You can never have too many shoes...

Kim joined in on the world of footwear with her first pair of shoes (bought specifically for her).  Finding shoes for her is impossibly hard!  She has the tiniest but fattest feet on the planet!  She is about a size two, but it is hard to find any that fit over her "bee sting" feet (as we like to call them).  She is just barely walking, so I splurged and got some Robeez.  They are great.  She can't pull them off and they don't fall off when she crawls around either, but they have the soft soles. 

 

Last night my mom and I took the bigger girls to a BYU dance performance at the local college.  They had to nap in preparation since it didn't start until after the time they are usually in bed by.  It was really uplifting.  Taylor really enjoyed it and wants to dance like that someday.  She waited on the stairs when it was over to be sure to shake some of the dancers' hands.  We thought a dance style from India was the coolest.  The poor dancers-I bet they were exhausted because it didn't seem like they had a lot of time to change and be back on stage for the next number!  

 I'll end with a funny picture.  I was jiggling Kadie across my knees when Kim crawled up and wanted up.  I put Kim on top of Kadie and did the same thing.  Then, of course, Taylor wanted to join in.  I took them all off and made a jiggly girl sandwich!

Billboards

 It was a crazy week this last week at our house!  Monday was my birthday.  It was a good birthday and we had fun going out to dinner.  Lee's work had a grand opening for their new business, Interior Innovations.  He put in a lot of overtime working on their website.  On a side note, two billboards that Lee designed went up in our hometown this week.  How awesome is that?!?

Here's the first one for Interior Innovations:

 And the second one for Bott Monument:

 (The way this one was facing made it hard to catch it in good light at the time.  Click on the names if you want to see the websites my husband has designed)

We did Taylor's half-birthday at school on Friday.  To make the day even more special, Kim decided to take her first steps that day!  She would still rather get around by scooting, but she has at least attempted to walk now.  She is also working on getting her top two center teeth.

Sweaters and Bows

Lee's Grandmother hand made all three girls adorable sweaters this Christmas and even sent matching hair bows.  Taylor and Kadie posed for a photo for me:

Kim was not quite as willing:

Thank you Grandma Andersen!

Christmas with Cousins

 So the more kids there are, the harder it is to get a good picture of everyone together.  This continues to be true at our house.  You can't have a good group picture unless someone is crying...

 I absolutely LOVE this picture.  It sums it all up!  

(Kadie sulking and Taylor smiling innocently)

 Can you tell how much Kadie likes having her picture taken?  This is the girl who hid outside on picture day at preschool so she wouldn't have to have hers taken:

Besides sledding and Christmas overall, the kids had fun together.  Chase and Taylor are both six, Kadie and Brayden are both four, and Kim and Emma are both one.  

 The babies sure interacted a lot.  Kim watched Emma walk all over and is now standing as a result.  She is thinking about walking, but right now she is just working on standing by herself.

Crazy Days of Christmas

 We put up the tree the day after Thanksgiving as is tradition in our house.  Just like last year, we cheated and used my three piece pre-lit tree that pops up in just a few minutes.  (My mom has a nicer/bigger one, but you have to sort the branches and put them in individually and then put the lights on and it can take forever.)  We waited until the last minute to put gifts under the tree.  We kept them in the play pen so they would not get bugged.  Once presents were out, we put up a guard chicken.  You don't have a guard chicken?  Well, you need one.  Lee was holding Kim and showing her pieces of the nativity, and me, being the horrible mother that I am from time to time, scared Kim by making a loud noise when she went to touch the chicken.  This resulted in her being afraid of it so this is what we put in front of our monstrous stack of presents:

 On a side note, she is even more terrified of Mike from Monsters, Inc. for the same reason.  We got tired of her shutting off the computer while we were using it, so he guards the on/off switch:

 Since we were doing Christmas with seven adults and six children, and Christmas fell on a Sunday this year where church started at 9, we cheated and did Christmas a day early.  We took the kids to see the lights around town while Grandpa and Grandma played Santa.  Here's the note they found on the door upon returning home:

 Opening presents at our house was crazy pandemonium.  Rather than hang a bunch of individual socks, we decided to just do one REALLY big sock:

 Kim was only about 5 days old last Christmas, so she got into it a little bit more this year:

 The bigger girls had no trouble jumping into the unwrapping festivities:

 Grandpa being goofy:

(I got a good gift for him this year...I try to go for the comic value of a gift when shopping for him.  As a child he had a sock monkey so his gift from me this year was a 4 foot tall sock monkey!)

 Traditional pictures of the Christmas Gifts (Which I claim are nice when your sister tries to claim something as hers in later years...you have proof that it was yours)

 Taylor:

 Kadie:

 And Kim:

 Hope you all had a Merry Christmas. 

Sledding

 I still have to blog Christmas, but these pictures were easier to find and sort first.  My sister took the kids sledding today.  I haven't been sledding in forever, and still haven't been, but I'm glad they got a chance to go!  They all went together to the old stadium in town.  It is perfect for sledding (as long as you avoid the fences...I went sledding with friends as a teen there once.  I was going to hit the fence so I stuck my leg out in order to bounce off it but ended up going partly under it and hitting the pole with my leg.  Biggest bruise ever.  It was really funny but hurt pretty bad too.)  It looks like they had a lot of fun:

 They found a plowed snow pile in the parking lot and had just as much fun playing on that:

 Thanks Liz!

Kim is One!

 I can hardly believe it's been a year since we welcomed this little bundle of joy into our hearts:

 We celebrated Kim's birthday today.  While she gets really tired in the evening, she had a lot of fun.  Between everybody's work, school parties, and more, it has been a crazy few weeks so Kim got store bought cupcakes.  They were cookies and cream and actually really yummy!

She wasn't sure about opening presents but she sure liked what came out of the wrappers!

The girls had to join in on the action:

Kim didn't really have a lot of interactive/musical toys so she scored for her birthday.  She couldn't decide which one she wanted to play with first.  She also bounced her body along to the songs that played in a dance.  It was super cute.

Taylor and Kadie used to have a Step 2 red car that you push like you would a stroller, but we loved it so much that they rode it until it died.  Lee and I got Kim a new one for her birthday, but this one is even better since it has whisper tires (the other one was noisy to push).  She absolutely loved it.  (Too bad it is snowing or we could take it for a ride.)

 Kim was having so much fun with her new presents, that she wasn't interested in cake or ice cream.  It took us three tries to get her in a chair, and she cried and fussed each time.  She wasn't sure what to do with the cupcake at first:

 Haha...she also didn't like the frosting on her fingers.  She kept shaking her hand to try to get it off.

 But in the end she figure out what to do with the cupcake and enjoyed her first in depth experience with chocolate: