Finn got better and little Abby never caught anything so that was lucky.

- Kenzie took Tate out to play in the snow one afternoon.  He didn't last long but he had so much fun.

 - All of my siblings and Glenn's brother Ian were able to be home for at some point over the break.  It was amazing to have us all together again.  It's been almost a year and a half and who knows how long it will be til the next time now that we're even more spread out across the country with Mal living in D.C. and Adam moving who knows where after he graduates. It was perfect family time and I still just look back and feel so lucky that we all got to be together.  Finn seems to have a soft spot for Uncle Cody.  He has a special smile when Cody come in the room .  It's like a teasing, sneaky smile.  And he loves Cody's scruffy face.  Even when he's sick or ornery there seems to be room for some smiles for Uncle Cody.

Tate and Finn absolutely adore their cousins.  It's so fun to watch them play together when we're home.  They see each other and hug and squeal then disappear into the basement or dump out a car bucket and play together for hours.  I love it so much.

- Other highlights include: seeing Les Miserable (I think I could write a whole post on this, wow), an outlet mall trip with my sisters, card games on new years eve, workout videos with my sisters and even once with Glenn and Ian, long talks, Wii games, good food (most of which was cooked by Glenn.  He was a cooking maniac), no vomit in the car on the long drives to and fro (a huge blessing.  Poor Tate gets car sick in the mountains but there was no vomit this time!).

As always, I wish I had taken more pictures but we got so busy just hanging out and being together that I kept forgetting to get my camera out.  I was a wonderful Christmas time.  I'm so glad that we went home for such a long time and were able to spend so much time with family.  In spite of two urgent care visits and a funeral, it was still a great holiday.