The End to our 12 Days of Christmas

This girl LOVES to party!! She loves to dress up and dance. Christmas Eve was right up her alley.

We had such a fun Christmas Eve at home. We did the 12 Days of Christmas with our kids this year in hopes that our focus wouldn't be on gifts for Christmas morning. We didn't have lots of gifts for the 12 days and most of the gifts were for the whole family or not even wrapped gifts at all. One day we had a dinner fit for a king. Another days gift was a family of swans a swimming (we swam in the hotel pool in Boise), another was a sweet treat (baggies of candy), they got a day of games, a day of movies, socks and a day of outdoor fun (girls got scooters and the boys got clay pigeons and shot gun shells).

Our Christmas Eve was Day 11. Their gift was a pair of pj's! Cooper wasn't sure about opening his gift. We had spent the 2 weeks before telling him to stay out of the presents! The kids, of course, were dying to help him open his gift.

Our 3 silly girls!

Austin and Cooper

We gotta love these boys and their goofy ways!!

We had gotten 'Just Dance 3' for one of our gifts and we decided to spent some time playing that on Christmas Eve. We even managed to talk Justin into dancing with us! He let his silly side come out and the girls thought it was pretty funny to watch him dance!

We love this guy and are the luckiest people ever to have him in our life!! He keeps us laughing and loving life!

Here's the poem we read to start our 12 Days of Christmas:

12 Days of Christmas 2011

It’s almost Christmas time,
That Holy night divine.
The excitement seems to grow
Even if there is no snow.
We want to change things up,
Not overfill our cup.
Focus on Christ, love and giving
Not on things needed for living
Each day a new gift you will get
That will make you smile, we bet.
In return, a few thoughts you will share
Of Christ and your testimony to bare.
We want the true Christmas spirit in our home
Hopefully to stay and never to roam.
We love you each from the bottom of our heart
And just know that our love will never depart.

Merry Christmas and enjoy the 12 Days of Christmas, Pugmire style.

Party Time at Grandma & Grandpa's

Christmas Eve party- December 23 & 24- Brower style!
These 2 kiddos were so stinkin' cute with each other!

After we left Boise on Friday, we drove down to Tremonton to spend time with my family. When we got there, my sister Brittany and her family were there already. Grandma had a whole bunch of things planned for us. The party started with an attempt to make a Gingerbread house. That didn't go over so good!

Grandpa got some time with Cooper and Alivia. It was fun to watch him with the kids!

For some reason, our mortar for the gingerbread house just wouldn't hold the house together. After spending lots of time holding the house together by hand, we decided to abandon the house altogether. When Natalie got there, she told us the trick. We should have just hot glue gunned the house together and then decorated the house! Now we know. We'll do that next year. (I'm not a fan of gingerbread houses and so we have never done it as a family! We now have a memory that will never be forgotten!)

Grandma was a trooper to hold this house together! The boys came to the rescue and used the smartie packages to hold the house up. After a little while, even the smarties couldn't hold the house up!

After a traditional dinner of scones and soup, we got all warm and cozy and headed out to do some caroling to neighbors. We used to do this every Christmas Eve while we were growing up. It took some convincing to get some of the older kids out the door. It was fun though!

After caroling, we got to play a fun present game, the Left & Right game. The kids had fun passing the presents back and forth and even more fun opening them up. There were games in each one along with some candy. It was a fun filled day and Grandma did great entertaining the family! None of us were bored!

Saturday morning, we all got up and got yummy french toast in our bellies and got ready for the day. Grandma had been asked to have her family sing at a blood drive on Christmas eve. So, we headed over to the Stake Center and took some time to sing to those good people that were giving blood! The kids loved singing and they all sounded great!!!

Justin didn't sing but watched Cooper! He also took pictures for us!

Grandma even had the kids play a song with chimes. Grandma and Grandpa sure know how to make a Christmas Eve memorable! After having lunch, we headed home to have our own party that night for Christmas Eve. Next year we'll hopefully have Tiffany and her family there and Chris will be home from his mission then. It will be a very fun Christmas party next year! It might be hard to beat all the fun we had this year though!

A Perfect Start to the Holidays

Justin had a work Christmas party in Boise on December 22. We decided to head to Boise on Wednesday, December 21 and take the kids and stay in a hotel. We went to the Hampton Inn and Suites downtown Boise. We got just 1 suite the first night and had 2 suites the 2nd night. The kids loved the hotel. They really wanted to go swimming that first night we got there. It was 9:45 pm when we showed up and the pool closed at 10 pm. They were all pretty tired though and it didn't take long for them to fall asleep!
Mayci was SO excited to be in a hotel and had a harder time sleeping than the other kids. Madison was very excited to be reading her book, "Fablehaven". She is loving those books. The suite fit all of us pretty good but it was nice to have both rooms the 2nd night. The 4 older kids slept in the other room while Cooper and Mayci slept in the room with Justin and I.

This hotel had a very kid friendly pool! There was a kiddie pool that had water attractions that sprayed water all over. Mayci could have swam all day long. They also provided water noodles for the kids to play with. Braydon taught Mayci how to hold onto the noodle and swim all around the pool. I'm pretty sure we spent 1 1/2 hours in the pool on Thursday morning. We finally got out and got ready for the day.

Their excerise room wasn't too bad either! The 2 boys spend some time in there with me both mornings! Austin couldn't swim because of his ear and he was pretty bummed about that but managed to still have a good time.

We decided to go to Rockie's Diner in Boise for lunch. The reason for this diner- the boys watched Man vs. Food and watched the host eat this huge meal in under 30 minutes and get a guitar for it! The boys didn't think they could acutally do the challenge but they wanted to eat the food. When we got there though, we found that they only serve that from 6-9 pm. We chose something else for lunch and the kids were stuffed! We actually took food home. Their chili-cheese fries were pretty good. The fries, alone, were delicious!!!

The boys were just excited to be in the same place as the host from Man vs. Food was at! They thought they were pretty cool!!

After lunch, we took Madison, Kenzie and Braydon out to Kuna to go play with friends. We picked up one of Austin's friends and brought him back into Boise to hang out with Austin. Justin and I got to go to the Manheim Steamroller Christmas Concert for his work party! It was SO great! It brought back so many memories from my childhood Christmas's. We would always play Manheim cd's during the holidays. It was a great way to start the holiday weekend! Austin stayed at the hotel with Mayci and Cooper while we were at the concert. The kids enjoyed hanging out with friends and Justin and I enjoyed the party! Justin ended up winning a Kindle touch at the party.

Let me just tell you how GREAT the hotel breakfast was. We are big fans of breakfast in our family and this hotel is a hit with our family. They have a hot continental breakfast and we get our moneys worth. The kids love eating the waffles, cereal, bagels, yogurt, bacon, sausage, eggs, doughnuts, muffins, fruit and juice. A couple of the kids even managed to have 2 breakfasts on Friday morning. They got a good supply of hot chocolate into their bellies also!

Of course, we had to have one more dip into the pool before we left on Friday. Mayci was really hoping that we were going to find another swimming pool when we went to Grandma/pa Brower's house. She was pretty sad to find out that we wouldn't be going to a pool for awhile.

Can You Hear Me Now?

Austin has had ear problems since he was 6 months old. It started with an ear ache and we flew to Seattle for a family reunion. Well, that managed to rupture his ear drum. He's had a hole in his ear since then. We've done a number of tubes in his ears and his ears kept rejecting the tubes. The last tube in his right ear managed to work it's way into his inner ear and was just hanging out. It was causing a lot of infection and the ENT decided it was probably time to go in and fix the hole and find the tube.

We had the surgery on December 5, 2011.
His surgery happened at EIRMC and it went pretty good. The surgery was expected to take just under 3 hours. They ended up in surgery for just over 3 hours. His ear canal was pretty full of scar tissue and they ended up drilling out all of the skin in his canal. They had to take skin from his leg to fix his canal. They found the tube and hopefully we won't be dealing with lots of infections in the future.

When he came out of surgery, he was feeling ok and needed to go to the bathroom. He got up and went and that made him pretty sick. He ended up throwing up and then they wouldn't let us leave until he was feeling better. The nurse told us that it was normal for ear surgery patients to feel sick due to the inner ear being messed with. It took him about 2 1/2 hours to start feeling good.

Justin, Cooper and I spent the day at the hospital waiting. Cooper did a great job, especially since we wouldn't let him crawl around on the floor. He loved being held most of the day.

Justin tried getting a few zzz's in while we waited for Austin to recover!

Cooper just got sillier the longer we were at the hospital.

Austin was crazy about the ice chips and was really hungry after the surgery. The nurse wouldn't let him have anything else though. Once we got home, he took a nap for about 1 hour and then couldn't stand not having food. He had a meatball hoagie and felt great. He had hardly any pain meds afterwards and did great recovering. He couldn't take his bandage off for 24 hours afterwards. Once he took it off, he wanted to look at it. He did. He got sick again. He couldn't believe what his ear looked like. I thought it looked pretty impressive!!

This is the look he sported for 1 week when he went to bed. He didn't want his ear to be ripped off while he slept! He didn't have to wear it during the day, thank goodness!! He only missed 2 days of school (including the surgery). Then it was back to normal.