End of 2016 fun

For Christmas we the Harrisons got our family season passes to Six Flags so we took full advantage of the remainder of Holiday in the Park before it shut down for the winter season. 

We went on Dec 26th with pretty much all of North Texas. 

Like 30 of our friends went too and it was crazy and crowded but so much fun!

   

Dylan can ride the mini-mine train and he is beside himself. 

 

We got free tickets for each of our season passes and invited the Fogles to come with us! 

 It was like a dream having them in Texas for a few days again. 

 

We celebrated Bart's birthday at the Mavs game! 

 

We can thank the Nordells for outfitting our entire family with Mavs gear...loved Dylan in this vintage 1980s shirt

   

Kinley had AG over for a sleepover and they had a fun spa night where we made egg white masks, sugar scrubs, bath scent molds.

   

 The morning was exciting for us because we got our first double yolk chicken egg.

 It was SO much bigger than our regular eggs and AG was there to see it and eat it too. 

 

We hosted the A&M vs. Kansas State Bowl game at our house. 

It didn't quite end up the way I was hoping for the Aggies but it was a pretty historic day for the Harrison family. A&M and K-State don't play each other in football hardly ever anymore now that they are in different conferences. 

Aunt Deb even came down to celebrate the occasion too. 

We were a family divided and each team had plenty of representation. 

 

My most favorite moment of the night was forcing Ben and Alex to re-create this 16 year old picture from when K-State played A&M when I was in college.

 I could not stop laughing. 

One of my favorite nights of the year is our high school girls Christmas exchange. 

 We started a new alphabet theme this year where all the gifts had to start with an 'A.' 

There was everything from Aprons to Amazon gift cards. 

We figure this theme will at least get us through the next 26 years :) 

 

 One Monday between Christmas and New Years all the dads had off work but Ty's baseball class still met so all the dads got to go watch in the middle of a workday.  It was so cute seeing all the boys with their daddies.

We spent New Years Eve with the Barstads and Booths over at Allison's house. 

 She hosted the most fun, family-friends NYE bash and we had a blast! She had tons of minute to win it games ready for the kids to play and walls covered with chalkboard paper to write new years resolutions and even a balloon drop from the ceiling when the ball dropped.

She is always the ULTIMATE party planner and it made ringing in the New Year SO much fun!!

 

Love looking at the Best Nine on Instagram for 2016. 

So many memories from this year!

Bring on 2017!

 

Christmas Day

This was the first year we spent actual Christmas morning at this house. 

We normally are traveling or at the lake or have slept at our parents house even.

 It was so fun to have our first Christmas in this house together. 

We made sure to sprinkle out some reindeer food on the lawn and leave cookies and milk for Santa so he would know where we were! 

 

 We also made sure to leave Santa some cookies and milk and he even wrote us a letter back! 

 He also made sure to take our elf, Buddy Snowflake, back with him who left us one final note for the Christmas season to sing Happy Birthday to Jesus.

  

Alex set up a special camera and caught Santa in the act of eating the cookies we left! 

 

Santa goodies for Kinley, Ty, Dylan, the whole family, and Haley too!

   

We spent Christmas morning with the Harrisons at our house opening presents, seeing what Santa brought and having brunch. 

 We lounged all day, ate, played games and just took it easy. 

 

For some reason, Dylan wasn't having the grandkid pic 

 

This year was the year of the Hatchimal and it was like the most difficult present to find and people were stalking websites, standing in lines for hours before stores opened to get them, and paying hundreds of dollars for these. There was NO way I was even going to spend more than the 5 minutes it would normally take to click a button to buy it online to get one of these things. 

 kept telling Kinley NOT to expect a Hatchimal, that they were sold out everywhere and do NOT get your hopes up we would try to get one for her birthday in a few months. 

But, I swear she thought I was kidding. 

She would wink and say "Ok, Mom :)" and i just kept having to re-emphasize that "NO! You will NOT get one!" 

But, I was worried she would be a little disappointed still on Christmas morning. 

(insert eye roll here) 

However, lo-and-behold on Christmas eve after all the services I get a call from Leslie saying she just happened to have an EXTRA, FREE Hatchimal and wanted to see if Kinley wanted it for Christmas. AG's grandma, Coco - who I like to call our fairy god-mother, had bought too many and AG wanted Kinley to have the extra one. 

 AH! Christmas miracle thanks to Coco :) 

 I explained it all to Kinley and she was beside herself excited.

   

Turns out there is a class-action lawsuit against these Hatchimals because most of them DIDN'T HATCH. Ours did take hours when it was supposed to only take 20 minutes but it made Christmas day pretty exciting with Kinley yelling every five minutes for us to watch the Hatchimal make a tiny poke in its shell.

   

We had a delicious Christmas dinner over at Alex & Mendy's house. 

 

It was such a special day!