Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years Eve 2017

I AM SO BEHIND! I am not going to write a lot about these awesome holidays, I'll mostly just post my favorite pictures with captions. I can't believe it is almost September and I haven't posted this yet. I'm too distracted with all my Eloise posts, haha. But anyway, here it is! Nothing too exciting, just a few memories via lots of pictures.

Thanksgiving

Our sweet baby Eloise was born just a few days before Thanksgiving 2017 (which was my goal, yay!). As a result, both our Kraus and Nielson families came to visit to see the baby! And though there was a little hesitation about having Thanksgiving dinner in our tiny apartment with both of our families (a total of 14 people, including us), we convinced everyone that it was a great idea. And it was! Because there wasn't a lot of cooking room and it was a bit last minute, we basically just made all the best Thanksgiving dishes. We made turkey, sweet potatoes with candied pecans, mashed potatoes, rolls, raspberry pretzel jello, and many pies, including pumpkin, peanut butter, cherry, apple, and key lime.

Eloise was an absolute angel. She spent a little time outside in the warmish November weather before dinner. She slept throughout the entire meal, even while being passed from person to person so everyone had the chance to eat. Dustan and I LOVED having both our families there for the holiday, even in our tiny apartment. It was wonderful! To celebrate the fun week, we did a few other fun activities like play at the park and visit Temple Square to see the Christmas lights.

Christmas

We spent the Christmas holidays and all the BYU break with our Kraus family in Colorado. We drove out, which actually went really well with a month old baby, thank goodness. Typically we party pretty hard with the Krauses during holidays, but with two little newborns there (Taylor had her baby just 12 days beforehand and was also there!), it was a bit more lowkey than normal. But it was SO fun to have all the Kraus kids there for the first time since I married into the family! No kids on missions or missing for any other reason. It was awesome.

We spent a majority of the time at their house playing games. I am not joking when I say that we spent over 12 hours playing "Code Names", one of our favorite games. Some other fun activities we did was go to Top Golf, do small hikes/walks around the local park, went to see "The Greatest Showman" with baby girl, walked around Ikea to test our new stroller, prepared and performed a church/holiday musical number, went mountain biking (not me), visited downtown Castle Rock, and spent hours watching the babies :) Here are a million pics to show you the adventures, though it's actually a million pictures of Eloise in different places, haha

The two babies meeting each other for the first time!

Late night mountain biking ride

First time in our new stroller, walking through Ikea

Church Christmas outfits

Seeing "The Greatest Showman"--she was so noisy, haha

Shooting clay pigeons

And here are some "fancy" pictures we took during the week. Basically, Kraus family pictures and cute pics of the babes :)

Christmas day was fun and relaxing, and not too different thank most Christmases I've had. Since Eloise was so young, she obviously didn't care at all about the holiday, haha. I enjoyed dressing her up all cute and opening her presents though!

During the opening of presents--she couldn't care less!

New Years Eve

For the New Year, we were still in Colorado with the Krauses. We prepared a ton of delicious snack foods and had a few friends over. Then from dinner time till the New Year, we just chatted, played games, and ate lots of food. It was great!

Eloise decided to really get into the New Years Even festivities and stayed up from about 6 pm to 1 am straight. It was a little rough. She refused to sleep, and just wanted to nurse constantly while we were partying. But, Eloise got to actually be up for New Years, woohoo! Funny story about the picture below. Dustan and I were just about to have a New Years kiss (after banging pots and spoons outside for a few minutes right at midnight) with our sparkling cider. Right as we were about to kiss, Dustan's little brother exclaimed that he burned his face with a sparkler AND Eloise did a huge poop I could feel on my hand. Hence, this picture. One of the firsts of 2018!

Sorry for my lamest vacation post yet! Hope you enjoyed the pics though :)