The Nutcracker

First I have to start this post and talk about the sweet blessings in our backyard :) When we bought this house a little over a year ago it felt crazy. It was a much bigger house than I was use to living in, it needed a TON of updating and just didn't feel like our home. It also is in a nice well established neighborhood, which is good, only I was pretty sure only older people lived here. No young families or small children. You can imagine my joy when I walked out our back door one day and walking into their house was our neighbors that live behind us. (we are on a corner lot) This was a sweet blessing from God it was :) These neighbors happen to be a sweet sweet couple that have four, yes four cute small children. Today, a year later, I am so thankful for them. My children love their children and I am so glad to have a friend that my lot backs up too. It was much more than I had hoped for. So the I got use to the house, we have made some headway with the updates, this is our home, AND we have the most awesome family living behind us.

So a few weeks ago Erin emailed me and ask if I would be interested in taking her Eden who is 4 and my Lily, 3 1/2 to the Nutcracker. What a great idea! So we planned it and I have been talking to Lily about it a lot. Well last night was the night. We had such a fun time. I just love spending one on one time with each of my kids. We had planned to go to the Spaghetti Factory before hand but when we finally got there, found a parking garage, etc. there was a 1.5 hour wait and we left the house early just to keep that from happening. But oh well :) The thing really was that Erin and I both have no clue a bout downtown:) I don't love it and it makes me nervous being down there at night w/o Kyle. We didn't really know where we were to find a new place to eat and really didn't want to go get the car out of the garage that we had just found and paid to park. So we started walking. After a while we realized that Hard Rock Cafe was not far so we walked there. After eating we realized we were cutting it short on time but didn't know how we were going to get to the Center For the Arts, remember we don't really know how to get anywhere down here :) Our waiter was great and told us the fastest way to get there (and warmest and safest :) was to get a taxi. :) Well that sounded great only I have never even been in a taxi before. So we made our way out and found a taxi. It as warm and fast and also scared me out of my mind. lol The entire time I was praying he was not someone who would abduct us and take us away. Thank goodness he was not and we made it just in time to get in our seats before it started. The girls did so good all night, so impressed! It was beautiful, and Li kept commenting on the things she liked, or recognizing the scenes from the book. About the last 1/2 hours she was pooped. It was 10 and she goes to bed not later than 8 . She was super sleepy and said "the fairies and angels went to bed let's get outa here lol ) We found our way back to our garage and got out of downtown pretty quick. It was quite and adventure but so fun. Lily loves Eden and kept putting her arm around her and rubbing her back during the show.

I was super thankful for this time with those sweet girls, memories I wouldn't trade anything for. As much as I worried a bit about some of the stuff you could tell it was all adventure and fun for those girls. I love childhood!!!

Eden and Erin.

Sweet friends

She's waiting to leave and so excited!

Loves these two. We told Callie maybe next year :)