Corbin's 6th Birthday

As is Jacobs' family tradition, Corbin wanted his winter birthday party at the pool. Luckily there is a fantastic indoor pool in Loveland that is cheap for parties. So we've been there many, many times. I am a dork and forgot to grab extra batteries for the camera, so I only got a few before they went dead. But my mom got there for cake & ice cream and took some pictures of that! As you can see, everyone enjoyed their chocolate cupcakes and Corbin really enjoyed his party!

Girl's Night + My Birthday = Fun Times!

So for girl's night this month, we also celebrated my birthday. We went to Applebees and ordered 1 of everything on the appetizer menu, apart from the shrimp. Yes, we had plenty to eat. After stuffing ourselves silly and talking over each other for 2 hours, we headed to my mom's basement for some games and karaoke. We karaoked for just a bit and then began playing a game I got when I was 13 called "True Colors". OMGosh, we had a BLAST playing it. I forgot to take many pictures because I was having too much fun, but here's what I actually got.






























Sarah, Amber, Michelle, Renee, Brooke, Kristine & I all had a really good time together! Thanks girls!







I also shot a short video of some of the karaoking. I did warn them that I was putting it on the blog (whisper: I don't think they heard me).

Chuck E. Cheese

For Christmas, Casey & Brittny gave the kids a trip to Chuck E. Cheese, one of my kids' favorite places on earth! On December 30, we all loaded up and headed over. As expected, the kids had a great time spending their allotted coins in no time flat, asking for more and saving up tickets for really great prizes that usually break or are thrown away before we get home. Luckily, we were saved from the depths of pizza hell though, as Casey & Brittny's charity overflowed and we were able to grab Little Caesars on the way home.
Laney kicked my butt at air hockey and then moved on to play guns with her daddy.

Payton got to ride a horse - FINALLY!

Gavin learned to play skee-ball.



The most popular game for the day was Deal or No Deal - Payton was the grand prize winner on that one, walking away with 40 tickets.





























As you can see, we didn't really enjoy ourselves...good thing we are all so convincing for the camera! Unfortunately, (or fortunately depending on how you look at it) our trip was pretty uneventful (no cops coming to arrest Grandma; I guess we're a little more boring than the Hansens) but we had a really good time nonetheless playing all the different games and getting to hang out with everyone.

Today Only! Freebies!

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Get your freebies here! You can only sign up for this today, January 14, 2009, so do it NOW! Just click here to be directed to the Suave site where you can sign up to recieve a coupon good for free shampoo. If you don't want it for yourself, get it anyway and donate it to House of Neighborly service or something. My motto has always been "If it's free, then it's for me"!Also, Auntie Anne's pretzels will give you a coupon for a free pretzel (with purchase of pretzel dog) by going here.

Christmas with the Jacobs

The Sunday after Christmas was our day to spend with the extended Jacobs family. As usual, we gorged ourselves. All of the "blood" Jacobs eat Pigs...a German food I haven't acquired a taste for in 12 years. They stink up the whole house while cooking and that's pretty much my #1 rule about food...If you have to cook it outside, don't put it inside your mouth. Halitosis, anyone? I think it is a pretty good rule. But I'm digressing.

This is a picture of super cutie Trent (you can kind of see Brittny, Jenni & Courtnee...yes I am the only Jacobs sis-in-law without an "ie" name).Back to Christmas. After dinner, we went downstairs where we attempted to take family pictures. They all turned out crappy. Aunt Tracy brought little goodie bags for all of the kids. Inside there were these little blow up balls with a snowman inside the blew up too. We are a close knit family, but no, Cameron & Courtnee are NOT making out. They are just trying to be efficient at blowing up the balls so the kids could go play. Then the boys/kids played pool and ping pong while the girls did dishes and stuff. After that, the real party started and we karaoke-ed. They really need to add that word to the dictionary. There I go again.Below is a video of the howling...I mean karaoke-ing. Clint, Taylor, Moon and Andrea had a fantastic time desecrating 80's monster ballads. They kept making the player skip because they were really belting out the tunes!I planned to take a bunch of pictures of everyone, but my camera disappeared at some point during dinner. From the quality of the below posted photos, it is evident that the culprit was an underaged minion. I did my best to clean them up (since I'm like basically a professional photographer and everything).

Here is Chase. He is Moon & Tracy's youngest.
Looks like Grandpa Jay found the camera theif!It's always fun to see our relatives from far away Denver!

Christmas Evening w/ Punky

I mentioned in my previous post that Ian and his bride-to-be, Kelsey, came by with her Christmas gift. Sorry Ian, this is the only shot I got of the two of you together. Kelsey looks cute though!Anyhow, the kids were all downstairs playing Wii, so we got to spend some time with adorable Punky, for just a little bit before taking her down to the mad house.

Here are Karson & Cole showing their cousin love. She is the most laid back puppy I've ever seen! So cute too! The kids all adored her! Even Laney!

Christmas Day!

I'm finally getting around to blogging about Christmas day! Of course, I woke up before anyone else on Christmas morning, but trying to be the adult about it, I stayed in bed until after 7 before poking at the boys to get them to wake up.

When I went upstairs to rouse the girls, this is how I found Delaney...she was "too many" tired still! But she eventually got up and was excited that Santa brought her the kitchen she was positive she was getting.

This year, Santa didn't think it was fair that the boys always get up early and snoop through the gifts before the girls finally roll out of bed...so he hid their gifts and sent them on a scavenger hunt. Delaney didn't have to look for hers (she can't read yet anyway) so she saw her Santa gift first. There is video of everyone below. You'll have to pause my awesome playlist music (on the right) if you want to hear them. They are hard to hear anyway because, being in the Christmas spirit, Cheryl shared her cough with just about all of us...so it can be hard to hear above the coughing. I hope they all load because I'm putting 4 videos on here.

Anyway, the boys scavenger hunt had them looking under the kitchen sink, inside the dryer, and finally they found their Santa gift in the coat closet. They were pretty excited with what they found there...



Santa told Payton to answer the darn phone that was ringing in her underwear drawer! Yes, Santa brought her a cell phone...can you believe it? She also got all of the CD's she wanted (Aly & AJ, Taylor Swift, Jonas Brothers, Miley Cyrus, Radio Disney, etc), the Twilight & Jonas Brothers posters, lots of cute dangly earrings and some really cute shoes & clothes.

Cole got the Magic Tree House book he wanted, Battleship the game, lots & lots of Pokemon cards, and a sweet new sled.

Cade got tons of Bionicles stuff, pokemon cards, and a new lunchbox (since Batman was too babyish apparently)..

Corbin got tons of his figurines including Hulk, Iron Man, & Wolverine, and lots of great puzzles and a really cool Transformers book.

Laney got food for her kitchen, a Disney tea set, lots of dollies and Princess figurines, and dress-ups.

All of the kids had Wii games & movies in their stockings or under the tree. And no, they did not lack for anything this Christmas. They are very spoiled (read: loved) children!

Below is a slide show of the other pictures I took. I didn't take that many because I was too caught up in the present opening fun.

As is tradition, we had a brunch with buttermilk pancakes and all the fixins. It was fun having all of our immediate Jacobs family there! We are so glad that Casey & Cameron and their families made the trek up from Arizona to be with us!

We spent the rest of the day just playing with new toys and relaxing. Clint & I picked up Kristen's 4 youngest that evening and they had a sleep over with their cousins. Ian & Kelsey stopped by...I'll write about that in another post.

We really enjoyed our Christmas and hope everyone else had a wonderful Christmas as well!

Staying Focused

I am having a really hard time staying focused today. I was paying bills this morning and couldn't find my stapler. So I went upstairs to look for it and found it in Payton's room. I noticed she still had a poster that hadn't been put up, so I climbed up on the top bunk and stapled it up on the wall. Then, on my way out of her room, I noticed that the washer was done, so I put that load in the dryer and put a new load in the washer. Then I walked past the kitchen and noticed that the granola bars I just bought were still on the counter. I opened the cupboard to put them in there, but it was so full of half-full boxes, it wouldn't fit. So I cleaned out that cupboard. While cleaning out the cupboard, I remembered that the missionaries are coming over for dinner, so I ran out to the freezer in the garage and pulled out a pork roast to thaw. Then I went back to cleaning out the cupboard and put a pile of the empty boxes on the counter. Then I walked in the pantry to grab the garbage to take out when I noticed that the cereal containers looked dirty and were mostly empty. So I cleaned out the cereal containers, stuck a few in the dishwasher, started the dishwasher, and grabbed the bag of garbage. I took the garbage and the empty boxes out to the garage, where I remembered that I needed to get my make-up bag out of the car. While in the car, I thought "I should really clean this out", so I cleaned out the front of the car, found the antennae I lost, found our new insurance cards and put them in the right spot, organized my glove box, cleaned out the ashtray (change tray) and got all of the trash out of there. Then I took my pile of "car stuff" back into the house, where I set everything down on the counter because I noticed the counters were dirty and needed to be wiped down. After wiping down the counters, I grabbed the stuff that needed to come down to my office and just got back down here. Now I'm sitting in front of my messy desk really wishing I could remember where the heck I put the stupid stapler!

Christmas Eve

My Christmas Eve started off not so good. I got up really early and went and got a tooth filled. Who goes to the dentist on Christmas Eve anyway? Then I had to go to my brother's house to get some gifts out his garage and closet that he was kindly storing for us. It was FREAKING cold and really windy, so I was really tense and somehow I threw out my back. OWWWWWWWWW! So then I had to drive a stick shift home with my back on fire and of course, my chiro was closed until Monday. Ugh! That shot my plans for making my first fruitcake ever. I even had Cam buy me some rum so I could make a real fruitcake. I've never had one, so maybe next year. The rest of the day was ok...I spent a lot of it on the floor icing.

Here are some pictures & videos from Christmas Eve. We typically spend Christmas Eve with my family, but since we did it earlier in the week, we spent Christmas Eve at our house with the missionaries, Jay & Cheryl and Casey, Brittny & Gavin. It was pretty low key, but nice. We had a little problem with the turkey earlier in the day. With the intent of saving oven space, we tried using the roaster for the first time but it burned the bag and let all the juices out, so the turkey ended up in the oven after all. It still tasted pretty good, even though it was a tiny bit more dry than usual.

After our small feast, we got together in the living room to sing carols, read the account of Jesus' birth and open some gifts. There is a video at the bottom of this showing our fantastic caroling skills!

When we were at my mom's house for Christmas, Laney got bonked in the nose with a wooden silverwear holder. She kept picking at it, so we finally put a bandaid on it. Here she is showing how sad her "owie" made her.

Currently serving in our ward are Elder Denton from Houston and Elder Seve (se-vay) from New Zealand. Denton said we had a pretty typical night, the same as what his family usually does. We asked Elder Seve what Christmas traditions he had and he said they usually have a pig roast, since it is summer there. And yes, we made sure he has been able to sample true American fare and he had his first ever PB&J and Mac & Cheese (what I call yellow death). Elder Seve taught Clint, Casey & Denton how to do a traditional Maori Christmas dance. Below is a short video clip of that. As a show of our gratitude, we got both elders a pair of wool socks, since they've been freezing this winter and they don't have a car.














Of course after all the apparently boring stuff (according to Clint & Corbin who made it a point to let us know what a snoozer the night was) we continued our 8 days of Christmas and the kids got to open another gift. Cole was ecstatic about his new baseball book. Cade got a set of Pokemon cards he was VERY excited about. Corbin loved his Spiderman hoodie, Laney got a new doll named Kelly, and Payton opened some big dangly earrings. Another great gift night. What a bunch of spoiled kids!