Keeping in Teutsch

Merry belated Christmas everyone! I hope you all had a great day with your families. I'll tell you all about our Christmas in just a minute, but first I want to show you Juliette's "Polar Express train ride" at school and our Christmas decorations.

Each year the kindergarteners at Juliette's school have a Polar Express Day where they wear their pajamas, watch the movie, eat popcorn and drink hot chocolate, and then take a train ride. They also had their Christmas party in the middle of all of this, so Matt and I went last Tuesday to help. Matt and I were in charge of helping the kids put together their reindeer food bags. The kids were crazy! Once they got on the "train" they squealed the entire time they rode it. It didn't even bother them that it wasn't an actual train! They had a lot of fun.


Here are our Christmas decorations this year. Pretty much the same as last year except I added two Pinterest-inspired projects: the rag garland and the clothespin card display.




On Saturday, everyone showed up at my parents around Noon and we had our Christmas gathering. Matt and I had decided to not leave town until after we went to Christmas Eve services with my parents at their church. It was a candlelight service and was very nice (Juliette even lit and held her own candle). After that we swung by McDonalds and picked up dinner and Juliette was asleep as soon as she ate. We got home about 10:30 or so because we had to stop a few times for Juliette to throw up...yep, you read that right. Thankfully, it wasn't much and she was fine once I gave her a bath...we think it might have been because of sinus drainage.

Here's what the tree looked like Christmas morning. (The unwrapped stuff is what Santa bought. It looks kinda pitiful, but it's because she got little things that were more expensive, like the Crayola stylus for the Ipad and the Disneyland game for the Xbox.)

Running in to see what Santa bought her.

Matt checking out his stocking.

Juliette digging into her stocking.

Matt being way too excited over slippers.

Juliette showing off her pile o' stuff, which included a Justin Bieber toothbrush that the Tooth Fairy sent via Santa (he left a note saying so).

Juliette modeling her new owl purse. Isn't it so cute?

Juliette, later Christmas morning, playing with the Barbie pool that she got from my sister and her family.

This was the first Christmas that we spent by ourselves and it felt kinda strange (and somewhat unlike Christmas) to be at home. It was kinda nice too, though. Juliette played with all her toys and I cooked lunch (a chicken stuffed with broccoli cheese and rice--from a meat market in town--hashbrown casserole, green bean casserole, and rolls; we brought sweets back from my parents' house) and we just hung out at home all day. Most years on Christmas day, Matt and I have gone to the movies, but we didn't do anything this year. Juliette kept asking why we weren't going anywhere!

Matt's parents were in Florida this year for Christmas so we'll be going back up to North Louisiana this weekend to have Christmas with his family.

Check back later for a 2011 recap and this year, I'm making some New Year's Resolutions and I'm going to share them with you too!

I told you it was going to be busy around here for the rest of the year, so now, I'm going to try to play catch-up.

First things first...Juliette's dance observation. I didn't get any good pictures from it, you know because they are constantly on the move. They spent a lot of time working on basic moves and didn't really do a dance for us. Juliette's cartwheels have gotten a lot better, but she still has trouble getting one of her legs straight. They are doing things differently this year and aren't letting the parents stay in the lobby during lessons (like we could last year; we couldn't see them, but we could hear what was going on) so I have no idea what she is learning and the only thing she constantly wants to practice is her cartwheels. I did get to see what the costumes will look like for her revue this year, and one of them is a bell hop costume and it's so cute! 

Next up was Thanksgiving. We spent it this year with Matt's parents (and then Matt and I left Thanksgiving afternoon for a little trip to Dallas for our 11th anniversary). We tried to take pictures of the grand kids and great grand kids all together for Matt's grandma, but as you can see that didn't really work out. (The babies belong to his cousin Thomas in case you are wondering. His sister Tiersten is sitting in the middle, holding the baby boy. They are ADORABLE!)
 As I said, that afternoon Matt and I went to Dallas for a little anniversary trip that mainly involved shopping. (We usually don't do much shopping on our anniversary trips, and although we had fun, I still prefer going to small towns, staying in a bed and breakfast, and just sightseeing.) We stayed across from the Galleria, so we spent most of Friday morning there. When we first got there that morning, there weren't many people and it was super nice, but by lunch it had gotten packed. We also went to a used book store called Half Price Books (it's a chain) and came back with huge stack of books...like we needed more in this apartment! And we also found this super nice Wal-mart (I didn't think I'd ever say that about a Wal-mart) and, of course, I had to go check out a Target.

(On a side note, I LOVED our hotel room. We stayed at Le Meridien and the hotel room was a junior suite. You can't really see the curtains in this picture but they are white with a black floral design that is repeated all over. They match the wallpaper that was in the bathroom and although I've never been crazy about wallpaper, I loved it. Very modern room, but I didn't feel uncomfortable in it.)

On Saturday, I had two places I wanted to go: 1) IKEA (to get supplies to set up an art corner in Juliette's room) and 2) the Coach Outlet store to pick out my birthday gift. We started out heading to IKEA and once we got there, we started looking for a restaurant close by to eat lunch. That's when we stumbled upon a super nice mall that had a Cheesecake Factory and a Dave and Busters. I wanted Cheesecake Factory; Matt wanted Dave and Busters. If you don't know what Dave and Busters is, it's like a Chuck-E-Cheese for adults. I caved (mainly because I didn't want a huge lunch) and we went to Dave and Busters. A lot of the games were the same thing you'd find at Chuck-E-Cheese, but required a lot more tokens. I wasn't that impressed, but now we can say we've been there. We walked around that mall for a little bit and I was happy to see that they had a Disney store (we don't have one here), so I was able to find the Flynn Rider doll (from Tangled) that we saw one time in Target and have never seen again. (It's been on Juliette's wish list ever since then.) After that, we headed to IKEA (which Matt had been dreading!) and took forever to figure out what I wanted (and then to locate it). By the time we made it to the long checkout line, Matt was not a happy camper! (We may or may not have had a little bit of an argument in there in regards to what section we would find something in.) The final stop was the outlet mall where Coach Outlet is located and it was extremely crowded. It took forever just to get into the parking lot and then when I went in the store, it was packed. They were handing out coupons for an extra 30 percent off your purchase, so I was happy about that, because I'm not so sure I would have bought a purse without the extra discount. It was definitely a splurge, but I had to keep reminding myself that it was a birthday gift and I had the money set aside for it. After that, we drove back (stopping for Mexican along the way) and made it back to Shreveport around 8:30 that night.

I'll stop with the replay of November here, as this is getting long. I'll put up another post with our Christmas card pictures and Christmas decorations, so check back for it.

Remember when I said if UL was chosen to go to a bowl game, Matt said we were going and I said, "We'll see about that." Well, UL is playing at 8 pm tonight in the R+L Carrier Bowl in New Orleans, and we are going. I got us a hotel room for $50 through the name your own price feature on Priceline.com (super excited about that deal), so we'll be staying in NOLA tonight since the game won't be over until at least 11 pm or later. I know people are tailgating there all day today, but we don't know anyone and since we have Juliette with us, we're not leaving until this afternoon. (If we took her tailgating all day, she'd want to crash before we even made it to the game.) It's on TV tonight...hopefully, you won't be seeing me. (I'll be trying my best to avoid the camera!) Geaux Cajuns!