Hearts Apart Christmas

My stylin' big girl.
and her equally stylin' little sister.. can you tell how long those ringlets are getting?? she's noticing. LOL
My friend that dragged us out to this and her little sweetie.. she has two boys too but they were busy playing. ;)
Santa made an appearance
and even listened to what the kids wanted for Christmas and had presents too and LOOK Julia went to him without Mama!!!!
Opening presents
The folks at Hearts Apart insisted on this one.. ugh..

They gave out great age appropriate toys! What an a great Hearts Apart program we have here. Guess I'm glad we got dragged out to it. ;)
Well, you can see what we did tonight. The base has a special program for families to take advantage of when our spouses are deployed.. Look I'm private now I can tell you that Daddy is deployed to Iraq!! He has been gone since the end of August and we don't expect him home til April...and yes that seems so very far away. But back to Hearts Apart, this was my first venture out with them and aside from it being a little bit chaotic (to be fair they had a lot of people there) it was really nice. Nice to get out and spend some time with people that really know what you are going through cause they are in the same place. Devyn made it a bit hard for me, as she is very determined to do what SHE wants and not what I expect or ask of her. And I swear she took a year off my life because we were doing a craft and we were just waiting on Julia to finish cutting hers out, I had taken scissors from Dev and was talking with my friend when I looked back down, she was GONE! I mean we went all through the building and didn't see her, finally the second time we checked the craft room across the hall they had her... she had apparently gone looking for (and found) another pair of scissors!!! Really that's 5 minutes I'd like to never repeat but I know I probably will with her... she has NO FEAR of walking away and doing her own thing.. and then I felt awful because Julia told me on the way home that she had gotten scared while she was cutting her craft out, know why?? because I had to leave the room to find her sister!!! I wasn't worried about her, I knew she wouldn't move til she was done, and she wouldn't go anywhere til I got back. But I felt awful that she got scared, she doesn't like to be out of sight at all, hence the very LONG drawn out issue of sleeping in her own bed. Have I mentioned that aside from liking to dress up these two are POLAR OPPOSITES?! Life should be very interesting here as they grow up... oh my.

Anyway...I was very impressed with our Hearts Apart people. The gifts for the kids alone say a lot. Not just that they were age appropriate but they had gotten names, ages and boy or girl information from us when we RSVP'd and they had specific gifts wrapped with the kids names on them, so this wasn't a generic effort on their part, by that I mean a lot of kids parties we have done if we didn't bring our wrapped gift for the kids, it was something more generic or a book which is fine, I was just impressed with how detailed they got. It took a lot of work, I know I have done my fair share of these things;)

So anyway that was our evening all the ups and downs of it! I definitely had two tired little girls when we got home. Not to mention I am beat, it has been one of those days, waking up late and feeling like I was running behind all day because of it. But really we weren't that far off from our usual bedtime so now I am going to watch Stargate and Sanctuary, it's my Syfy Friday night (bet you wouldn't have guessed that;) and then hit the hay. We may go and check out the holiday parade tomorrow, so it will be another busy day out in the cold. Did you know that FL got cold?? well it has this week and frankly I have had enough already, seriously where do I have to go to get warm weather YEAR ROUND??! My aching back does not like the cold. LOL