The Hansen Family: December 2017

On December 1st - our Elf Friend JINGLE arrived!

These three little kids were thrilled to see him again and he helped them behave all month!

Here are a few of the funny things he was found doing each morning this year...

On the 2nd day of December - CARLY TURNED 12!! She received her Faith in God award and is excited to be part of the Young Women's program at church now. We sure love this pretty girl.

Our biggest news for December is that WE MOVED!! Pretty fun to get a house for Christmas but it was definitely a lot of work getting Christmas ready plus out of one house and into another. It will definitely be a Christmas we remember!

Quite a few ward members came to help us move out and we had another good crowd of people from our new ward helping us move in - we are blessed.

Here's our house! We're renting it because we now live in Renton and that seemed appropriate - haha.

We are SO happy to be out of an apartment with our family of 7 and have more room to live. The best part is being away from cussing and pot smoking neighbors - finally! The big girls are thrilled to have their own rooms downstairs with their own bathroom - our own little teenager-ville. We even have a room for an office. The house sits off the end of a road nestled into trees and is peaceful and quiet - I love it. It will be a wonderful place for our family to live for the next little while. We are just 40 minutes north of where we were before. Matt and I are opening a satellite location for the sign company he works for and Renton is where they wanted us to be.

Carly discovered a fun little trick her lotion can do while we were at church the day after we moved...and here is proof that it snows in Washington every once in a while! Doesn't that handprint look like it's puffed up on top of the snow? Awesome.

Here is the funniest thing about our new house - it is owned by a Chinese couple so they thought this was a normal thing to do - but THE LAUNDRY IS OUTSIDE on the deck!! Matt had to quickly figure out a way to keep heat lamps on the pipes to keep them from freezing and it has been quite the experience doing laundry in the cold and rain! I will say it was nice one day to go out there and breathe in the fresh air and hear the birds singing in the trees while I did laundry!

The day after we moved was Christmas Eve - here are the new pajamas the kiddos got. The second picture is them showing off their tails - Trevor is so funny!

Christmas morning was wonderful! All the kids got a new Lego set and for the first time in I'm told 8 years - we had a white Christmas! We got a good 4 inches at least and the road to our house is sloped so the kids had a perfect sledding hill. Great holiday.

I made an awesome snowman on our back deck - see our great view? The next day is when we discovered that having a road to our house on a slope is NOT always a good thing - Matt got his work truck stuck. Slipping and sliding - scary. We had to put chains on vehicles more than once to get them out of there. That's why we're very glad it rarely snows here!

Alissa was thrilled to get her very own pet hamster for Christmas - his name is Bibbles.

Because of all the moving "fun" right before Christmas - we had to put off our sugar cookie tradition until after the holiday - Jacie made sure we made some this year, though.

After a week of getting unburied from all our boxes and getting more settled in our house, a new holiday arrived - New Year's Eve was upon us. Our friends the Pauls from Lakewood drove up to spend the night with us. We had great fun playing games and eating yummy snacks with them.

We got the game Speak Out for Christmas - wow, that was entertaining...and slightly gross when drool would drip down the kids' chins!

A few other things we did in December included a couple trips to see a Nativity Festival in Tacoma. The girls went with their Young Women's group - it was Carly's first official activity as a Beehive.