My little Ry when he was Olivia’s age. These were taken on what became Olivia’s birthday 2 years later. Look at how much more hair he had than Olivia has! 

Every year, it never fails. The years come and go faster and faster and my favorite seasons, Spring and Summer, fly by. We celebrate Thanksgiving and the day after go right to work on making sure the upcoming Christmas is special in every way. Getting our tree, wrapping our presents, setting the decorations just so and even making sure our Mr. Elf on the Shelf lands in a new location every morning so the kids can find him first thing.

Before you know it though, it’s over. All of the anticipation and preparing is over just. like. that. We took down our tree and decorations on New Years Day and it left me, as it does every year, with a very sad and final feeling. Does this happen to anyone else?

I was able to get over it pretty quickly. I thought about how happy I was that my husband took a 1.5 week vacation over Christmas break so we could spend extra time with him. We made it out of town for a few days to spend time with family we rarely see. The kids had a fabulous Christmas and I have the video footage to prove it.  I received everything I asked for and more, I couldn’t be more appreciative. Now I have a new year to look forward to. Some changes with the blog will be taking place very soon. We’re going to go skiing, skating and sledding. Before I know it, my favorite seasons will be back and maybe they’ll be even better than last year, you know since I did eat the Herring on New Years for good luck and all.

I hope you all had a fantastic 2009, here’s to 2010!

Ryan and I actually made these for the first time last year. I found the Jolly Elves in my Parents magazine, thought they were super cute and looked easy enough for my 4 year old (at the time) and I to accomplish. We were able to find all of the supplies we needed at our local JoAnn Fabrics and we still had a bunch of the stuff left over that we haven’t been able to use for anything else yet so when Ryan had a couple of his friends over last week I gave them the supplies and let them be creative and make them however they pleased. They all had a lot of fun. Ryan decided he LOVES making these little guys so him and I made a bunch more that we’re going to attach with the gift tags on the the gifts that we are giving this year.