Christmas, Hop Lop and the New Year

We had a wonderful Christmas morning.  Santa came and he ate all the cookies we had made for him the night before.  His reindeer ate the carrots.  And the milk was gone too.  Santa left Connor a letter saying what a good boy he and Stella had been.  Connor got a train set, extra trains, lots of treats, legos, and a puzzle.  Stella got a new rattle, a rolling toy, and a vibrating girraffe toy.  Mommy got a poem written by Daddy and Daddy got some chocolates from Mommy.  At church I got to accompany a cute little family as they sang in sacrament meeting.  They have 6 kids with a 7th on the way and all of them are super young. On Christmas day we went to dinner at some new friends' house from our ward.  It was really super fun and nice to be with people.  We got to try reindeer, Finnish Christmas ham, homemade Finnish Christmas bread, and other delicious food items, which was awesome.  Everyone spoke English and the missionaries were there too.  It was laid back and everyone was so nice to our kids.  We were quite the sideshow though.  Within 10 minutes we created quite the scene.  First, Connor fell off a bunk bed ladder.  Corey went up to calm him down and realized he had a poopy diaper.  Connor wouldn't let him change it, so I went up to change it.  Once that was finished, I headed downstairs and slipped on the hardwood stairs.  I fell really hard on my back and slid all the way down.  It knocked the wind out of me but I was fine.  I'm still quite sore and at the end of the day my back has had it, but I'm alright.  Immediately as I walked down the stairs, Stella, who had been sleeping, started screaming.  I went to get her and we thought the drama was over, but then Stella decided to puke on the floor.  One of the missionaries looked at us in awe and said, "It's like watching a movie!  And all the while the parents are so calm!"  Corey responded with, "Yeah well, we're in public".  Hahaha.  Kind of.  We probably would have acted the same at home but boy was is a chaotic few minutes.  After that we were driven home (which was a nice treat after riding the bus everywhere for weeks).  The unfortunate thing was that we left our stroller in the trunk of their car.   Normally this wouldn't be a big deal but we are dumb enough not to have a number or e-mail address of our friends and they didn't have ours!  We figured it would be a week before we saw it again. On Monday we wished we had it, as we were taking a trip to a new place called Hop Lop for Connor.  It's basically a McDonald's play place on steroids with a bouncy house too.  Because I had hurt my back, Corey wore Stella in the Baby Bjorn, and because we had a long way to go and buses to catch, we needed Connor to move quickly, so Corey put him on his shoulder.  And because my back hurt, Corey also wore our diaper bag backpack.  Hahahaha, he looked like quite the camel.  As you can imagine, a stroller would have been REALLY helpful that day.

Corey the camel

It's like a snowman made out of heads

Daddy and Stella playing in the balls at Hop Lop

Connor driving a car at Hop Lop

Jumping on daddy in the balls

having so much fun

You can just make our Connor's nose under the balls in the bottom right hand corner.....hahahahaha

Connor is playing games on Daddy's iphone (thx uncle Cory!).  Also, the bandaid on his nose is from when connor head butted him with his teeth....ouch!

Like clones. (Connor's face  is shiny from lotion.  We lather it on at night after all the cold wind on his cheeks!)

 For the new year we went downtown to watch the fireworks show over the river.  They started at 10pm and lasted for 15 minutes.  Why they don't start them earlier I'm not sure.  It's completely dark by 4pm.  But anyway, it was beautiful and fun.  We were a bit worried about getting a bus home with all the people out there, but we were able to get on (it was SUPER full) and we made it home safely.  They don't have such strict fireworks laws here in Finland so all night long people were setting off huge fireworks (like the ones illegal in the states that go super high and are like real fireworks).  It was really cool until about 2am when we were still hearing it and trying desperately to get some sleep.

You can't see the people very well, but you can see the cool bridge near where the fireworks went off

It was SUPER cold that night and we had to wait outside for an hour because everything was closed.  Connor kept saying he wanted to go home.  Poor little guy

This is just some at home fun

Look at those little cuties

Goin' crraazzyyyyy

Connor took a break

But her came back for more