Happy New Year

Our first visitors in our new home came just a few days after Christmas and a couple weeks after we moved in...The Stoeckles came to play!

We went to Mountasia, Magic Mountain, the Mall which had the Fossil Dig It Store {Lame} but the kids loved it haha... We went and visited Josh at his new work and on our way home stopped and visited his boss who was the manager of the City of Sierra Madre New Years Float...We got a free tour and the kids evn got to help decorate a little piece of one of the butterfly's wings...

Tami and I baked an awesome Chocolate Peppermint Cake for New Years and we did our traditional 8pm Happy New Years! with the kids and then played our favorite game Trains and Rummikub til we were too sleepy... It was a great week!

Mountasia

Magic Mountain

Dig-It Fossil

 

The Japanese Garden at City of Hope

Josh's work

Lexi working on the Float

Lexi watching it on TV

Our Yummy Cake

The kids center piece on the kids table ;) hahahaha

Our New Home

Finally after months and months of searching all over Los Angeles including, parts of San Bernadino, and Orange County we found it. And I mean the city too when I say IT... Josh has a bit of a commute to work everyday and while we knew Simi Valley would never work for us for a few reasons, I knew we had to be somewhat closer to his work...There were just a lot of items on our check list... Newish home, diversified city/neighbprhood, Good schools, higher than a rating of 5 please, lots of families, Mall {first on my list lol} view of some sort, room enough for the seven of us, lots of younger families in ward...just to name a few off the top of the list...

The night before we were going to make an offer on a home in Porter Ranch I was poking around on lds.org on the church house maps to see where there were a lot of church buildings...I noticed there were a lot of wards in the Santa Clarita area including TWO stakes! That's a lot...The population is only 176,000...We had to look here! And so the next day April my sister in law and her friend Anna who lives here in SCV took me out to see two sets of new homes that were selling and bam! This was just here waiting for us...pretty much, since it had gone thru two potential buyers and they kept lowering the price on it especially now that the year was closing in on them we got some pretty cool incentives to buy it! and now we are pretty much stuck! Awesome interest rate ;) Not going anywhere anytime soon! and I am pretty happy about that since this stake is pretty darn awesome...and I say stake since I have some friends in all the wards! But seriously Mint Canyon is pretty bomb... For you Tina... ;)

And living closer to the family is pretty nice I must say, yesterday we got to go and spend the day with grandparents and cousins and then turn around and drive home...And living closer to L.A. is pretty fun too! and I was missing those mountains...;)

 Our Secret Park  

Our home is just to the left of Deveon's ear ;)

An only one mishap from our double move...

Our December

This is becoming a tradition with these two cute cousins...The Nutcracker at the T.O Civic Arts Center...Funny thing about this show was it was the same day we moved into our new home...We bought the tix way in advance and had no idea it would land on hte same day for us to move in... We made it though...

Lexi and Bree

American Girl and an Itty Bitty

My mom, Linda and I took these three cute girls to the American Girl Store in Hollywood to pick out their Doll early for Christmas...the only rule was they could play with them until we got to the car, then they had to go back to sleep until Christmas ;) Lily did not want to part with the little Itty Bitty Baby Doll at the store...

Lexi and Maddi

Lexi with Mary

Lily with Baby

We also did a little shopping and had lunch their at the Groves

Los Angeles Temple Lights

with the Miles Family cousins and Uncle Jesse and GF Mariah

Ward Christmas Party

My mom and I were in charge of decorating for Santa at the Ward Party...Linda helped me set everything up the day of...

Kids visiting Santa at the Simi Mall

-Noah says to Santa, "You can buy all the toys at Walmart!"

This year since we were staying at the Miles Home in Simi while waiting for our house to close, I got to decorate two trees...My parents and My In-Laws...It was a lot of fun shopping for new decorations and figuring new ways to decorat trees from all the ideas on Pinterest...
This was at my In-Laws...A candy tree

Moms house a Peppermint Tree...

Christmas Eve...

Dinner with cousins Sofia and Vinny at El Torito and yes we had the tableside guacamole cause we are fancy like that ;)

Christmas Day...

Christmas Night...

LOL

Lexi's Cousins got American Girl Dolls too ;)