Holiday Celebrations!

Well, I'm a month behind on my blogging once again. December was a full month with all the associated Christmas activities. While December is the month we celebrate the birth of our beloved Savior, it is also the birth month of my beloved husband. Since another in our group also has a December birthday, we enjoyed a lovely combination Christmas/birthday dinner celebration with our church fellowship.

Elisabeth's first taste of eggnog - she loved it!



The kids in their Christmas attire.



Sheila made a gourmet birthday cake - delicious!



The kids love singing Christmas Carols; Jonah sang to the top of his lungs despite not knowing the words to all of them.

Brotherly Love....

is sometime hard on the body, especially when he's an older brother who's only three and nearly twice your size. All in all, Elisabeth handles Jonah's rough housing fairly well. And for the most part, they really do seem to like each other and enjoy having the other around. Thus, it's not too hard to capture moments like this.

Just Because....

I think these pictures are cool. My hubby took these. No photoshop needed here. Each candid pose really captures some aspect of that child's personality.





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A New Visitor

Our friends Tom and Amy, who recently had a baby girl came over for a visit. Here is Jonah playing with little Lydia - with lots of reminders from me to be gentle.



Here's some cute pictures of Lydia with her mom and dad.

Tis the Season

When you have children, you are motivated to do things at Christmas time that you have never done before. I heard some ladies at my MOPs group talk about putting together gingerbread houses with their kids. I thought I'd investigate it but had my doubts. I assumed such a thing would be insanely hard to do. However, I was glad to find out you can buy these easy to put together kits that include everything you need - woohoo! One of the perks of living in the 21st century! I found two different ones at Target for about $10 each: (Option 1) included everything you need and you put the house together (Option 2) the gingerbread house is already constructed you just decorate it (candy and icing again included.) Well, I felt like I would be a total wimp to go with the the pre-fab gingerbread house, so I purchased Option 1.

During Elisabeth's afternoon nap, I focused Jonah on the task at hand and set about putting it together. I finally got the structure of the house put together despite Jonah's "help." He was in a hurry to decorate with (a.k.a eat) the candy. I found that decorating the house prettily like the picture on the box, was not going to happen - I cut the hole in the icing bag too big for one thing. Jonah's desire to get to the candy part of this production prompted me to stick the roof on and add icing before the suggested wait time was over. When we got the house nearly finished, I noticed the roof pieces were beginning to slide down. At that point I had three thoughts (1) I guess I should have waited the extra few minutes for the roof joints to dry (2) now I know why I heard some ladies say they used super glue on their gingerbread houses and (3) next time maybe I should go with the prefab gingerbread house.

Here's a picture of Jonah with our creation. Note the cups propping the roof up.



The next day we didn't need the cups once the icing hardened.