Christopher Pop-In-Kins - A New Family Christmas Tradition

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I wanted to share a new Christmas tradition with you that we will be starting this year. I know that it's just barely November but I wanted to share with you now in case you have never heard of it before and wanted to start it with your family too! Before last year I had never heard of anything like it. It was too close to Christmas by the time I had heard about it and Dawson had just turned two so we decided to wait until this year start it.

We normally set up our Christmas tree on Thanksgiving after dinner. Or if we're feeling a little bit lazy we'll do it the day after Thanksgiving. This year we are going to be moving from California to Utah right after Thanksgiving so putting up the tree isn't going to happen until the beginning of December. And that's when we'll introduce the kids to Christopher Pop-In-Kins!

Christopher "pops in" every day in a new hiding spot to check on the kids and make sure they're being good. The kids are not allowed to touch him or else he will lose his magic and have to return to the North Pole to have it restored. I know Dawson is going to love trying to find where Christopher is hiding every day and if he starts to be naughty I will remind him that Christopher is watching and will tell Santa what he sees.

The Christopher Pop-In-Kins kit comes with the Christopher Pop-In-Kins doll, a book telling the story about Christopher Pop-In-Kins and why he visits children during the Christmas season, and a case that holds the book and doll. The doll is pose-able so you can move his arms and legs and pose him differently every day. And he is SO cute!!

I love the illustrations in the book, too. It's a cute story and I know Dawson and Ashlynn will love looking at the pictures while me or dada read the story to them.


The book is a hardcover which is great because it will last a long time. The elf is also very sturdy. This is a great buy because it will provide you with years of family fun and memories!

You can buy Christopher Pop-In-Kins from Amazon or head on over to the Christopher Pop-In-Kins site for a list of other places to buy him.

I'm going to have some more posts in December about what Christopher Pop-In-Kins has been up to at our house and how the kids are liking him so stay tuned for those! :) Will you be joining in on the fun this year?

Disclosure: I received the Christopher Pop-In-Kins kit for free in order to try the product and form an opinion for this review. I was not compensated in any other manner. All opinions expressed above are my own. Thank you to ElfFun.com for allowing me (and my kids) to review Christopher Pop-In-Kins. I'm looking forward to starting this new tradition with my family. All opinions in this post are my own.

Wordless Wednesday - Giggles

Pin It now! Just a short video of Ashlynn laughing at Dawson. ♥

Wordless Wednesday - My Loves

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Wordless Wednesday

Pin It now! I took this picture with my phone so they quality isn't the greatest but Ashlynn looks adorable so I had to share. I need to stop being so lazy and pull out my camera more often instead of using my phone! Anyway, Ashlynn is 10 1/2 weeks old!
And here is a short video of Dawson telling a joke... (He's 2 1/2 now!)



In case you can't understand him he says "Why did the chicken cross the road?" and then "(to get) to the other side!" He's hilarious! :P

24 days old - Ashlynn is Home!!!

Pin It now! Ashlynn is home!! It's beyond wonderful to have her here with us. She is going to be one spoiled baby because me and Dave want to hold her all the time! :) Dawson was excited to see her for the first time at the hospital but once we got home he didn't seem to notice she was even here. He just wanted to play. After awhile though, about an hour before his bedtime, I was holding Ashlynn on the couch and he came over and wanted to cuddle with us. :) I LOVED having both my babies cuddling with me.

Here is the video of Dawson and Ashlynn meeting for the first time...



He was so sweet!!! :) I can't even explain how I felt seeing his reaction to her, I was just so happy!

We bought this outfit for her to come home in when we thought she was going to be born in February... Even though she decided to come early it still worked out really well since she came home on February 1st!


Look at how cute she is in her monkey pj's!


Here we are cuddling on the couch. :)


And just a little video of Ashlynn.



Thank you all for your thoughts and prayers! We are so happy that our baby is home!!

Introducing Ashlynn!!!

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Our baby girl is here!! My water broke at 34 weeks 3 days, so she was almost 6 weeks early! She weighed 5lbs 6oz and was 17 3/4 inches long. Just a little thing! She is 9 days old today and still in the NICU. :( She has been able to breathe on her own since birth, she started maintaining her body temperature on her own at just a few days old, now we just have to get her to eat! She has an NG tube right now because she is supposed to be eating 47 cc's every 3 hours, but she rarely finishes so they put whatever she doesn't eat on her own down the tube. Hopefully she'll get the hang of it and be able to come home soon!

Ashlynn Marie
1/8/2011 11:11 pm
5 lbs 6 oz
17 3/4 inches long

Here are some pics!

Just after she was born...


Mama holding her in the NICU for the first time.


Dada holding her...


Her bilirubin levels were a little high so she was under the lights for a couple of days.


4 days old and she got a new bed! No more bili lights, no bed warmer AND she got her IV removed! (She had an IV that was basically feeding her since she wasn't eating much and she was getting antibiotics)


I love this sweet little face.


Here she is at 1 week old...



We are so in love with our baby girl, she is such a sweet little baby. Dawson hasn't met her yet because they don't allow anybody except parents and grandparents into the NICU to visit. I'm excited to bring her home, I know that Dawson will just love her.

Please keep little Ashlynn in your thoughts and prayers. We need her strong and healthy enough to come home soon!!

Halloween: A Look Back

Pin It now! Amanda over at Funny Days with Mommy and Maddie has a linky up for posts about kids in Halloween costumes and I thought it would be fun to join in! So here's a look back at what Dawson has been for Halloween...

This was in 2008, he was born just 6 days before Halloween so we didn't buy him a real Halloween costume because he was so small. He did have a few really cute Halloween onesies though!


His onesie says "this is my costume!" He's also got on a cute little pumpkin hat and pumpkin socks. :)

I also really like this ghost onesie that he had.


I think all together he had 5 or 6 Halloween onesies, we got a few of them as gifts and couldn't resist buying a couple ourselves since we knew he was going to be born so close to Halloween.

Last year he was a dinosaur! And it was his first time trick-or-treating. He had just turned a year old so he didn't really get in to it much but he liked being outside walking around with everyone.


Rawr!


This year he was going to be a skeleton but when we took him shopping for a costume we learned that he is scared of skeletons so that wasn't going to work. We ended up finding this really cute pirate costume that he wasn't scared of and I like it a lot more than I would have liked a skeleton.


Doesn't he look adorable?! The boots are a little big, we actually just trimmed them down a little bit this morning so they would fit him better because he is wearing his costume tonight! The housing that we live in is having a Fall into Fun party tonight and kids are supposed to wear their costumes. We are looking forward to going, it should be a lot of fun and I'm excited to see Dawson dressed up in his costume again.

I think he's going to have a lot of fun trick-or-treating this year and seeing all the other kids in their costumes. He has already mastered saying "trick-or-treat" so he's ready to go!

Wordless Wednesday - Big News!

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For more Wordless Wednesday posts head on over to 5 Minutes for Mom.

Family Movie Night - Cars

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This week we decided to watch Cars for our family movie night. I had so much fun planning it and I love how everything turned out.

Last week we got started on making a decoration for our movie night. We let Dawson paint 4 pieces of paper - 1 black, 1 red, 1 yellow and 1 green. He had a lot of fun painting away.


And they all turned out really well!


Now can anybody guess what we did with these?


Anybody?


After they finished drying I cut them up to and glued them together to make a traffic light. It turned out really cute.


I was a little stumped when it came to a craft that we could do on our movie night so I turned to my friends on Facebook. A couple of them had really cute ideas and I absolutely fell in love with one of the ideas that they shared. Let me just tell you that paint plus cookies cutters can potentially equal AMAZING artwork. To see the awesome post that inspired this next craft click here.

He is definitely getting better at stamping...


And it turned out pretty cute. This is definitely something we will be doing again when he gets older. (And I think I might even try out it out, too.)



Now it's time for dinner! We picked up a black table cloth and yellow streamers at the dollar store and turned our table into road! And my AMAZING husband made some checkered flag placemats out of construction paper. (He made the traffic cone, too!)


For dinner we decided to do it tailgating-style. We had chili dogs, pasta salad (in the shape of wheels of course), homemade tortilla chips and queso and soda. I made the chips in the shape of cars and Piston Cups. :)


Movie tickets...


For dessert we had chocolate donuts. I tried to set them up to look like the tires in front of Luigi's.


And you can see some more decorations that we used... some of Dawson's cars, the Cars DVD (we didn't notice until we popped it in to watch it that we grabbed the bonus DVD and not the movie. Oops! A quick trip upstairs fixed that problem.) And check out Dave's awesome traffic cone (it's just missing a garage door or else it could be part of the Cozy Cone Motel).


And Dawson's traffic light.


And I can't forget to add a picture of my cute boys in their Cars shirts (well hubby's isn't a Cars shirt but close enough).


Again Dawson didn't watch too much of the movie but the little bit that he did watch was ADORABLE! You know how at the beginning there is a huge wreck during the race, well Dawson climbed up on me with the most serious look on his face and said "ok cars?" Awwwww!!! He was asking if the cars were ok!! It was the sweetest thing.

We are really loving doing these movie nights and I already have most of the next one planned already! We are going to be watching A Bug's Life! I think we are going to watch it this Saturday as long as we don't have too much going on. Hopefully we'll make it through a little bit more of the movie this time, but if not it's still fun. :)

Handprint Crab and the Beach!

Pin It now! I found this cute little handprint crab over at Ramblings of a Crazy Woman and I knew it would be the perfect craft for us to do this week since we were going to the beach. I changed it up a little bit and let Dawson paint the ocean/water (or "wawa" as he calls it) before we did the crab. I know how much he likes to do crafts and just doing handprints isn't very fun for him...he wants to paint!


Dawson painted SO well! I didn't have to remind him at all to stay on the paper. He did get a little bit of paint on the table but I could tell it was on accident, he seriously amazed me. He did so good!

After the blue paint dried we added his handprints so there would be a crab in the water.


If we do this again (and we just might...) I'd do his handprints first and after they are dry I'd tape a paper over the crab and then let him paint. That way when I take the taped paper off you would still be able to see the crab really well. I still LOVE how it turned out, I love all of his creations.

And before I go here are some pictures from the beach that inspired us to do this craft...

Daddy and Dawson walking towards the water.


Dawson LOVED putting his feet in the water.


He didn't want to leave when we were trying to get him to play in the sand.

He only sat in the sand for about 30 seconds...


And then he took off for the water! (Don't worry Dave is right beside him just out of the picture)



It was hilarious to seem him RUN as FAST as he could toward the water. He wanted to be in the water so bad...


And then he was happy again. :)




Me and my baby.




We'll definitely be headed to the beach a lot this summer because Dawson absolutely loved it.