Yea Christmas!!

We finally have our own little Garcia family for Christmas! To think of how much we love our boys and how little it pales in comparison to the love God has for us. Emmanuel...God with us, what better gift than that this Christmas?

We have been incredibly blessed this year with our family, amazing church, health, friends, jobs...the list is endless. Okay...now the real reason I came on here. Wanted to share some photos and video with y'all. Couple of weeks ago we made it out to Marble Falls to check the Christmas lights display there. We met Brian and Jean there and ate at the River City Grille. Good times. Here is the Photo Album.

This past weekend we headed up to Edmond, Oklahoma, just outside of OKC to visit the grandparents and Mari. Just hung out on Saturday, then Sunday it was church and more hanging out. Mari showed us Larissa's picture with Santa at Bass Pro Shop and we decided we needed on of the boys. I was so hoping the boys would be terrified with Santa in the pic and I wasn't disappointed!

On the way home we made a stop in Dallas and stayed with Brad and Kelli for a night. Kelli made an awesome dinner for us. Little Anna is so beautiful...she is getting big. Oh, and then Brian and Jean showed up! It was a Festivus miracle! They were in town visiting with Jean's family. A good ol' fashioned home group reunion in Dallas. It was good to be back in Texas...but now wishing we had stayed in OK for Christmas, they have SNOW! Here are all the photos from OKC and Dallas: OKC/Dallas Photo Album.

That is all for now...have more December JAG pics to post, including some with Mrs.Karen who stayed with us a couple days last week on her way home from M.D. Anderson in Houston. Amen! Another prayer answered this year. God rocks!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

12

It's been 12 years since I trapped my wife in marriage and locked her in with her "I do." No take backs!

Time to get started on lucky 13 with our two JAGerrific boys. I'm living walking proof of how awesome God is...that He can love and forgive me and bless me with such an amazing woman who would help bring me home to Him. A woman who loves God, has brains, beauty, amazing mother, she is hilarious, she also laughs at all my jokes - which is key, she is probably now a bigger die hard Raider fan than I am...I win! I still remember watching a Raider game many many moons ago and she yells out, correctly mind you, "That's HOLDING!!" If there was every any doubt, which there wasn't, it was all laid to rest then.

Happy 12th Beautiful! I lub you!

Christmas Card Past

I think this might be the earliest we've got our Christmas cards mailed. Got 99% of them in the mail today...still need a few more. So keep an eye on out for it. Here is a look back at some of the homemade cards we've sent out this decade. To check out all the photos for the making of some of these cards, CLICK HERE.

Christmas 2008: Holly was 8 months preggers last December. Our whole year was mostly about the boys, obviously. Knew we wanted to use the boys sonogram pics for the card. Somehow came up the idea of taking a picture of our Raider Christmas tree and photoshopping the boys pics in as ornaments. Jordan is on top, the 3-D pic. Jeremy never was in a good position for sono's after about month 5...so his is an older regular sonogram pic.

Christmas 2007: I think I was just going through pics to look for something to use for the card and spark an idea. Came across a sleeping doggy pic and ended up with the idea of the dogs and cat sleeping and dreaming about what they love doing. Jezebel (top) is dreaming of playing in her kiddie pool. T-Bone (middle) is dreaming of going out for a run with me...and carrying his own leash. Tiger II (a.k.a. "dumb cat", bottom) is dreaming about sleeping.

Christmas 2006: Don't remember how we came up with this idea, but it was one of the best times we had. The idea was to try and get a good shot, but include a bunch of "blooper" type shots. Trying to stage bloopers is not as easy as you'd think, but it sure was fun. My 2 favorite bloopers are the one of T-Bone who ended up in the shot alone and the one of Jezebel with her back to the camera and Holly caught in a blink. Good times.

 Christmas 2002: We moved in to our new home in February of 2002...this was our first Christmas at "home." So we used that for the card. I knew once I had my own house I would use the same ceramic bulbs I used to string up on the house growing up to decorate. Still using those lights today! Although now the 2 little trees out front are much bigger.

Christmas 2000: This is a recycled card. The original pic was taken in '98 and did not include Jezebel. We only had Spyncer (cat), Kukoc (parakeet, named after a player on the Chicago Bulls back when the NBA was still fun) and T-Bone. The original "photo shoot" was hilarious. Trying to get the cat, bird and dog to all sit still for the pic was a lot of fun. Not sure if we ever sent the original out or not...but eventually in 2000 when we got Jezebel, I photoshopped her in and used that for our card.

EDIT - no idea what happened to the missing years in between. I know one year we sent out Scooby-Doo Christmas cards that were store bought. Haven't the foggiest about the rest of the years. Maybe we didn't send cards...maybe they were store bought? You're guess is as good as mine.

JAG Boys Love Taylor Swift

The boys loved dancing to Taylor Swift last week. We were watching SNL and Holly's bestest friend Taylor Swift was the host and musical guest. When Swift performed, the boys had fun getting jiggy widit. That is not saying much though, since the boys can get down with half the commercials on TV that have a good beat. Still though, they had fun...Jordan just need to work on his head banging at the end of the video!

Gobble Gobble

Wait so long for Thanksgiving and time with family and then poof...its all gone except for some stale honey wheat rolls and a couple last shreds of white meat and ham. Our house was jam packed with Garcias this holiday, it was awesome. The kids out numbered the adults, so it was a bit scary. Luckily enough they never joined forces to overthrow the powers that be. Isaiah arrived last Wednesday night followed by my Pop and the whole family about 1:30am Thursday morning. Finally Mari and the girls all got here Thanksgiving day. We played football out front, then watched the Raiders give away another game, but we were too high on tryptophan to really care much about it. Turkey, ham, mashed-taters, green bean casserole, stuffing, fruit salad and honey wheat rolls...YUM!

Friday we just veg'd and recovered from eating on Thursday. Went to the store and Zaiah bought ingridients for menudo and then he and Dad cooked it for dinner. It...was...TASTY! Saturday it was off to Town Lake and the park to hang out and fly some kites. It was a beautiful day...there were parrots hanging out at the park. We saw one, figured it just escaped from someone's home. Then we saw another. Then another. Three green parrots just chillin' in the park. After the park it was off to Chuy's for dinner and then downtown to Amy's for ice cream.

While Larissa was here, Mari was hoping she might catch on to crawling and getting around like the boys, but instead, Larissa taught Jeremy how to lazily boot scoot across the floor. Basically, she stays in a sitting position and scoots her butt forward (much like a dog does on carpet) then stretches out her legs and does it again to move forward. Good times...good times...

Thanksgiving Photo Album

Meanwhile, Thanksgiving marked another milestone for the JAG Twins...it was their 10 month mark! Back at the beginning of November the boys went for their 9 month check up. Jeremy measured in at 21 lbs 4 oz - 30" - and a head circumference of 48 cm. Jordan measured in at 19 lbs 6 oz - 29" - and a head circumference of 46 ½ cm. The boys got some big ol' teeth now...2 front middle top and bottom and then a few extra. We are starting to brush their teeth during bath time (just the brush) to get them used to the brush. The boys can crawl up the stairs on their own...and they have! Jeremy sneaked up on us twice and got half way up the stairs...yikes! They are having fun playing together. It is great to watch one boy chase the other while the other crawls away cracking up.

This month their art project was to create a painting for Poppi (Mrs.Karen) while she is at M.D. Anderson. Holly used their butt prints and feet prints to make a landscape picture. Their butts were the sun and clouds and their feet were tree tops. It had the writing, "Soon the worst will be BEHIND you and...you will be on your FEET in no time!"

Not too many photos this month, but here they are.

JAG November Photo Album