By the way...Santa came

We had a busy busy Christmas break (2 weeks for Campbell, 1 week for Ammon...zero for me). Campbell had a list of things he wanted to do over the break and that we did: bowling, 2 children's museums, tide pools, mini golf, story time at the library and most imporant...Grandma's house. We also had the extra bonus of Auntie Bethany visiting AND Brooke & Eric being in town.

And by the way...Santa Came!

1st and foremost...I got a new camera! Hooray! From Ammon...sorry Santa, Ammon gets the props for this one. (And I had no faith - I actually picked out and ordered the Mother's Necklace I wanted and handed it to Ammon to give to me...and he did give it to me, but he had much bigger and better things in mind.)

Back to Santa. He brought Cooper a new monkey to replace the sacrificed monkey (see Cooper's cousin Jack's monkey story here):


Isla was so excited about the stocking that we probably could have ended there and she would have been totally satisfied. Here she is showing Grandma her new Pez:


Santa delivered with the Criss Cross Crash. Campbell's been wanting it FOREVER...but of course he told me a couple of days before Christmas that he would rather just have more Wedgits. What? Santa likes to plan ahead. Luckily he still brought the Criss Cross Crash and Campbell was totally thrilled with it:


And Auntie Bethany played a very important role. Of course, she was on hand to have a tea party:


But her key role was in the hours spent building the Galaxy Marble Mania. A genius gift for Campbell from the Shepperts...but this puppy had 79 pages of instructions. And she read every last one. Bless you, Bethany:


The finished product:


And Bethany was then granted naptime...supervised by Isla.

**Sidenote: Isla had to put on every new outfit she got...and she LOVED each one. What a little girl!

Here we are visiting the tide pools at Little Corona del Mar:


And the family shot:


And 2 seconds before the family shot:


(And then one little girl turned two, yes TWO! But this warrants its own entry.)

Then we celebrated the new year. It has become a tradition to have all of the cousin kids over for a good confetti throw and snap fest. Even the littlest kid can appreciate throwing confetti and snaps (snaps outside, of course). It doesn't matter at all that we did it at 7pm. It was midnight somewhere.
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Happy New Year!