Merry Christmas!

What a wonderful Christmas we had! Christmas with kids is the best!!! I have been so excited for Christmas to come and it did not disappoint.

This year I stole Becca's idea to keep Christmas simple: something to wear, something to read, something you want, something you need. We have wanted to keep Christmas simple and more about Christ and less about presents but I still wanted it to be exciting. It hit me that the "something you need" could be A NEW ROOM - we needed to get him a new bed so we could take the crib back for the baby (he's slept in it as a toddler bed) and I thought if we did it for Christmas it would be exciting and not like baby sister is taking his stuff. So for the last two months I've been planning and plotting his room out but not able to execute anything since I wanted it all to be a Christmas morning surprise! So it finally came and it was so great!

In case you're curious the something you want was Ninjago Legos, something to read was a Children's Encyclopedia from Usborne books, and something to wear was snow boots.

So to make this surprise for his room happen we had a few things that needed to get done... first we bought a new dresser for our room so we could give Robby ours. Putting that Ikea dresser together was a BEAST of a project that took us from 10 pm to about 3:30 am... we did it Wednesday night... but it got done! Then we needed to move the 2 bookshelves out of the office into our bedroom so we had a place to put the baby's dresser and crib! We also bought another bookshelf so on Friday we had bookshelf night which resulted in this in our room:

Ok then on Christmas eve we put him to sleep in our room and started to get to work! I felt like I was on one of those TLC shows like "while you were out."

Before pics:

(dresser we'll use for baby, see the collage there with all the black & white pics - I made that about 3 years ago)

crib we'd had turned into toddler bed... he was getting way too tall for this thing! and we'll need it for little sister... see the little bookshelf... and his animal heads were on this wall...

Cleared out and cleaned out the room!

Thanks Andrew for coming and putting the bed together with Rob! Went way more smoothly than the dresser we put together earlier that week! And I could work on re-doing the photo collage at the same time! 

The finished product:

he has our old dresser but it's new to him and he's excited about it! Moved toy organizer to this wall...

Close up of the collage I redid... I love doing stuff like this...

took this tall bookshelf from our room, gives us more room to put games and toys on shelves and helped us organize his closet better! Hung up cousins calender and this cork board - the cork board has already fallen off (it was a stick on the wall kind) and we need to figure out a better way to hang it! He was really excited about that part.

 He slept on our floor that night. He thought we were just having a sleepover for fun!

We put up a sign and lights so he couldn't go into the hallway without us! 

 

Surprise! He was so excited!!!!!!!!!

He loves climbing into his big boy bed! Up the ladder... and he came up with another way using his stool and the window sill. He was just so surprised!

I couldn't get the video to upload on here so I created a picasa web album and I think the video is the first thing! There's also a bunch of other pictures of our Christmas stuff that I may or may not get around to blogging about! You can watch it here if you're interested:

https://picasaweb.google.com/101513013890981584451/Christmas2011

I was so focused on this awesome Christmas present for him I didn't even think about what I was going to get! Rob still managed to surprise me and get me some fun stuff - including some coupons to get my car washed and detailed which I'm really excited about! I LOVE a clean car! 

Mostly this Christmas I'm just so grateful for my little family! And my big family (brothers, sisters, in-laws, best friends...). And for this baby!! Oh my goodness! She is growing so big inside of me and feels like she never stops moving and even though it's not the most comfortable thing in the world it's still the best feeling ever! We are so blessed! We are grateful for our Savior Jesus Christ and for the Gospel! All these things bring us true happiness and I'm so grateful for that! 

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas!!! 

love, The Parsons

little update....

This was just cute and I wanted to remember it....
Robby asked Rob, "Dad, is Scott your best friend?"
Rob, "Scott? Scott Carter?"
Robby: "Yeah."
Rob: "No, he's a good friend but not my best friend."
Robby: "Who's your best friend?"
Rob: "Who do you think?" (I was thinking at that point Robby would say Will...)
Robby's eyes light up and he says with confidence, "ME!"
Pretty much the sweetest thing ever. :)

One night I was walking past Robby's room to the kitchen and I saw him lying beside his open door, asleep. This is very unusual for him! He thought it was so funny when I showed him the picture. :)
 

 First time ice skating! He was pretty nervous at first because it was super crowded but he can't wait to go back and do it again.

 

The 6 month belly... (Robby my photographer)

  

My attempt...

Proud big brother! :)

Happy Birthday Honey!

 Happy Birthday Rob! We are very lucky to have such a wonderful dad for our little family! We hope he had a good day! He got to sleep in, went to work for a few hours, had a little date and used his bday coupon at Tucanos for lunch, got a massage from my awesome Aunt Miriam, then came home and we had a little party with Andrew & Becca. Since we had a big lunch I was trying to think of something lighter for dinner and one of Rob's favorite things is yummy sandwiches so we had those and tried to copy the dessert from The Chocolate for a cake - warmed up cookie dough with ice cream! Yum! Robby wanted to get balloons for daddy and I even put up streamers - I'm not one to usually decorate really so I think Rob knows he must be pretty special! :)

 

 We had to do the candles BEFORE we cooked the cookie dough cause we weren't sure if it'd hold them up after it was cooked!

 The finished product.... mmm...

Andrew & Becca gave Rob a coupon for 5 FREE HUGS! (Modern Family anyone??) Ha ha... the kids were all giving hugs and Luke and Robby wanted to join in... 

Robby says what he loves about daddy is that he plays football with him and wrestles with him and he loves him really much.

I'm grateful for how hard he works for our family. I know he'll always take care of us and keep us safe (he is always armed you know! ha ha). We have so much fun together and I feel lucky to be married to my best friend.

LOVE YOU ROB!

Happy Halloween!

 We had a lovely Halloween! Robby decided he wanted to be a football player - surprise surprise! Third year in a ROW. He really considered some other options but couldn't resist his favorite costume. We got together with A&B and Liv&Scott and had a yummy dinner before hand and then Robby had a blast getting tons of candy in their neighborhood! We even added a fun new treat this year - homemade scones! Rob has fond memories of frying up scones on Halloween nights with the Pratts and we were happy to try this! Yum!

We'll definitely have to try these scones again soon - they were sooo good! We made honey butter to go with them and put cinnamon sugar on them... 

 

This morning Robby and I spent a long time looking at his candy... we organized them and counted them... he forgot that we had emptied his bucket into a bag before he went back out for a second round so after we went through the bucket and he was all excited about his goodies I surprised him with his other bag ful and he was soooo happy! Ahhh it was so cute!

 Now what the heck are we going to DO with all this candy??? I think back to my childhood with my pillowcase full of candy and I think we were just allowed to eat it as much as we wanted!!! Also we always stayed home from school the day after Halloween to trade our candy and recover... ahhh good times!

While I want to just let him go at it and have as much as he can eat I can really see a difference in his mood/attitude when he's had too much sugar! Today I had him eat breakfast and then let him eat a bunch of candy. Then we had a green smoothie (heavy on the green today) to try to combat the sugar. But I don't know what to do with the rest... let him pick one piece a day for the rest of the year? Buy it from him? Trade it for something else... hmm... and I'd rather get it out of the house sooner than later so I don't eat it too!

Fall fun!

If I was keeping up with my blogging each of these activities would be its own post but oh well! We've been enjoying this fall weather lots and have gotten to go to some fun places.

Hee Haw Farms

 We got to take home a pumpkin...

They had a cute little petting zoo area where the kids had a blast with the animals! 

 Robby wouldn't look up because he didn't want to be the cow. Oh well. :)

After what felt like forever we made it out of the Corn Maze! Yay!

Orem Fire Department

 Demonstrations showing what a grease fire looks like... 

 Yikes! Point is don't add water and don't use the fire extinguisher on a grease fire. They said try to smother it with the lid of the pot and if that doesn't work GET OUT OF THE HOUSE and call them!

 Practicing CPR on the "doll"

Witches Night Out

@Gardner Village

 As usual Witches Night Out is the best girls night out of the year! Dancing with your girls and grabbing food afterward? Basically perfect. Another awesome year...

 Cornbelly's

 This corn maze was wayyyy too hard for our group... we had to ditch out halfway through...

Halloween Parties

So far we've gotten to go to a little neighborhood party and our Ward party! I didn't take many pictures at the Ward party because we were helping so I was busy running around but it turned out awesome!

 Robby kept standing by me dancing to the music but no one else was... until we got them to turn up the music and then all the kids were rockin out! (it reminded me of myself usually bouncing around to the music by myself wanting to dance... ha ha)

 Getting ready for the ward party! We couldn't find his Spiderman outfit he wore the time before so luckily he wasn't feeling picky and put on his Superman costume which I thought worked great! He was working it!

 Robby and his cute friend Seabass... Robby gets so shy at these activities! I'm glad he had a pal to do the trick or treating with!

In honor of his recent hunting excursion... maybe I can get him to post about that later...

Pumpkinland

Robby's attempts at taking a picture of us... he and Syd were taking our pictures and we were laughing so hard because they looked so cute with their cameras pointed at us!

 This kid is my best little buddy! I'm so lucky I get to spend every day with him! He makes me so happy!

 

Whew! We've done a lot! And I'm exhausted! :) Pumpkinland was today - we were lucky the weather turned out perfect!!! It was great to be able to hang out and chat with the girls while the kids ran around.