Last visitors

Right before we moved, we had a few last visitors.  Mamaquel and Grandpa Whetten came.  We took them to the house we were in the process of buying and walked around the outside and peeked in the windows.  

We also had Grandma Mindy come for a quick visit and showed her the outside of the new house too. 

old / new house

When we moved into our first house on Coral Harbor in 2003 we didn't expect to be there long.  We thought we would maybe be there for the four years of Matt's residency training and then move on due to being in the military.  It ended up that because of the specialty Matt chose we would be moving back to San Antonio after a fellowship in North Carolina, so we decided to keep the house as a rental so we could move back in after fellowship.  We revised our plans to live there for a few more years to save money and when Kylee was getting ready to go to middle school we would move.  Though we loved our elementary school, the middle and high schools for which we were zoned were not great. 

When Matt and I started looking at houses, we knew it would be a while before we were in the market to buy one.  We wanted to find the perfect house in the best location and were prepared to take several years to look.  We narrowed down a few neighborhoods that we wanted to be in.   We were pretty low key for our realtor.  He didn't really look for houses for us, he would send us all the houses for sale within the area and price we wanted. We would look at all of them and we would let him know the houses that we were interested in seeing.  He would make the appointments and we would go check them out.  If the house was great, the yard wasn't.  Some of the houses had great yards, but not enough bathrooms.  I was surprised at how many houses that were pretty good size and only had 2 full bathrooms.  Matt had seen a house that he liked listed in October and he liked it.  He decided in December to see if it was still on the market.  It was, so we decided to check it out.  The minute we stepped in, I liked it.  The more we looked the more we realized it had all the things we had been looking for.  Everything was great.  There were many things it had that we hadn't seen in other houses.  We decided that evening to put an offer on it. It had been on the market several months so we were discussing how much less to offer when our realtor called.   The seller's agent had told him there were 2 other offers.  Worried we would miss out on the only house in nearly two years of looking that had almost exactly what we wanted, we offered 5 thousand more than the list price.  We were thrilled when it was accepted.

Julia's Winter Wonderland Party

Julia's birthday lands in the middle of the crazy Christmas Season.  To not add to the craziness we had her party on January 19th.  She wanted a Winter snowflake theme.  I had fun getting stuff together to decorate and use for the party.  We hung snowflakes through out the house.  In their take home goodies the kids got a pail with bubble bath, bubbles, a fun straw, and a snowflake ornament.  I was able to find a pinata that kind of looked like a snowflake.

We played some winter themed games.  They had a race of dressing up a snowman.  They used toilet paper to wrap a team member up and put on a hat, scarf, and gloves. 

They also had a relay race of balancing a cotton ball on a spoon and they had a snowball fight.  They had to try and get all the snowballs on the other teams side.  They had a lot of fun throwing them.  

Those that attended the party from left right:

Brayden, Brant Jensen, Blake, Katie Mason, Cameron Jensen, Brienz Dahlke, Julia, Brooke Ball, Kylee, Andrew Mason, and Ryan Jensen

Since Matt had made a pretty fancy cake on Julia's birthday, we decided to go the easy route for her party.  We bought a rainbow cake that was pretty fun.  

Career day round #3

This year Career Day at Bob Lewis ended up being in January instead of at the end of the school year.  I was able to take the day off to participate.  I requested Julia's class since I had done Kylee's and Brayden's classes in previous years.  

It was fun talking about eyes with Julia's class and the other two classes that rotated through the room.  Both of the other two presenters Julia heard from were military, one of them in the medical field.  He brought blue gloves for the kids, which was a hit.   

Having taken the day off from work, I was able to pick the kids up after school and I saw a bunch of first graders sporting their new roll up sunglasses I had handed out to the classes along with their fancy blue gloves.

Brayden's favorite was a parent who worked at a radio station.

A week afterward I got a nice certificate of appreciation and a manilla envelope full of thank you notes from the kids.

My favorite one was Julia's.  

Donut the Elf

As I was getting out our Christmas decorations I found the Christmas Elf that was given to us from the Herrera family in a past Christmas.  I decided to get it out so that the kids could name it and have their actions be monitored by the elf to report to Santa.  They named the elf Donut.  At first it mostly creeped them out.  The idea that that it would watch them and move around at night was a little disturbing.  Concerned that it would come into their rooms during the night, they had a hard time falling asleep.  The first morning they were so freaked out not knowing where it would be.  To make things worse, the power had gone out and we couldn't turn on the lights so they were trying to find the elf in the dark. They slowly walked down the stairs huddled together looking all around, as if something was going to jump out at them.  To help the kids get their anxiety under control and be able to go to sleep at night we made a rule that Donut could not go up stairs.  After a few days they got used to it and calmed down.  No longer concerned about waking up to him staring them in the eye, they were excited to see where he was each morning and what he had done during the night.

St. Moritz Reunion

Bailey, Avery, Kylee, Julia, Blake, Jackson, Brayden, Mitchell, and Gavin

The Caraways drove to Austin to spend Christmas with Damen's family.  They had planned to come and spend a night with us in San Antonio. We let the Vaughn's know and invited them over to have a little reunion.  We got a call earlier that day letting us know that their plans had changed.  They had recently discovered that their daughter Sydney had lice (the one Julia's age) and she would be staying in Austin with her grandparents.  They were only going to be able to stay for the evening and not stay the night so that Sydney wouldn't be left out. It was fun to get together and talk about our times in The Villas of St. Moritz.  The kids had a lot of fun playing.

Christmas 2012

In 2012 we stayed in San Antonio for Christmas and enjoyed the holidays with our immediate family.  Sunday before Christmas Pictures

 

Christmas Eve Pajamas and books. 

Christmas morning right before the craziness. 

The kids enjoyed some Christmas Train building and Matt really enjoyed all the Gingerbread Grandma Mindy sent in the mail.