Homeschooling: building Legos in jammies before hitting the books.

Happy girl enjoying ice cream at Farm Burger!

Bed head cuteness!!!!!

Cutie pie gets a haircut! (she is CRAZY about smoothies!!! She wants one every single day, sometimes two. This one had beets, carrots, spinach, orange, chia seeds and water. I do have to say she didn't love it as much as her daily classic that has plain yogurt, water, banana, frozen berries, chia seeds and a date).

Serenading the baby!

The latter part of vacation week was mostly for productive work.  We cleaned out the entire garage which was quite the project, but I find these kinds of jobs done as a team with my hubby are always enjoyable.  As you'll see in the above pic, the kids wore their rollerblades as they worked so it was half fun/half work for them!

Selife stick pictures after a delightful afternoon walk:

Here's our first Skype meeting with the Grahams to begin the plan on the new house.  I am posting this on Jan 23 so everything is complete now, but I wanted to document our first official meeting.  We had about 3 of these 90+ minute Skype calls with them to work out the layout of the house and we had such a fun time doing it.  I can't believe we get to do this project with our amazing friends!  We definitely would not consider building a house otherwise!

The children have fire duty in the mornings and are able to get beautiful fires going in the fireplace all on their own!

Homeschooling at it's best :)

Lucia loves to crawl into bed with Alexia to read books:

December

We always look so forward to the week between Christmas and New Years as Ricardo always takes the week off and we usually enjoy lots of special family time.

We had fun playing board games:

So Decmeber 31, 2015 will go down in the books as a major day for the Lopez Family.  We purchased a vacant lot!!!!!!!!!!!  We had been in the process of closing this deal since November and there was a delay due to issues on the seller's end which had pushed closing to January.  We agreed to the delay and were just waiting for the time to pass.  Well, I received a call on December 29 from our realtor that there was a big problem as the lot was about to go into foreclosure which would mean we'd lose it so we had to close in TWO days!  Thankfully we already had all of our ducks in a row so we scheduled the closing for December 31 at 11:00.  We took all of the children with us to the attorney's office and they did so well.  Everyone there thought they were the world's best kids and wouldn't stop asking what my secret is.  But my secret of that morning was that I told everyone they had to bring a book...AND there was a bowl of candy on the table so they were allowed to munch away.  We left the closing, went to Farm Burger for a celebratory lunch and then to the lot to take the pictures below:

Our dear, dear friends, Luke and Laura have been hired for the project and we are so very excited and so grateful to the Lord for His provision for this opportunity.  We've been talking about the possibility of moving for a couple of years now, but weren't rushed and really could not find the right fit for our family.  The Lord blessed every step of this purchase that we felt so confirmed in His plan for us to move forward.  The lot is less than a mile from our current house which is a huge blessing as we love our neighborhood and we'll be able to oversee the construction really easily.  It is about 2 1/2 acres and is really beautiful!  We hope to break ground in February and hope to move in November/December of this year.   This will certainly be a busy year for our family!!

To celebrate New Years Eve, we went to a party at the Coxes house and had a super fun time.  It was so fun to go there as a family and hang out until after 10:00pm!!

Marco, Callen and Duncan - the 3 adorable boys!

Of course Ricardo bought fireworks to take along so the kids had a blast outside with him: