Arizona Christmas

A few days after Christmas, we went down to Phoenix to spend a week with the Stauth family. Darren's sister and her family live in Denver and have made it tradition for 12 years to go down to Phoenix for the fun. This is our first year travelling to Phoenix after living there for so many years! This trip is something we will continue to look forward to, year after year. It will be amazing to watch as our kids grow as the Hobens have watched theirs turn into adolescents and young adults.

Christmas in Phoenix usually entails a lot of family, fun, and FOOD! I think we ate out almost every single lunch and dinner we were there! Our first evening there, Tevin enjoyed his milk in his "big boy straw cup", and Brynlee liked sucking on a slice of pizza. The whole family posed for a picture... I think there were almost 20 people there! The following night, we had Christmas with The Stauths at Darren's grandparents' place. Brynlee got two new baby dolls which she snuggled and loved so much. A few days after that, we enjoyed our traditional trip to Oregano's, a delicious Italian place in Scottsdale. We went to Civic Center Park for pictures. It was indeed nice to get out of the cold and into short sleeves for a week!

Christmas!

The first picture is actually from a few days before Christmas but it's so cute!

Christmas Eve was spent at Gammy's house with all of the uncles and aunt, and even great Aunt Kristin. We all had a very good time enjoying eachother's company.

Christmas morning, Tevin woke up and came downstairs to find that Santa had brought him a new electric train. It was chugging around the track which was carefully placed around the tree skirt under the tree. We were so excited to see his reaction that we forgot to get his face on film but it was indeed priceless. He was also excited to see that Santa had eaten all the cookies we'd made for him the day before.

Both kids were in awe of the events, and the fun continued at Grandpa's house on Christmas Day when they found a new red wagon to enjoy! We spent a very long time going up and down Grandpa's long hallway, back and forth, back and forth. We didn't get a lot of pictures of the events because we were so busy taking it all in.

Kyndall's Graduation

Kyndall is Darren's oldest neice. She graduated from CU Boulder on Dec. 21. We went to the ceremony up at the campus. Tevin clapped when everyone else clapped and when everyone stopped, he would put his finger up to his mouth and say, "Shhhh!!" It was so funny. Afterward we went to her party. We stayed all day and had a lot of fun with the family, including Grandma and Granddad who flew in from Phoenix for the big occasion.

Christmas 2007

Wishing everyone the very best this holiday season! We love you and miss those we won't see this year. Please keep in touch!

Signs of the Season

Saturday evening it started to snow and when we woke up in the morning on Sunday, we had about 6 inches on the ground. It was the first official Shoveling Snow! Darren and the kids played in it while I took pictures. Tevin enjoyed hauling loads of the white stuff up and down the sidewalk in his yellow dump truck. Brynlee enjoyed crawling in it but quickly realized she'd rather walk (holding my hands, of course, so I couldn't get pictures of that). Tevin made a snow angel without my prompting which is something he had seen on Elmo's World in recent weeks. We had a fun few minutes in the snow before the gloves fell off and fingers started to freeze. I'm sure we're in for a lot more snow before this winter is over. We do hope it doesn't snow quite as much as it did last year but we do love the seasons here in Colorado.

Here is our tree! We put it up the first weekend in December. The tree is situated in the front room because we figured it would be the best place for the kids to ignore it. That theory works most of the time although we always know when Brynlee has wandered into the tree room because it gets very quiet and we soon find her pulling on the ornaments!

Most Determined Award

We knew going to bed that snow was going to fall all night and the roads would be icy. We heard on the news last night that this morning's rush hour was going to be bad. Little did we know the rails would be bad too! Around 6 a.m. a coal train derailed, and shortly thereafter, a light rail train hit that coal train, shutting down the line Darren normally rides to work. Around 6:30 a.m., Darren called me to find out whether or not the train was even running. At that time, the news had said NO. The road he was on was shut down due to the train crash investigation. So he started driving toward the East Lines, which would mean at least an hour on one of the highways just to get over to the crowded train station on the other side of town. After spending a considerable amount of time in stand-still traffic, he was about to run out of gas and slowly made his way to a station (they are few and far between in this particular part of town) only to find the pumps were not working. I kept telling him he should come home until we figured out this mess, and the worst-case scenario would be that he'd get there by lunch. Darren was just so determined to get to work, so he back tracked and ended up getting on the road he was originally on (which had reopened) and getting on the train north of where the crash was. He had so many things go wrong this morning but he made it to work about 2 1/2 hours after he left the house. I hereby give Darren the Most Determined Award for the season!

Crazy Hair

Ok this post is kind of silly but I wanted to put SOMETHING on the site because I haven't done much lately. Here it is, December 5th, and my latest post is from November! How lazy of me! ;) Seriously though, we are staying very busy. This past Sunday, we put up our tree. I started working on lights for the outside of the house yesterday but the wind halted my progress about halfway through. If I don't get another nice day before too long, we're going to have just one sad string of lights along the gutter above the garage! I guess I shouldn't complain; this is the first year we have put lights on the house since, well, WAY before we had two small kiddos running around.

We're excited for the coming events of the season! Check back often for updated posts of all our holiday shenanigans!