A New Holiday Fun Tradition

This is the first year I have gotten the kids a gingerbread house to decorate. On our family night, we had fun "constructing" the house, "painting" the house, and then putting on all the decorations! I even convinced the kids (momentarily, anyway) that the candy was for decoration only! :) Bonus: The gingerbread smelled really good and the house makes our house smell good too!

Christmas at the Zoo

Two of Brenner's favorite things! Christmas lights and the zoo! He was very excited the day we got the postcard in the mail inviting us to come to the zoo for a special night to celebrate Christmas with the animals! So we headed off to see what we could see...

This was no ordinary Santa. As we discovered, he was more popularly visited by people's pets than people's children! People brought all kinds of pets to the zoo to see Santa! (Aile was quite fascinated by the ferret. Hmmm...)
Although we do love Chimps and Lions, as shown in this picture, our favorite animal on this trip was the cougar! (Mainly because he was eagerly prowling the fence trying to get a better glimpse of the guy's dog that was next to us! Having people's pets at the zoo added an interesting dynamic.) It was also pretty interesting to see the animals at night. Of course, some of them were sleeping. But I've never seen others of them so active! The most interesting was probably the wild turkeys and peacocks. You have to cross this train trestle thing, and about 6 or 8 turkeys and peacocks were up on the beams over our heads as we passed through! (We were careful not to stop directly under them...as one little boy near us shouted so bluntly--"we don't want poop on our heads!") :)

Christmas Tree Lighting

My kids love this tradition. Every year we go walk the promanade and watch them light their huge Christmas tree at the university. Along the promanade they have various musicians performing, Santa Claus, hot chocolate and donut holes, and a live nativity scene. Ironically, I did not take a picture of the huge Christmas tree...

Here is Caelum's first encounter with Jolly Ol' St. Nick. He wasn't too interested.

On our way back to the car, Brenner asks, "Mommy, what was your favorite part?"

"Oh, Mommy loves the bells!" I reply. "The songs played by the bell choir were my favorite part!"

"Ok. And what was your favorite part, Aile?" he continues.

"Santa!!" his big sister eagerly replies.

"Brenner," I say, "what was YOUR favorite part?"

"Oh!" he seems surprised to be asked. "Well, I liked the hot chocolate and the donuts! Aaaand the Christmas tree...Aaaaand the lights!"

Caelum's Army Crawling Adventure

And he's off! No longer do I have a happy little baby boy who sits on a blanket with his toys right where I place him! He started rolling around everywhere several weeks ago, but now--now he's off! Now he's an ecstatic little baby boy who loves to explore! :) This particular adventure took him from his original perch in the living room, all the way down the hall into Aile's room. He was laughing the whole time--so proud of himself! :)

Thanksgiving in Augusta, SC

As is the tradition with Sean's family, we loaded up the kids and headed down to Augusta, SC for Thanksgiving this year. We stopped on the way there and on the way back at Aunt Verla's house to cut the trip up a bit. This year, I'd say the weekend went pretty great! We only had one injury--sorry Uncle Ron, you know those young men are brutally competitive when it comes to their family football! We only had one absentee--poo poo on Zach this year! :) We even invited a family from our church to come join us! And--amazingly--all 13 children under the age of 7 got along famously all weekend with NO major disputes or meltdowns! Awesome! (Granted, 3 of those were under 1 year...and next year we'll have 2 more baby members of the clan!)

Once again, I did not get any pictures of the food! What is wrong with me?! I guess I was too busy eating... :) I didn't get any pictures at our game nights either...but I DID get quite an entertaining video of Lisa and Elaine at the Karaoke machine! :)

Also, I am not a professional photographer by any means, folks, but we are going to have to consider these pics of Caelum his 8 month pics. Unfortunately, he had a weird eye thing going on the week before and we had to cancel our picture appointment. So here's what we have:

This was hilarious! Brenner, Kaleb, and Megan were standing aroung the relish tray "sneaking" carrots, olives, and cucumbers. They kept sharing these conspiratorial little grins and giggles as if they were really getting away with something. After the veggies were gone, Verla filled the tray up again with blueberries, bananas, and grapes, and the three amigos kept right on munching.

While the 3 two-year-olds were chowing down, Aile was finding the dress-up clothes! (No shocker there...) She graciously paused in her "wedding dance" so I could take this pic.

When he was finished with his "secret" snack, Brenner was back to his favorite pastime--cars and trucks!

Ahhh--the picture just doesn't do it justice. Too bad the video is too long to upload to this blog...sigh. As you can see, Caelum didn't quite know what to make of it all either...

Thanksgiving with Auntie MJ and Uncle Don

We celebrated Thanksgiving and Sean's birthday with MJ and Don the weekend before the real day since we were going to be out of town. We always love heading down to "Maey Dane's house" as Brenner calls it. :) (In fact, just tonight he told me: "You know, I sure love Maey Dane!") Bummer--I didn't get a picture of the food table and pie and such! We had such YUMMY food!! :)