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Christmas Recap

Merry Christmas everyone!! We had the most wonderful Christmas. Dad was home this year and Santa was extra generous with us. Fiona was so much fun this year. Her top two favorite gifts were her bike which she only left to play with her powerwheels from PopPop. she even ate her breakfast on her bike. she really was a hoot to watch. It took all day to open most of her gifts and she just loved them all.

Here are a few pics from the day. I will have videos of Christmas Eve and Christmas day up later today...The one from Christmas eve is hilarious at the end!!

I am a bad, bad girl cuz I didn't get my Christmas Cards out. So be on the look out for a special Valentine Card from us.

Love you all and Happy New Year!!

New Addition to our little family

Today was a big day in the Hyland household. We went to see Santa today and Santa had a little surprise waiting for us - Bridgett Hyland.

She is Labrador Retriever Mix, 10 months old and we rescued her from a local shelter here. It was a bit chaotic meeting her and getting all the dog stuff (I just got rid of all the stuff we had from Riley), but she is seriously a perfect fit so far for our family. She is the sweetest natured dog, loves Fiona they were running around and laughing this evening. Novi, our cat, as seen below, is not exactly happy about a new member - but he is tolerating her much better than the other dogs who have come to visit us.

Fiona thinks Bridget's crate is her new playhouse...
Novi not too happy about sharing his Mommy, Daddy and Fiona

We really missed having a dog as a part of our family, and now we feel that the house feels nice and full.

Snow Day

Well, if you hadn't heard it on the news, we had a HUGE freak snowstorm here in the desert. When all was said and done, we ended up with about 13 inches of snow!!! Can you believe it?? The city closed down (and still is closed today) all the highways in and out of the area also were closed, many people were stranded. lucky that Mike had taken off work yesterday so we could see Santa, but apparently even Santa was having a hard time getting around and we didn't get to see him.

Heather is in town also, and had planned to drive to Fresno to visit with a friend, but had to turn back after 30 miles - it took her over 7 hours to drive 60 miles yesterday. She is so glad she made it back here.

here are the picks from Fiona's first time in the snow - she HATED it. We took her out today to try and make a snowman, but no such luck. It is pretty beautiful, but it totally reminded me why I don't want to live in the Northeast again, LOL!!

Snow is almost gone already today it'll be gone by this weekend I am sure, but it was pretty amazing to get so much snow around Christmas...

SANTA CAME EARLY!!!!

Well, to my great surprise (sorta - cuz I have been bugging Santa alot) I got my Christmas present yesterday!! A Nikon D60 camera - my dream of all dream cameras!! It rocks I took like 150 pictures today just to play around with it!! Still getting used to the whole SLR thing but it is a load of fun and I got some good shots today. I figure the more I practice the better I'll get :)

And the other great cool thing?? Heather is coming to visit tomorrow and she is staying with us with a short little break until the 22nd!! How much better can Christmas get???

Here are some of the pics from today...

Advent Calendar...ooooohhh Lights

First, today we started our First Advent Calendar. We are doing for Daddy and Fiona since Daddy is also doing RCIA and I wanted to him to experience the joy of the Advent Calendar like all good Catholic kids do...

Fiona got a pair of Christmas Socks that light up. She wanted to play with them so bad so I let her. I look over and this is how I found her a few minutes later:



yes, she is wearing the socks like a headband!! LOL!! got to give her points for creativity.

Then there was the "stringing up the lights" portion of the afternoon. I though, hey, I can put the lights on the tree while Fiona watches her 2nd favorite guy, Handy Manny. So I pull out the step ladder climb up and start putting on the lights, only to have Fiona start climbing up the ladder after me. Apparently, since accomplishing our stairs and the ladders to the slides at the park, the step ladder was quite enticing. Now, I must explain one thing about Fiona, she is a sensitive soul and does not like being told no. The girl will take a tumble on her head, get up and rub it and be fine. You say to her, "Honey, this is dangerous, please don't climb up here." The Girl just melts down. - Ask anyone!! so I made the mistake of nicely asking her not to climb on the ladder, while I am at the 3 step, she just sits down on the second step and begins to melt down. Great now I am stuck and can't get down to get her off or to comfort her... Somehow I finagled a toe on the second step and made my way down. Needless to say we waited until Daddy got home and finished up the lights. Check out our beautiful lighted tree:



so then we started decorating the tree. it started out well, Fiona playing in the gold beads - in truest Fancy Fiona fashion, that is until Fiona, and seriously it was like watching it in slow motion, took a glass ball turned towards the kitchen floor and throws it as hard as she can and smashes it into a million peices. Kids and experimentation, Hey I wonder what would happen if I throw this over there?? ok, not so good - ball breaks. Hopefully the mental note to self not to do that again kicks in. Needless to say there are 3 boxes of glass ornaments that are safely in the box in the garage this season. but here are a couple of cute pics:

It was a lot of fun and I will post more tree pics later.