Since Mike has been busy with finals and Kyia and I are leaving soon to visit family for Christmas, we decided to open the gifts we received at our house early. It was fun to spend that time together with the christmas music playing in the background. Kyia really enjoyed opening her gifts and we are all very thankful for everything. Merry Christmas!!
After:
This year we decided we would make gingerbread houses. I wanted to do the real thing instead of using graham crackers so I got the recipe and started baking. I have never worked with gingerbread before and underestimated the amount of time three gingerbread houses would take to make. It was well worth the time and we had a lot of fun decorating them.
I think Kyia enjoyed eating the candy more than the decorating though. Mike already has an idea for what he is going to do next year with his gingerbread house and he still has a year to plan. 
Kyia has learned her alphabet. She doesn't recognize all the letters yet but she can sing the song. My favorite part is "L, M, N, O, P". She does that every time and it's so funny. I remember mixing up all the letters when I was little also. She's becoming quite the little talker.
Kyia had Willow over to play today and they had a lot of fun dressing up, singing and dancing. I put a couple of Kyia's favorite songs on and they were dancing and singing all through lunch!
It is the Christmas season again. It seems to come faster every year! Mike took a day off of studying today so we could go have some fun. We decided we would go downtown to see the exhibit ICE! This year the theme was How the Grinch stole Christmas. They had the story shaved into ice and everything was colored. It was really neat but very, very cold!! They keep the tempurature at about 12 degrees so you don't want to be in there very long and you have to where a parka before you can enter. They do help a little. Mike and I both forgot our gloves so by the end, I could barely take a picture because my hands were frozen. (I will have to remember that for next time.) Kyia had a lot of fun on the slides and wanted to go again and again. After that, we did a little shopping then went to the Opryland Hotel to look at the Christmas lights. We ended the night by going to the Rainforest Cafe for dinner. Kyia didn't know what to think of the animals that come to life. She was a little afraid of the gorillas when they started moving. We were worn out at the end of the day but it was a fun way to start the week! Here's some pictures of our day. That is all ice!
A couple days ago we put up our Christmas tree. Kyia loved it! Now she keeps taking the ornaments off just so she can put them back on again. Having the tree up is making her that much more anxious for Santa to come. She asks me every day, "How much longer, mom?" She's starting to understand how Santa works now. She is going to be fun this Christmas!
We had a successful Thanksgiving Day this year. We had good practice last year makeing food for everyone. Everything went well and turned out really good except we had way too much food for the three of us. We need some visitors ;). We are headed to go see the movie 'Enchanted' tonight. We tried to pick one that Kyia would be more opt to watch so hopefully she will like this one. We'll let you know how it goes. We hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving!!
We thought we would try this blogging experience. Since we are so far away from everyone, we thought it would be a nice way for people to keep in touch with us and see what we are up to. We will try to update it regularly so check back often. We went to get our family pictures taken this weekend for our Christmas cards. They turned out pretty good and we got some really cute ones of Kyia. We had to bribe her a little to get her to smile so we took her to the park later on that day. She loves the park! 
