Happy 3rd Birthday Karissa!

I made a Dora's Backpack cake for Karissa's birthday because she loves Dora! I'm no Martha Stewart, but it was cute!
The traditional birthday cake pose.
All the little girls that came to her party. On the right is Charlotte and Jana Erickson, then Chloe on the end, and Kaylana Graham on the left.
Charlotte, Jana, and Leah Erickson.
The boys at the party - Leah's husband Jarrod, with their son Cooper, and Joel (duh!)
This was hilarious - we got Karissa a Dora movie for her birthday, so she opened it up and shouted - Dora! Then started singing "we did it, we did it, hooray!" It was priceless- I wish we could have got a video of it...
Our little housekeeper. We also got her a cleaning set, because she loves to clean! She was really excited about it :)

Thanks for all the phone calls to wish Karissa a happy birthday! It's hard to believe we have a 3-year-old.... wow!

p.s. - belated happy birthday to Sammy Spring!!!

Christmas - a little late!

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! Sorry I didn't post these sooner. I put all the pics on facebook and didn't think about the blog soon enough... But I know there are a lot of you that only look at the blog! So, here are a few of the pictures from Christmas... they're a little mixed up - party blogger's fault, partly mine.
Karissa fishing into hers to see what was in it...
Of course Karissa has to help daddy open his as well!
Chloe was getting pretty good at opening her presents this year! She still needed a bit of help, but she did well! She was pretty excited :) I'm sure it helped that Karissa was so into it.


This is what was under our tree on Christmas Eve. Most of it is for the girls - the kicker is, all we got them is what was in their stockings! Grandparents took care of the rest... We managed to do the present opening in shifts so the girls wouldn't be too overwhelmed. We opened some first thing, then ate breakfast, then opened a few more, then got dressed, etc. I think the final presents were opened at about 2:30/3:00. It worked pretty well!
For some reason blogger decided to mess up the order of my pictures, but here's a recent family photo (finally!) of us after Christmas dinner with our friends, Bryan and Fiona.
The crazy Christmas face :)
A new toy from Oma and Opa. The girls have fun boppin' along with this one!
This has to be one of my favourites... We were helping Chloe make things with her giant beads.
Not sure about this one. Chloe was pretty excited about the beads she found in her stocking though... (I wonder what all we could fit into that mouth....)

I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday! Hopefully we will get to see you soon... it was nice to stay home, but we really did miss everyone a lot!