Babies, it's COLD outside!

We had a fun and busy day today! This morning, we had our Christmas Card Photo Shoot! Backstory: Our friend Kacy is going to Africa in January to serve with YWAM at a base with Ten Thousand Homes. (I am VERY HOPEFUL that I'll be able to join her in July... a team from our church plans to go there on a 2-week mission trip to build a home!) Kacy's friend Loryn is a very talented photographer, who incredibly and graciously offered to donate a day of photo shoots to raise money for Kacy! Awesome! They raised over $1700 in ONE DAY! Woo hoo!

Our time slot was at 10 AM. Little did I know, when signing up for our time, that it would be 39 degrees at 10 AM on December 5 IN TEXAS. Hmph. Izzy doesn't do incredibly well with professional photographers anyway, and adding near-freezing temperatures to the mix didn't do much for her disposition, or her smile, but Loryn did a fantastic job and we got some VERY cute pictures. I won't post the one that we'll be using for our Christmas cards, so that it can be a surprise, but please enjoy the other shots!

Dan says that this one really captures the essence of Abby...

After our morning nap, we went Christmas tree shopping! We had grand plans to cut our own this year, but with the icy temps and Izzy's rough morning, we weren't feeling quite up to it... so we visited our local nursery. Izzy was not short on smiles at the store, of course...

We finally found the perfect tree, and tucked it into the minivan. The girls were fascinated, and when Izzy began to teeter on the brink of freaking out because something wasn't right, we asked the girls to hold the tree's hands.... which they did, happily :)

The Yancy's invited us over in the evening for an impromptu dinner date, which was VERY exciting and very delicious. The girls loved playing with Nathaniel... Abby conned him into pushing her around on the fire truck, and Izzy tried consistently to steal his toys, and to raise a ruckus when he tried to steal hers :) It's really starting to be fun to watch them with other kids and to realize that these are their first friends!