Christmas with family

We enjoyed a long week in Minot. The trip home was a piece of cake because we didn't even need our winter jackets! I'm convinced the warm temps made the kids even crazier on Christmas Eve. Gus and Ross went outside around 9pm, right before bed, to sprinkle some reindeer food on the lawn.

Other than the reindeer food, and cookies for Santa, they just ran around like fools.

Disclaimer: I typed a very long post, but somehow after I published it, photos are missing and so is the rest of the text. So for now, enjoy photos. I hope the photos can speak for themselves since the captions have disappeared.

Merry Christmas

Nora is working on her talking skills

She's also into dental hygiene at the moment. She'll stay in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, for 30 minutes at a time.



Don't worry, Steph, while we're all at home for Christmas we'll work with her on your family's names.

You know you let your 4-year old use the DVR too much when...

The other night while Gus and I were reading a few bedtime stories, he put his hand on my arm and said, "hey mom, can you pause the book real quick, I need to go get a drink."

Pause the book? Sure, Gus. Or I could just stop reading for a moment. Either one.


On that note, I think I'll sub in 1 more book in the evenings in place of Toy Story 3 or Cars 2.

Showtime

Gus' preschool, Small Wonders, held their annual Christmas program this week. This was Gus' first official Christmas program. He did a great job of standing up tall, and not bothering the kids next to him. The singing part? Not really interested. I don't think he'll be the performer of the family but that's OK. We think he enjoyed it once he could see us sitting in the audience.



After the program was over, he was ready to play. It would appear that he is more of a solo artist, and more comfortable performing on his own.





Here's Gus with his buddy, Conner. They wanted to take a picture with each other but they didn't want to stop.

Here. Much better.
Gus' teachers are great. Mrs. Julie, and Senora Kayla, his Spanish teacher.


And finally, a clip of my all-time favorite Christmas song.



??? I love 4 year olds.

Reunited

Now that the air has that winter chill in it, Gus and his best neighbor buddy Caleb haven't been hanging out nearly as much as they did all summer and fall.

Until this past Saturday.

Caleb and Gus played cars all afternoon. Then they watched the movie Cars while zipped up in Cars sleeping bags. And soon after that it was time to pretend they were cars and eat a snack (they called it fueling up).

Buddies!

Oh, Christmas Tree

Ever since Ross and I have been married, we've had a fake, pre-lit Christmas tree. It has been handy, and it looks good. We liked the simplicity of it - open the box, unfold the branches, wrap a ribbon around it (I skipped ornaments because it took too long), and plug it in. Voila, a beautiful tree with no mess. 15 minutes to set it up.

So why would I want to complicate things and throw a real tree into the mix? Because we have kids, of course, and we are responsible for forming glorious memories for them.

But before we went to pick out our real tree, we brought out the old trusty fake tree and put it up in the kitchen. It was our warm-up tree. Also, we aren't using the ribbon this year because it became tangled during that 15 minute set up time I was bragging about earlier.


Thanks to Ross' family (Aunt Nancy and Grandma Vickie) for being the sole providers of all the ornaments on our trees. Nancy and Leo gave Ross an ornament every year when he was a child, and even gifted us some ornaments the first few years after we were married, so it was fun to take them out of all their boxes, plus see a little piece of Ross' Christmas history. Vickie had them all packaged up so it was easy as could be to add them to our little tree. It also appears we've inherited some of Ross' brothers' - Chad and Kyle's - ornaments. If you want them, guys, lemmeknow.

Nora added her own ornament that she made last year. For some reason she was drawn to this one.

The kids helped pick out the best looking, best smelling Fraser Fir I've ever seen.

It's up in our living room now and waiting to be decorated! It was totally worth it.