Did I catch a Niner?

Yep! He's is 9! Howie started out as a tiny little 5 and a half pound baby who was so kind as to let me finish my Thanksgiving pie before deciding to make an entrance to this world. That is so typical of him now. He is the child who will nicely ask for something one time and then sit patiently until I can get to it. Actually, now he just does it himself because I usually take too long. Howie hardly cried as a baby. He was happy to just sit and watch what was going on. He was especially interested in what Donovan was doing and has always tried to keep up. But somewhere along the way he caught up and matured beyond his years. Howie has such an enjoyable personality and sense of humor and we just love him so much. It was a great pleasure to celebrate his birthday today!

Time to decorate the house!

Nothing puts me in the mood to decorate like staying up all night to go shopping with my sister. And I'm being serious. I had some kind of adrenaline rush going on and I took full advantage of it. So after pretty much finishing all our Christmas shopping, we had the decorations up and happily started off our Christmas season.

Howie was his usually helpful self. He added a few smartie pants comments here and there to keep things lively. And by lively, I mean Nina screaming and crying.

But Nina settled down and was delighted to discover all the Christmas books. Each and every one.

Rex helped unpack any box he could reach. And if he couldn't reach them, he found a way.

Matt made this face every time he got a string of lights to finally start working. He never yelled, "Fine! If you're so smart, you string up the lights!" So I think it was a success.

Ahh, so pretty.

We waited until two days before we left for Reno to put presents under the tree. Just enough time for the kids to order, reorder, shake, stack and all the other things that need to be done to presents.

I stopped by Michael's to get a few things. I wondered why it cost so much, but tried to get out of there before Rex lost it. I came home and realized that Cameron snuck a bunch of Santa hats into the cart. And took off the tags and started wearing them before I could return them. Now everyone has a Santa hat.

The Happy Boys

There's not much to say here. Our boys were happy 99.9% of the time and that makes me happy.

Rex was happy that he got to climb things.

Donovan and Howie were happy that they got to shoot things.

Matt likes to shoot things too.

Donovan was happy that he got to ride a wild animal.

Cameron and Rex were happy that they got to wait forever while the older and taller kids waited forever to ride the new Cars ride observe the crowd.

These 3 were happy to play with bugs.

Sometimes you are happy for reasons that your mom doesn't know about.

Donovan and Howie were happy that they got all wet on the Grizzly River Run. They were probably happy that I let them ride it twice by themselves.

Rex is always happy to spend time with Matt.

Rex is happy that he doesn't know yet that this ride totally freaked him out.

It's pretty obvious why Rex is happy here. He figured out a way to pass the time while the older kids got to have all the fun on the rides. He got to sample all their lollipops.

These 3 are happy to be newly trained Jedi Padawans.

Cameron is happy that he didn't have to ride Space Mountain and got to meet Wreck It Ralph.

Donovan is always happy to have candy

Howie, Cameron and Rex are happy to give me their best smiles.

First day of fun

Matt was a diligent cameraman on this trip. I didn't realize how good he was until I got home and loaded the pictures onto the computer. I love how many pictures he took of us on rides. Those will be great memories! I want to post them for our own family journaling purposes, so feel free to just scroll on down.

So this might not technically qualify as a ride, but it was the first thing we did when we got to the park. Okay, so another technicality. They all went on Star Tours first while we waited for Jedi Training to begin. I have no idea where our three older boys are in this picture, but I know they are there.

We made a few rookie mistakes on this trip. One was letting the kids go on the Monorail. It's a dumb ride. Another was how to divide the kids up so one of us could stay with Rex while the other took kids on rides. We sent the 4 kids with Matt to ride Autopia without realizing that we would be one adult short. Luckily this nice lady, who doesn't want to be identified, offered to take Nina and Howie. Yay for nice people.

The rides in Fantasyland are those classic rides that I loved when I was young. We spent almost all of our first day going through these rides. The rides aren't all that exciting, but Disney just has a way of making everything seem awesome and magical.

I never got to go head to head against Matt on these arcade rides, but I totally would have beat him if we did. As long as he got to have Rex on his lap. And on a related note, we saw tons of couples with those Just Married matching Mickey ears. I think Matt and I missed a great opportunity to garner strange reactions. Next time.

These pictures were funny surprises to me. Matt has an awesome expression. It captures just the right amount of excitement, an attempt to concentrate, delight, hunger and passion.

Disneyland "family" pictures

I'm not really sure how to go about posting pictures from our trip to Disneyland. I've thought it over, walked back and forth to the kitchen for more caramels (3 times)and made a decision. So, it doesn't really make sense, but it will keep me from going out of body while I put the posts together. And I'm out of caramels. Here are some of the family pictures we took at Disneyland. For the purposes of this post, a "family" picture will include any picture with 4 or more of us. Just want to be clear.

Here you can see some of the must have souveniers our kids accumulated. We still have the hats, but I threw away the glow-in-the-dark-lightsabers-that-we-used-to-bribe-kids-to-go-on-ThunderMountain-at-night-because-I-wanted-to-go-again-but-some-kids-thought-it-would-be-too-scary-and-frankly-they-were-getting-on-my-nerves.

This is a picture of the happiest Nina you'll ever see. And her family. I'm pretty sure she thinks that the Disney princesses are all, in fact, Bona fide princesses. Disney really knows how to market these ladies and this dinner was perfect. You pay quite a price for this kind of perfection, but it was truly worth it.

Who needs Broadway when you can see the Aladdin musical at Disneyland? We all loved it.

This was our first picture in the park. There was some movie being filmed that morning so the flower Mickey at the front of the park was roped off.

Here is our brood in front of a house outside of Alice in Wonderland. After we went on that ride, it made me want to watch that movie again. I'm guessing that I'll still think it's a weird movie though.

We thought it would be best to lock the kids up in Toontown with these ginormous suckers. Rex was locked up in his stroller. Without a sucker and without a smile.

The classic picture at the Sword in the Stone. I love Donovan's puffed cheeks.

I was a little disappointed about this part of our trip. When I was younger, our family loved to go on Splash Mountain and pose for the camera on the ride. Well, some of us posed, others groped (allegedly by accident). So Rex is a shorty which meant that Matt and I couldn't ride at the same time which for sure meant no groping. We divided up the kids and my group did not pose. They screamed for dear life and refused to go again. I have high hopes for next time.

We eventually got to take this obligatory photo. Yes I called it a photo, it flows better. You can see that Nina was not in her happy place which I'm sure shocks everyone.

It rained all day on Thursday which made for smelly, wet socks, pruney toes and short lines.

I think I was in line for the new Cars ride when Matt took this picture. The only things I can say are that I love my boys and I think they are somewhere in the Bug's Life place.