dance class

ethan has been so good at coming with me to dance classes. its so fun to be able to do clogging again this year. he is pretty good about letting me get through most of the class without crying. i really hope that by coming to dance classes ethan will grow up with the desire to dance. that is one of the things that attracted me to his daddy and i hope that ethan will take advantage of his opportunity to learn dance from his awesome grandma! ask me how a baby falls alseep while 8 women are clogging with loud music... answer: no idea! ask my kid!

ward party/santa train/parade

the weekend after thanksgiving was really special. it started off with our ward party. our whole stake was rearranged and we were put in a new ward. we were able to go to our new ward party and meet some new people. the best part was that matt got the whole day off! after the party we headed to boulder city to ride the santa train. all of ethans cousins came (even the arizona ones!) the santa train is a fun thing they do in boulder city. the regular train tour that they have is just a ride up and back on an old train but at christmas they throw on some decorations and santa and mrs clause come through for pictures
we had lots of fun riding the train with cousins and seeing santa!


after the train we got a picture in santa's sleigh. then we went and looked at all the model trains on display

after we were sick of trains we went and got some mcdonalds and went to a nearby park for the kids to play. ethan went in a swing for the first time... he loved it! (video at the end of the blog)

after the park matt went home because he was tired and ethan and i went with grandma and grandpa to get ready for the boulder city christmas parade. this is a parade that grandmas dance studio does every year. the parade is special because its done at night and everyone has to use lots of christmas lights. stacie and i had fun clogging while pushing our strollers. the blessing was that it was acctually really nice otuside. it is usually freezing and i was concerned for my baby but it was nice and comfy and he loved it. he loved the lights and the fun "ride" mommy took him on. he loved it so much he wore himself out and fell asleep at the end!
it was such a fun way to start our christmas season!

thanksgiving

alright so thanksgiving was a few weeks ago... alright fine it was a few months ago. but i did say i was bad a blogging didnt i??? thanksgiving was fun this year. it was a larsen year for thanksgiving and so we got to spend lots of time with our fun larsen family. we were so blessed to have matts uncle eric and his family come down as well as aunt charisse and aunt wendy. we were especially lucky to have our fun cousins jared and emily stay at our house. as has been our tradition matts aunt charisse brought lots of her fun scrapbooking stuff for us to play with. we turned brenda's dance studio into a scrapbooking workshop. aunt charisse helps us to put together beautiful scrapbooks for all of her great nieces/nephews that we just have to add the pictures to. it is a great way to document my sweet boys first year. aunt charisse has TONS of scrapbooking stuff and loves to share it with us. it is nice because i love to scrapbook but dont really have the time or means to do so. ethan spent lots of time with his daddy while i got to have fun hanging out with aunt charisse. even though it was our year with the larsens we still found some time to hang out with our rodarte family as well. we went thanksgiving morning to join with the romneys in a little volleyball which is our tradition. this year we went to the church building and played inside instead of at the park. i was grateful for this because it was cold outside and i dont think ethan would have been very happy. loved sitting and watching inside where it was warm.

I think ethan enjoyed spending time with his cousins and he liked watching football on tv with the guys

we only wish our larsen family could live closer so we could spend more time with them! oh yeah... the food was great!