Family College Station Visit

For six years now, we've been talking about needing to make a family trip to College Station to see my friend Rachel and her family.  We've seen Rachel and Elaine at least once a football season, but they'd never met the girls.  We finally made it!  Had a super fun time, got to spend some time with Rachel and then got to run around campus with the girls.  I think that the girls had a great time - I've never looked at campus from the parent perspective, but there is a lot for the kids to see and on a random December weekend, there was plenty of free space to run around.  That being said, there wasn't a lot of sitting still for picture purposes, but I got a few.

 I didn't spend a lot of time on main campus and maybe saw this fountain a few times during my time at A&M.  The girls could have spent the entire afternoon there.  

 Pretty flowers attract butterflies and little girls.

I guess maybe the corp uses these monkey bars during drills or something.  They were crazy tall, but Ella really wanted to hang from them.  Michael was just barely able to get her up there.  

Thanksgiving 2012

Another great Thanksgiving.  Pretty much the same routine as every other year.  Great time with family and yummy food. 

 This year Ella was big enough to help with the green bean casserole.

 Very focused green bean stirring. 

 The annual turkey dunk.

 Cute family pic minus Addison.  She had a big slumber party with Aunt Jean, Uncle Tom, Betsy and Granny and they hadn't made it to the party yet.

We kind of wondered why all of the guys volunteered to sit with the kids and then before we know it, the TV was unpaused and they were watching the Texans. 

Silly Ella

She always keeps us laughing...

For a couple of days, I'd go in to get Ella up from her nap and she 'd be sleeping on Big Dog.  One day he was more of a pillow, the next a full mattress.  

Ella LOVES White Kitten.  Here Meow, Meow White Kitten is giving Ella a hug.  She totally comes up with this stuff, not us!

Ella's First Haircut

I was fully expecting this outing to be a huge mistake - taking both kids to the haircut place on a Saturday and Ella had never been before. Therefore, it was the exact opposite of what I expected and it was a wonderful experience, Ella did great.  I expected fighting when we put her up in the chair, none of that.  I expected she'd hate having the drape thing on her, she didn't even notice it was there.  I figured she'd pull the clips out when the lady was putting the sections of her hair up, not at all.  The end result was a super cute trimmed hairstyle and a super happy mommy and Ella.

 So, maybe the lollipop, sparkly thing and tv show helped the situation! 

San Antonio

We took a break from Feast with the Beast this year and decided to head out of town for the weekend with Mark and Melissa to celebrate Melissa and my 21st birthdays!  When we arrived in the city the only thing we knew we wanted to do was watch the Aggie game.  We ended up doing dinner and drinks of the Riverwalk on Friday.  Then a casual breakfast at a local dive on Saturday, followed by some shopping at El Mercado.  Even managed a trip to the Alamo before planting ourselves on bar stools for the game.