Mostly for my mom

A video of Autumn opening up her baby doll from my mom on her first Christmas, her smiles were quite sweet :)

Christmas

It was Autumn's first Christmas, and I loved seeing Noah and our baby open presents together.

Noah for the first time understood what Christmas meant. He actually thought Jesus was coming on Christmas. The whole day he kept asking where Jesus was. After he opened his presents he said "Baby Jesus coming after nap mommy?" He was SO expecting Jesus to come. He also said "Jesus come in a car mommy."

Autumn had no idea what it was all about, but she smiled and cooed at her baby doll

Noah's favorite gift was a $1 kiddy spade I got at a cheap Chinatown kinda store. He loves to help Clint pick up Spurgeon's icky stuff on the grass (I have no idea why) so I got him his own spade. We had to stop opening presents so that Noah could pick up all Spurgeon's mess outside. (Training them young!)

Autumn loved her glowing ball

We invited Charl & Nina and Liz and Lyle over for Christmas dinner. Autumn and Emma were playing with all the toys

Autumn and Emma were born 20 minutes apart! Its so fun to see them interact and how similar they are

I love these little nametag holders for our Christmas dinner, you just print them off marthastewart.com!

Cheesy Christmas cracker crowns :)

And all of us by the tree, we chatted till about midnight, it was a fun night!

Christmas Eve

I dressed Autumn up cause we went to our neighbors house to give them a little gift from the kids, her first Christmas will be tomorrow!

We hung up our last ornament on the Jesse Tree (a tree that has the story of Jesus from the Old Testament to the New, we hung a new ornament on the tree every night of Advent and did a little Bible Study with Noah each night. Christmas Eve was Mary and Joseph on their long journey to Bethlehem).

Sweet girl

And I was SO excited cause it was cold enough for Noah to wear his Christmas PJ's. Its summer here techniqually, but Christmas eve there was a HUGE cold thunderstorm (with lots of lightning) and it was cold enough for him to wear! (Sent from my dad in the States :)

Lightning McQueen skidding in the snow :)

Catching up...

So just finishing off pictures from our trip to the Berg. Our kiddos got free horsie rides. Noah was "scared" at first, but by the second time around the field he was loving it.

And smiling the whole way back

Autumn's first time on a horse, she LOVED this, lots of smiles

She looks like she'll be a natural someday, I wonder if she'll love horsies

A pretty cool African grasshopper

Autumn's first swim, she liked it so much she wouldn't even look at me, she kept looking down at what she was doing

Noah loved hanging out at the pool with daddy, he's very enamored with his dad.

Showing off the "big muscles mommy"

Life sized chess, Autumn liked to ride the horsie that Clint got of mine

Noah was a pawn

Autumn tried to replace the horse Clint stole from me

I checkmated Clint, but after several.... "hey if you do that I'm going to steal your queen"

Me and my little girl

Family shot

We said goodbye to the mountains and headed home for a 3 hour drive, the kids did great!

We passed alot of houses like this on the way home

And this was pretty much the view the whole way home, so pretty.

Video of the day

So my blog has been very lacking in videos since my little camera that took videos died. Liz and Lyle lent me theirs for a couple of days so I could take videos...here's my favorite of today. I was changing Autumn after her bath and she started playing Peek-a-boo with me under the curtains :)

Drakensburg Part 2

The best part about the Drakensburg mountains is that the view changes so much throughout the day. It really displays God's glory in full effect. We had such a fun time hanging out with just our family in the mountains. I think it helped Noah and Autumn bond a bit too!

View from our room

Clint got tea and scones for us while Noah slept. Butler Archer :)

View while we had our tea on the patio

They made the BEST scones

Watching the sun starting to set

They had an awesome jungle gym that Noah climbed "by myself mommy!"

While watching Noah climb we'd turn around the other way and see this....just amazing

Noah loved the slide

Sunset view from the slide, it was so breathtaking!

Drakensburg pt 1

South Africa is REALLY beautiful. I often drive around and just thank the Lord that he placed me in such a pretty part of the world. This week we drove to the Drakensburg mountains about 3 hours away from us. We were celebrating 4 years of being in SA (I can't believe its been 4 years!) with a little holiday away. How gorgeous are these mountains?

Clint planned everything apart from my knowledge, and booked a place in the Drakensburg mountains that accommodated kids SO amazingly. They even had a little petting zoo right there on the hotel grounds. Here is our friendly goat saying hi!

The friendly goat got extra friendly and jumped up to say hi to Clint and Auty, but then turned out to be super unfriendly and gave Noah a little "head butt" yikes!

Autumn liked looking at the bunnies and birds

I tried to catch a bunny for Noah to hold, but man those things are fast, so then we just played "chase the bunny"

Walking back to our room Noah LOVED seeing a real manger since we sing Away in a Manger almost every night.

The hotel had thatch roofs, which were so beautiful against the mountains.