Christmas Decorating

The Big Tree!
I was so excited because for the first time in 3 years we were finally able to get all of our Christmas decorations out of storage and put up our big tree. We spent two days decorating. It's not like I have that much stuff, but with the new house and the kids it just took extra long to figure out where to put everything. And now I finally get to have my 2 trees. The small tree is in the piano room and is decorated "fancy" while the big tree is in the family room and gets the lower half of the decorations ripped off several times a day. I don't really mind the kids taking the decorations off because I have fond memories of being a kid and loving to take the decorations off the tree and then put them back on again. That was before we got older and mom got the "blue" tree!

The kids favorite part of decorating is putting together the gingerbread house Chuck's sister Paula gave us several years ago. Each year the kids think the candy is real and they have to bite several pieces just to make sure. They love to look at this house and pull the candy off the little tree and then put it back on again. I have it up on the countertop and they pull chairs over at least once a day to play with it.

Bella loves to help especially if it involves climbing the ladder. I love nativity sets and have been collecting them for a few years now. I think I have 16 displayed throughout the house this year. I especially love the ones we picked up from the days when we used to travel and Chuck's mom brought me back a beautiful nativity from their mission in Ghana.

Big buddy getting in on the action. I usually find him sucking on a Christmas ornament at least once a day. He rolls over by the tree and likes to feel the branches, but can't actually take anything off. But not to worry, the other kids get the decorations for him to eat.

Hiking

We went for a hike over the Thanksgiving weekend. We actually ended up hiking over a couple of miles and the kids did amazingly well walking by themselves. We don't really go that far anymore, but Grandpa Paul was forging ahead and the rest of us were just trying to drag the kids along and keep up!

The kids had their walking sticks and were whacking every bush or tree in sight. At one point Paul told Samuel he could only hit each bush once because all of his whacking was just slowing us down too much.

Bella is our little independant soul. She doesn't want you to help her do anything and while I think this is great, it can be a little annoying at times. Her hat was bugging her and she kept taking it off and then stopping and sitting down to fix it. She wouldn't let any of us touch it and if we did she would yank it away and scream at us. So we had several stops for her to fix the hat and eat her peanuts.

Poor big buddy was just having too much fun!

Yes we were taking the little ones on some difficult terrain.

It was really quite cold and so despite the fact that I looked quite silly in the jazz stocking hat, I was thankful it was in the trunk of the car!

Thanksgiving

Chuck and I have hosted a Thanksgiving dinner at our home for the past 7 years - always with my mom and dad and usually Trina and Wes, but this year mom and dad went to Arkansas so we had Chuck's mom and dad, Danny, Michelle and kids at our home. Despite the fact that Chuck laughs at my planning, I really do have a good system worked out for making the whole Thanksgiving meal. (I have a word document that I pull up each year with what preparations to do each day before Thanksgiving, a shopping list, what time to begin cooking everything so it's all done at the same time - a little nerdy I know, but I love to plan - no wonder I loved my SLOC job so much!) We had a great time with Chuck's family and our kids loved playing with their cousins. The grandparents even watched the kids one evening so we could see a movie - we couldn't even remember the last time we went to the show! We don't get out much these days!

The kids eating their Thanksgiving feast. Bella actually likes turkey!

The weather had been beautiful here until the family rolled into town and then it turned cold. Despite the cold and rain on Thanksgiving day, the kids still enjoyed playing with Grandma Luann outside.

Chuck put the guys to work that morning on the playhouse. I really wanted to have it done for Christmas, but we've decided now may be the time to get a good deal on a new vehicle so we're going to spent the next few weekends shopping around. The kids will just be excited whenever it gets done.

I really love my entry way and have enjoyed decorating it for each of the holidays. These are the Thanksgiving decorations on display and amazingly enough the kids actually are good about not touching the stuff. We'll see what happens when Isaac gets old enough to walk!

Mom's Casita :)

So Mom you're always talking about us building you a casita so here you go! Now that Chuck has most of the playhouse framed it looks a little bigger than I thought it was going to be. Good thing he talked me into scaling it down! The kids are so excited about getting the playhouse done. We're hoping to have it finished in time for Christmas - we'll see how fast Chuck can build!

Growing too fast!

I had to take this picture because he is so hard to feed. We like to joke that he's like the Karate Kid - wax on, wax off - blocking all of our efforts to get food into his mouth. It's quite the messy affair because he is always knocking our hand and flipping food every where. By far my hardest kid to feed yet. I was hoping to have a good eater this time, but so far it's not looking too good!

He has started to eat baby crackers and Bella just thinks this is the greatest. She loves to shove crackers in his mouth. And yes, she is still trying to feed him other things when I'm not watching. This week he was sitting in the family room holding a tortilla chip she had given him and then I had to dig a giant size piece of granola out of his mouth she had shared with him. That girl!

The big open mouth smile! My baby is growing too fast!

Turkey Cookies

I posted this picture because I couldn't believe that I cracked one egg and two yolks came out. Crazy huh - Could have been twin chickens! Now being the gifted cook that I am - I can literally mess up any recipe no matter how easy - I was wondering if this was going to ruin my cookies, but of course it didn't matter.

Another afternoon of fun baking. This time we made turkey sugar cookies using the kids hand prints. They thought this was great.

The before shot.

The finished product. We only did one hand print turkey for each of them and then round cookies for the rest. The bad thing was that the kids ate their cookie and then I pretty much ate the rest of the 3 dozen cookies myself. Chuck had a couple once he figured out where I had hid them!

Big Buddy

There was one little patch of leaves on the ground where we took the other pictures. I really wanted to get some colorful leaf pictures this year, but it didn't happen. This will just have to do until next year.

Big Buddy Isaac is the sweetest little guy! He is always smiling and happy. He truly is the joy in my life. He doesn't let me get much sleep at night - still waking up at least 2 times, but more often 3 times a night! No wonder my eyes always look so bad - no sleep! But he's worth all those sleepless nights.

I finally was able to get a few 6 month pictures of Isaac. Chuck was giving me a hard time about wanting to take pictures every Saturday. He was working really hard to get the kids to smile and told me next time he wanted to take the pictures and I could do the hard part.

I really liked the vintage look here, but Chuck deflated by bubble when he said it looked like a bad polaroid! I still like it though!