Home Plate for the Holidays - Arizona Christmas Par Excellence

Nothing says "Happy Holidays" like a giant inflatable Chuck Norris.

Crystal and Ben and Tommy went to Goodyear Ballpark for the City's "Home Plate for the Holidays" festival, which boasted 40 tons of manufactured snow and Santa arriving by firetruck (the flier had the line break before "engine" and after "fire", so for a brief period Crystal thought Santa was going to appear in a blaze of glory, David Copperfield style).


Also making an appearance were bounce houses. Our favorite:


Yes, I'm pretty sure that's a giant inflatable Chuck Norris in cutoffs.

Also, tables that were selling the requisite knick-knacks, and, apparently, massages. Turns out if you get bored waiting for Santa, and the unflavored sno-cone playpen and inflatable Texas Ranger don't really float your boat, you can have a footrub in front of thousands of total strangers.

More of those Darn Cows

So Tommy has learned to play with this toy in more ways than even Fisher-Price could have imagined. At this rate he'll still be playing with it when he is 19 years old!

The Happiest Pirate

We had a great Halloween with our Tommy. I dressed him up like a pirate a few days before Halloween (he especially loved sucking on his sword). His official Halloween costume was a cute little lion.
We were finally able to catch Tommy laughing on video, so here it is! He has also become a master at grabbing our face and hair.

Chow Time

More Videos 'Cause we Know that's What you Want

Our House, In the Middle of Our Street

The kitchen

The front room (we'll actually have furniture in it tomorrow!)

The backyard. This will be our project for the next several months.

A view of the cul-de-sac we live on (you can see our car on the right)

The front of the house. Yeah! The front yard needs a little work.

Ben's office

Tommy contemplating escrow

We moved into our new home about 10 days ago and we love it! The house is beautiful. Ben has been working hard to fix the things that were broken (two toilets, the garage door, the dishwasher, and the washer and dryer so far) while Crystal has been working hard to unpack and clean. Tommy has been working hard to learn how to make new sounds, grow front teeth, and roll over. We've been busy!! We love Goodyear so far and we feel like this is right where we need to be for now. Our neighborhood is quiet and beautiful with a park in the middle where we go walk almost every day. We feel extremely lucky and blessed to be living in such a nice place. Our ward is full of young families so it looks like Tommy will grow up with lots of little friends.

Brrrrr!

Here is a video of Tommy concentrating really hard to make that noise. Note: we are in our new house! More pictures of that to come.