A month of Christmas Fun!

 Our month has been full!  We wrapped up Mothers Day Out, MOPS, and Bible Study, fought off a stomach bug, played with lots of friends, and enjoyed a lot of fun Christmas things in between.

We put out a few yard decorations and we let Cooper pick out an inflatable to add to our yard collection.  He picked the Santa Mickey and loves to give him hugs and high fives.  As an added bonus, last week At Home had all of their Christmas stuff already 50% off so we grabbed a few more inflatables super cheap to add to our collection for next year!

Cooper loved hanging ornaments on the tree this year.

David and I at our Lifegroup's Christmas party

We checked out the city of Plano Christmas tree lighting

including a carriage ride around part of downtown!

Cooper decorated his felt Christmas tree.  He has not taken it off the wall yet this year which is a huge win after last year where he would take it down as soon as I rehung it.

All dressed up for his Christmas performance at Bible Study.  He loves all the songs and sings them all the time, but he kept telling me he was going to "get off the stage" and that's exactly what he did-- he walked up on stage, started crying, and spent the rest of the performance in his teacher's lap.

We took Cooper to our church's Christmas concert again this year.  We only made it to intermission, but he really enjoyed the music (despite this picture of him covering his ears which is his new thing to do)

Every day our star moves around the house for the wisemen to follow and Cooper finds the star and our Advent song for the day.  Little Drummer Boy is Cooper's favorite song this year, so the day of that song he also found some drums along with the star.

Our first trip to check out the zoo lights was a lot of fun!

Our Lifegroup did some caroling at a local memory care assisted living home.  Cooper didn't want to sing but he loved making his reindeer antlers jingle.

Baking and cutting out cookies in his apron.  He kept excitedly saying "I'm Baker Aker!" (from Daniel Tiger)

And an after-lunch treat of cookie decorating (and icing eating)!

We saw the decorations and Christmas puppet show at Northpark.

And went to a breakfast with Santa-- this is as close as Cooper would get to him, but he had fun.

A trip to Vitruvian Park to run around amidst the lights.

And lots of Christmas books-- this year's favorite is The Grinch!

It's been a fun month.  Today we're heading to the Arboretum to check out all of the decorations then we'll be with family the next 2 days.  Love this time of year and Cooper is having a blast this Christmas!

New Little One Coming in 2020

Peek-a-boo!  Cooper's got some news.

He's going to be a big brother!

A new little one is coming in May 2020

We decided to repurpose last year's Christmas pajamas to announce our new little one.  Cooper wore the little shirt last year and now has a big brother shirt to match:

 We were so excited to get to share the news with everyone this past weekend :). And can't wait to meet our new little love next Spring!

November iPhone Rewind

It's hard to believe December is here!  Here's a glimpse back at our November.

A learning activity with our Halloween Candy.  I opened all the little packages of M&Ms and had Cooper sort them by color.  He did a really good job and was excited to "play the M&M game" and to eat the candy after.

I took a day trip to Canton with 2 sweet friends.  It ended up being a really nice day and we had a great time shopping together!

When Mom doesn't feel well you get to watch Daniel Tiger on the iPad in bed with her :)

We went to see one of Chase's last baseball games of the season.

My mom and I went to a live show for one of the podcasts we listen to.  It was a fun night out doing something different!

Our thankfulness tree.  This year we did the characteristics of God (Give thanks to the Lord for he is...) and then added some handprint leaves with what we are thankful for.

My little turkey at his Thanksgiving feast at school.

Our friends Eli and Maddie took us to the Crayola Experience with their membership!  It was a fun morning with sweet friends.

We took Cooper to see Frozen 2 in the theater while David was off work for Thanksgiving week.  Cooper made it through most of the movie and has asked to watch the original Frozen every day since then.

Hugging our inflatable Mickey Mouse.

Cooper played hard on Thanksgiving Day.  He ran and tackled and threw the ball and climbed the stairs.  We finally got a moment of stillness while he watch Mickey Mouse with cousin Piper.

He was so proud to hang up his new ornament on the tree.

We finished off November with a day trip to East Texas for Cooper's second cousin's birthday party.  Leo is turning 4 and had a party at a petting zoo where there was also tractors to ride.  Cooper had a blast and it was good catching up with family.

It was a fun month-- looking forward to all that December will hold!

Baylor OU Game 2019

This past weekend was the annual Baylor OU Football Game and we continued our tradition of going together.

We started the day watching College Game Day at home.  They were in Waco, so it was a lot of fun getting to watch that.  

We headed out after lunchtime and Cooper took a good nap on the way there which was really good since we knew we had a long night ahead of us.

When we got to Waco we stopped for a snack at Katie's Custard.  I love their Harvest Cyclone (pumpkin pie mixed in their vanilla custard) so it's fun when we're in town in the Fall and can get one!  The boys shared a cookies and cream custard.

We got to the parking lot in plenty of time to park and walk to the stadium.  We decided to take the carrier for the long walk to the stadium and Cooper loved his "piggy back ride" from Daddy and even got mad when we took him out of the carrier at the stadium.

After we found our seats we went and walked around to let Cooper stretch his legs and get some energy out so we didn't spend too much time in our seats before the game started.

Cooper has been looking through our photobooks and found several pictures of him in his headphones from the game in 2017 and demanded to wear them again.  I was so glad he did, because I probably wouldn't have thought about taking them, but it was so loud so it was great that he had them!

Cooper was SO into the game. He loved cheering and singing and clapping and entertaining everyone around us.  

A quick family picture.

OU hat over his headphones.

We were pretty excited about the way the game was going in the 2nd quarter.

Touchdown!  Cooper loved yelling touchdown, yelling "Baylor Bears Fight!" during the fight song and "OU" (or occasionally "ah Choo!") during kickoffs.

He made it almost all the way through the first half in our seats before he needed to go walk around.  We tried again after halftime but he was not having it anymore.  It was past his bedtime, loud and being in one spot is hard for a 2 year old.  Overall, it went better than I could have dreamed taking him to a game with how active he is right now!

We headed out after halftime and grabbed this picture on our walk back over the bridge toward our car.  And I'd love to pretend that things just ended then :)

As we walked to the car we could hear the OU band playing Boomer Sooner several times, so we knew things had changed.  The score actually hadn't changed by the time we got to our car, but we listened to the rest of the game and OU's comeback to win on our drive home.

Love this tradition with our little family!   And it's pretty exciting that there's a high chance that our teams will play again December in the Big 12 Championship. We'll probably skip going to that one, but it's always fun when both of our teams are doing well. 

Memorial Stones

Yesterday we started off our month of family devotions related to thankfulness.  We still plan to do our thankfulness tree like we did last year, but since we have an extra Sunday before Thanksgiving this November, we took the opportunity to do something we've been planning for a while but hadn't sat down to do.  

This Fall I was studying Joshua at Bible Study while our class at church was also going through it and David and I both were struck by the idea of the memorial stones in Joshua 4.  After the Israelites crossed over the Jordan River, God commanded them to take stones from the midst of the Jordan and lay them on the edge.  And when their children asked them what the stones meant they would recall how God had dried up the water of the Jordan so that all the peoples of the earth may know that the hand of the Lord is mighty, that you may fear the Lord your God forever.

This year has been pretty rough in a lot of ways and even though we are starting to come out of the harder part of it all, we wanted to remember God's faithfulness to us-- regardless of how things turned out.

I shared in my iPhone rewind that we collected rocks on the path behind our apartment the day we turned our keys in.  That apartment was not something we ever would have anticipated, but it was such a place of God's provision for us when things felt really out of control.  So we thought it would be a good place to gather stones for our memorial.

Sunday we sat down for our devotional time.  I read part of the story of Joshua from the Big Picture Story Bible.  And then we talked about the stones of remembrance and how God is faithful to us.

Cooper helped us put the rocks into the vase we had set aside.

Most of them are blank, but we decide to write on a few of them as we talked about the things God has provided this year.  And Cooper wanted to write on one too-- he said he was writing "C-O-O-P-E-R" on his.  

A vase full of rocks.  To remind us of all that God has done and all that He is to us.  Our song for the week is Great is Thy Faithfulness, so we've also been singing that a lot the last few days.  I sing it sometimes at bedtime anyway, so as soon as I started it yesterday Cooper's face lit up and said "Oh I remember this song!"  May he always remember the faithfulness of God!