Christmas at the Fairbanks'

We spent about two weeks in Fort Collins at my family's house this Christmas. It was very nice to be able to have so much time off. I love Christmas at my house! And I'm very lucky that my husband enjoys being at my family's house also, or else it would have been a horrible couple weeks for him. The only down side was Fort Collins got a total of NO snow while we were there. There were even a couple days that got into the 60s. WHAT?! Crazy huh. Definitly not typical December whether in Colorado.
Even though much of the time when Kambria and Madalyn are playing is spent being policemen, I believe they really do like playing with eachother. Especially when it gets close to their bedtime. Funny, but they got along better at that time then any other. We've only been home a day now and Madalyn already asks where Kambria is.
One of their favorite things to do was "rock" eachother in baby Weston's chair. It was hilarious comparing the difference in how each of them rocked eachother. Madalyn, on the hand, gently rocked Kambria while Kambria pushed that thing up and down so fast.

We spent one night at Bryan and Eliza's new place, had dinner and decorated sugar cookies. Kambria and Madlayn even had their own table...Madalyn really is happy in this picture, I swear! :)








We took one night and acted out the Nativity with the whole family and Jacqueline's mom. We had a couple of uncooperative cast members, namely the little ones, and so Mary and Joseph, which was played by Erik and I magically had a 2 year old little girl while in the stable with baby Jesus. :) As we've found out though from our infamous Nativity Scene of about 15 years ago, the disfunctional ones are the funniest.



Madalyn found a new hobby at Grandma's house...PLAYDOH! She loves making birthday cakes and then blowing out the candles.


Christmas Eve we tried to watch the Polar Express 3D, but either people couldn't see the 3D or else the glasses gave them a headache. Otherwise it was "pretty cool" :) Or at least we all looked real cool in our glasses.


Madalyn's favorite gift Christmas morning was the one from Grandma and Grandpa...a new DOLLHOUSE!! She loves it!

Trip to Colorado

Our trip to Colorado for Christmas was quite the adventure. We were supposed to leave Friday night, but ALL day Friday it decided to snow!!! Wonderful! Erik got out of school early and started driving home when he called us saying it had taken him over an hour to get to Lehi from his school in Salt Lake so Amanda, Madalyn, and I decided to start driving and we'd just meet him in Salt Lake. After a couple hours of driving no more than 15 miles an hour we arrive at the airport, check in...flight still on time. All right! Make it through security, arrive at our gate to find that our flight had been cancelled. SWEET! Apparantly the plane we were supposed to fly on wasn't coming to Salt Lake anymore due to storms other places and so out of the 4 or 5 flights going to Denver that night...ours got cancelled. We stuck around for a few hours to see if we could get on standby and NOTHING! Instead of sleeping in the airport, with a two year old we figured it wouldn't be the best thing, we decided to go to the airport hotels and spend the night so we could try and get an early flight out in the morning.
We get to the hotel, get a room, and continue on our journey to find it. After searching what felt like EVERYWHERE we decide they gave us a room that doesn't even exist. Could our luck be any better? :) Finally we find that our room is in the high rise located, no joke, about a mile towards the back of the hotel. To top it off we chose the one hotel, out of all the airport hotels, that doesn't offer a complimentary breakfast. And we were already starving when we got there at night. Amanda and I finally found a vending machine that curbed our appetite for the time being, or at least made us feel yucky enough that we didn't want to eat.
So this is Amanda and Madalyn making eachother comfortable in bed and chowing down on good quality vending food.



Madalyn just slept in the bed with Erik and I, and although it took her awhile to fall asleep I think once she did she slept pretty well. At least she had the room she needed...by morning she had kicked me out of bed and made Erik move all the way to the bottom. This is how we found her that morning.


We got up early and went to the airport in hopes that we could go standby on an early flight. There was a 1000 flight that they could put us on standby...until they found that they had no record that we had checked any bags, when we each had checked one. So the flight guy didn't want to put us on standby when he didn't know where our luggage was, and plus the flight was already overbooked. Wonderful. So a couple minutes before the flight they decide to let us on in hopes that our bags are already in Denver...and because a connecting flight wasn't going to make it on time so some seats opened.
Finally we make it to Denver just hoping that we might have some luggage there or at least be able to find out where it is. We walk around to baggage claim and much to our surprise find all three of our bags just sitting there waiting for us. It was AWESOME! It was the perfect ending to such an unlucky trip. In the end I emptied about 20 or so boarding tickets that we collected throughout our trip. I believe Amanda has now officially decided that she hates flying. It could have been worse though.

Early Christmas

We celebrated Christmas with our own family a little early because we were flying to Colorado for Christmas and didn't want to bring all our gifts with us on the plane. Madalyn is still young enough that she was okay with Santa coming twice...at least she didn't notice that he did. :)
Although Madalyn wanted to open every single present by herself, we had to help her a little or else we would have been there forever. She's so delicate with the wraping paper, it's hilarious.
These are our stockings before Santa came obviously. Erik is still learning about stockings with my family. Stockings has always been my favorite part of Christmas morning.




Madalyn apparantly likes stocking gifts as much as I do.

Her favorite gift from Mom and Dad was her new baby doll and play set. We got her it thinking it would help her get ready for a new baby in this house. Now we're just worried that she's going to want to put her new baby sister in her baby doll stroller and push her around the house. :)

Turkey Day!

This Thanksgiving was very relaxing. We ended up staying here in Utah the whole time and I didn't even have to work the whole weekend. It was great. Erik and I, thanks to our daughter, even slept in most of the mornings. That's what vacations are for right?! We spent Thanksgiving day at Erik's Mom's house. Their whole family was there except DJ and Kristeen. Gretchen and I decided that we need to add to Grandma Freeman's toy collection. These kids just don't stay entertained as long anymore and so the cats become their toys which leads to scratching and crying and no fun. We still can't believe that come next summer the grandkids running around at Grandma's house on Sundays will be double! Well, okay so three little ones one't necessarily be running around quite yet, but Grandma's house is going to start getting quite full. These are the three grandkids right now.
Max, Ava, and Madalyn.


Ava definitly has a Freeman thermostat in her, Gretchen says she's constantly complaining that she's hot...hence the tank top in winter. :)

The day after Thanksgiving we did one of my favorite things...set up our Christmas stuff and decorate the tree. If people wouldn't call me crazy I'd probably set up our stuff before Christmas. I love Christmas decorations and just Christmas season in general. The one thing I don't like thoough is cold weather. My opinion is if it's going to be cold outside there might as well be snow, otherwise what is the cold good for?! Absolutly NOTHING! We havn't had much of any snow yet here, which Erik is very grateful for in that he has to commute to work, but as for Madalyn and I, we're anxiously waiting for snow.
Madalyn was hilarious when we were setting up our Christmas stuff. She thought we were setting up a bunch of new toys all around the house for her. She quikcly found out the toys didn't play nice when she pulled the stocking holder down from the fireplace right on her little nose. She now has a little "booboo" as she calls it. The good thing is she hasn't messed with the stockings since. As for the tree, the bottom half is basically empty so Madalyn can't go to town with the ornaments, but she's found she likes to lay underneath the tree and play with all the lights. I'm okay with that. :) Thanks to Grandma Fairbanks she now has her own Little People Nativity Set that she CAN play with. Thanks Grandma, now us parents aren't SO mean.

This is Madalyn helping "clean" the tree. Apparantly she thought it was dirty.


Madalyn helping decorate the tree. She really wanted her purse on it for some reason.

It's ANOTHER GIRL!!!

Yes, we are having another little girl. I tell you, all the schemes about boys make you sicker, girls make you sicker, twins make you even sicker is HOOPLA!!! They're all just scams. I was tons sicker this time than I was with Madalyn...and what do you know, they're both GIRLS!! My theory is it's different for every women, it's different for every baby, plain and simple! Anyway, we were kind of hoping for a boy, Erik in that he wanted his little football player, and me, well honestly I wanted to be sure that we had one of each this time since I was so sick at first being pregnant again sometime just didn't sound like much fun to me. Of course with time us women forget the horrible parts of pregnancy and I'm sure I'll gladly try again sometime. :) Even still, we're excited for a girl and the better part is she'll be born about the same time as Madalyn so I'm hoping she can wear most all of Madalyn's old clothes. A plus for sure!

Apparantly this is how she deciphered we were having a girl. Don't ask me! :)

This is her little foot stikcing out. Can you count all 5 toes?!

Everything looked great in the ultrasound, she's right on schedule and everything. It still amazes me how they can decipher what parts of the ultrasound are. I mean I can point out the main parts like the head, some feet or hands, but it amazes me how they're able to find the stomach, kidneys, things like that so easily. I just nod my head and say, "oh yea, looks good!" Erik wasn't able to make it to the ultrasound, :( and I wanted us to be able to find out together what we were having so I had the lady put a pair of socks, pink or blue, depending whether it was a boy or girl, in a box for us and we would open it up together. I tell you, it was pretty hard not to peek in that box all afternoon waiting for Erik to come home. I'm proud to say that I didn't though.

Happy Halloweeeeeeen!

Our Halloween festivities started at our Ward Halloween party last weekend. The best part was trunk-or-treating even though Madalyn had no clue what was going on. The first couple trunks we went to she kept looking at me like "What the heck are we doing Mom, stealing candy from people's cars? This is crazy!" After awhile she could have cared less how we were getting it, all she cared about was the candy. I think we're going to have ourselves a little girl with a HUGE sweet tooth. I had to hide all the candy so she would stop asking for it. Thankfully her Aunt Amanda came over and ate ALL of it! Freshman. They are such mooches. :)

For Family night last Monday we had Scott, Jacqueline and Amanda over to carve pumpkins. I'd say between all of our pumpkins, it was quite a toss up who's was the best.

Madalyn had a blast cleaning out the pumpkins. She thought the stringy stuff in the middle was pretty cool.



On the other hand, Amanda...well let's just say, I think this was her first time carving a pumpkin. She really needs to get out more. :)



Then of course we had to go trick-or-treating with Madalyn. The best part about kids is that you get to start doing little kids things all over again! It's GREAT! However, trick-or-treating isn't quite what it used to be when I was a kid. I remember leaving at 5 or 6 and not stopping till 10 or 11. Now people who go past 8 are looked at funny. Madalyn knew what she was doing this time and loved it. There was one house that the guy who answered it was wearing a mask and scared all the kids. Madalyn just started screaming. It was really pretty funny. Madalyn dressed up as Cinderella this year. "Lella" to her. She loved the dress. She would just stand in front of the mirror and stare at herself. She's definitly a girl! Sorry Daddy. :)



We went trick-or-treating with Carter and Berkley. Carter was T-rex and Berkley was a fairy. All three of them were so cute. However, it was pretty hard to get a good picture of all of them. Whoever thought little children would stand still when they know candy is within reach is crazy.
Sorry the pictures aren't the best quality. Until we get a new camera we're using our video camera, and obviously it doesn't take the best still shots.

WHHAAATTT????!!!!

I know, I know! It's been awhile! I could think of a million excuses as to why I have failed keeping up to date with my blogging, such as our camera broke in California- and what is a blog without pictures?...or that I've been too busy working and taking care of a little stinker to think about blogging...but that's what those all are...EXCUSES! The real reason is that all my extra time has either been spent sleeping or staring at the bottom of the toilet! Sound like fun? NO! Yes, the rumor is true. We are expecting our second child. And I can officially tell you that I am excited. For those who have known since the beginning, that's huge for me. This pregnancy was nonetheless, an "accident". As Erik says, He tripped, fell over, and wha-la, his wife is pregnant. :) I was really sick at the beginning and so with not being mentally prepared to be pregnant, not exactly wanting to throw-up 2 or 3 times a day, and self-ish maybe, but not looking forward to the instant weight gain...I was having a hard time being excited about having another child. But now that I'm about 18 weeks and feeling much better, I'm very excited. I have this feeling that 9 months is going to be WAY too long though, I'm already getting uncomfortable. YUCK!



This is the first ultrasound of our little baby. It was taken at about 13 weeks. It's still amazing to me how soon they look like little babies. That little stinker's no bigger than a peanut there, yet you can tell exactly what it is. Simply a work of art! We find out in a couple of weeks what we're having. To be honest, I think we're both hoping for a boy, just so we know we have one of each..but we'll love it no matter what.

Two of my sister-in-laws on Erik's side both pregnant also, so that will be really fun to have three little cousins all the same age. Kristeen is due about three weeks before me in March, and then Gretchen is due in June. I'm sure all the guys are going to get so sick of us when we're all together cause all we talk about is pregnant junk. Sorry!