Christmas at the Lanier's!

First of all, we want to wish all of our friends and family a wonderful Christmas and may your New Year be filled with love, peace and joy.  This Christmas season, were have been so thankful and so blessed. It has been a rough few months adjusting to our new home, our new community, Nick's new job, and him going away a lot.  We have had a lot of stress in our lives in one form or another in this last bit of time, but we looked very forward to our first Christmas in our new home.  

This year we had to cut back a bit on Christmas.  We've been in our home for about 5 and a half months now, and it has been a bit different for us financially.  For the last 8 years, we've lived in military housing on an Army post and while we've paid for housing via our BAH, we have not had to pay for utilities.  Now we have electric/water/sewer, etc. in addition to our mortgage.  We are still getting used to the extra bills as they fluctuate quite a bit, especially the electric, with the seasons.  The girls have been reading the Little House series of books and we talked about what it was like in those times, that they did not go to Walmart, or Target or to the Mall to purchase gifts for each other.  The girls surprised me, suddenly, no more attention was spent on the latest toy and electronic commercials on the television, and instead they were focused on brainstorming gift ideas of things they could make for our family members.  We had set aside a little to be able to get them each a small santa gift, and the rest we were making by hand. They knew it would be a small Christmas, but they were okay with that, focused not on gifts they wanted, but on gifts they could invest their time and heart in to give.

Well, we were surprised by a couple of angels/santas that sent some wonderful surprise packages of gifts for the girls.  My "thank you's" just didn't seem to be enough words to express the gratitude that I had for these kind and generous folks.  All I can say is we have been truly blessed.  My girls came out wide-eyed on Christmas morning to more than they had dreamed of, and the wonder in their eyes was fabulous.  Sophia said, "Wow!  I really wasn't expecting this much!"  Juliette said, "Wow! We must have been REALLY good this year!" and Hannah just stood by with amazement on her face, see she knows about Santa now and thought she knew exactly what would be under our tree.  Evy just got very excited and yelled, "Pesents!!  Santa Clock bing me pesents!"  It was such a wonderful gift to our family, and those of you know who you are and I thank you truly from the bottom of my heart.  Between friends and family, this Christmas was truly one of the best ever, material things aside.  We are looking forward to being in the position of paying it forward in the future.

Below I have just posted some of the photos sharing our day.  Thank you for allowing me to share the wonders of this day with you!

Cookie making on Christmas Eve:

Christmas morning

Evy seeing her Rose Petal Cottage for the first time:

The girls and some of their presents:

Evy in her house and in front of the tree:

Sophia by the tree:

And Juliette ready for bed in the night gown I made her:

I didn't get any of Hannah in front of the tree because she spent most of the day with her nose in a book she had been wanting. 

Thank you so much for sharing our day!  Hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas and may you have a Happy New Year!

Our first Thanksgiving in our new home!

I know Thanksgiving is past us now and I am a bit behind on posting holiday pics, but I just didn't want to miss out on the opportunity to share our first Thanksgiving in our new home with all of our friends and family.  If you are on my Facebook, chances are you have seen all of these pictures, but if you haven't seen them yet, I hope you enjoy them!

We were happy to have a nice low-key Thanksgiving this year.  We had invited some of Nick's Soldiers to come and enjoy dinner with us, but it turned out that they all had someplace else to go, so it was just us.  Last year, we had extra guests, friends whose spouses were deployed or away in training, and the couple of years before that we had big gatherings with all of our neighbors, so this is the first year in a while it was just us.  We had to remember to get a smaller turkey and to not make as many side dishes as we usually prepare.  When I look at the pictures, it seems like our "spread" is so small, but in reality, we still had plenty of leftovers.  

This year, all the girls who were old enough helped to prepare a dish for our dinner.  It was fabulous and they all took such pride in helping prepare our meal.  I think this is a tradition we will carry forward.

Here is Hannah making the green bean casserole

Juliette's job was the corn casserole

Sophia was the chef of our delicious pumpkin pie

Hannah also was trusted with a knife (after a demonstration) and she cut up the celery and carrots for the stuffing

And one last photo of our table all set with the china ready to eat our Thanksgiving feast!

We are so thankful this year that we get to spend another holiday season together as a family and so grateful that we are blessed with our home in Georgia!

Sophia is 8 years old!

Sophia turned 8 on the 21st of December.  Since her birthday falls so close to Christmas, we decided not to have a party with friends since it would be unlikely that any of them could have come.  We are thinking of having a "friend" party for her sometime in January.  We normally would skip it, but the last 2 birthdays have been family affairs since we were in TX and all of her friends had moved away.  Now we live in a neighborhood chock full of kids and the girls are so excited to have "real" parties again.  Hannah didn't get one this year as we were still unpacking and the house was in no shape for company, but Jules did, so of course, Sophia wants one too.

She had a great time.  Her birthday fell on a Sunday this year and that was nice because usually when birthdays are a week day, we wait until Daddy gets home to open presents, but since it was a weekend (and Nick was on leave as well) she got to open her presents in the morning, hence the nightgown she is wearing in her present pictures, lol.  Sophia loves cars, specifically race cars so we had the great idea of putting a race track on her cake.  We decided that we could use 2 rounds and make an "8" shaped cake with a figure eight race track.  She can't have artificial coloring due to her migraine headaches, so we went with a chocolate frosting, which made a perfect "dirt" track.  She loved her cake.

One of her favorite presents was a shell that Hannah got out of Granny's yard on her 8th birthday, that Hannah gave to her.  She was so pleased with that shell, as she admired it often.  We got her an Our Generation Doll for her big present.  She is always wishing she had curly hair, so we chose a doll with dark hair like her, and curly too.  The doll she got is a flower girl, and that is only fitting as Sophia will be a flower girl in her Aunt Leanna's wedding in April.  (Now I need to figure out how to get her hair to hold a curl!)  Some other gifts she loved were a Junie B. Jones book from Aunt Lizzie, and some snowman pajamas from Granny and Paw Paw.  The only thing Sophia loves more than cars are snowmen!  She was also a lucky girl and got a frog webkinz that I had tucked away a year ago saving for a special day.  

Here are some pictures of her with her gifts, her birthday cake, and a couple I was able to get of her in her birthday outfit by the tree.  Enjoy!!

Sophia and her Alexis doll

Here she is with her other presents:

Sweet Sophia in front of the tree:

And here she just had to have a silly one!

And here is her birthday cake and a picture of her blowing out her candle!

Thanks so much for sharing her special day with us!

Pictures!!

I am trying to go chronologically here in order of when the photos were taken, to go along with my chronological update.  Hope you enjoy!

Here's what happens when you give a toddler a cookie in the back seat!

Here is Hannah in the back seat, and then a pic of the middle girls in the way back:

Here are my favorite pictures of our trip to St. Louis:

Girls by the arch:

Evy not looking showing some Cardinals spirit:

And Nick and Evy at the St. Louis Zoo:

This is Hannah, Sophia and Juliette in the rocking chairs outside of one of the many Cracker Barrel's we ate at on our trip.  I have a similar picture somewhere just like this when the girls were younger!

A great family picture at the Nashville Zoo!

Here are some of the pictures from Dollywood!

And alas, some photos of our new house!  First up is the kitchen after we re-did it (cupboards used to be a dark brown and the walls were white, we've since replaced the fridge that died with a white one and we hope to slowly be able to start replacing the other appliances with newer, better functioning ones that are white and are energy efficient!)

And some pictures of our living room and dining room!

Here is Evy's version of what an Army boot should look like!

And the rest are random pictures of the girls!  Hannah is 10, Sophia will be 8 in 3 days, Juliette is 6, and Evelynn is 2!  Enjoy!