A few more Christmas pics

All the kiddos


Greta enjoying Claudia's new mini lava lamp


Does anyone feed this kid?

Thomas Christmas

This weekend we celebrated Christmas with my side of the family.
Instead of having a traditional meal, we decided to do something
different and have a seafood night.
My little Morgan scarfed up the steamed clams. I personally think
they look disgusting and have never tried one. She must have inherited
the love from my brother and dad.


Claudia, not so sure about the steamed clam. Love this look on her face


Pigs


Scallops in bacon


The funny moment of the night, my sister-in-law Miranda made
mom and I some "homemade slippers". Cracked me up. Can you
tell what they are made of?

Happy Birthday, Afton!!

Friday nite we had a little party for my niece (my brother's girl)
who turned 1. What a cutie!!

Love this face

My kind husband got me a new camera a few weeks back and
Greta has been my willing model as I try it out. Here are some
recent shots of her precious face.

Merry Christmas!!

Baby Jaden

We had the joy last night of spending the evening with our
dear friends, Tweit and Jolynn and their new little cutie, Jaden.
Jolynn and I went to school together and we have been friends
for what feels like forever. We were the maid of honor in each
others weddings and have been through much together!! They
live in Florida now so we don't get to see too much of them, but
it always great fun when we do. This was the first we got to
meet their baby boy, they adopted him about 2 months ago.
Jaden and Greta were born 3 weeks apart. He is ADORABLE
and so fun to meet the little guy.


Greta and her new friend


What a face!!


The cute family


True love

Birthday Bash

We had a little party for Aaron Sat. night. We invited his 2nd
cousins and buddies QJ and Oliver.


Lovin' his firetruck-in-an-accident cake




Lovin' the monster truck that QJ gave him


I love the look on both their faces in reaction to the train he
got from grandma!

A for effort?

My little man turned 2 on Friday, can hardly believe it!! In my
attempt to be fun and creative, I thought I would make him a
firetruck cake. Aaron is obsessed by trucks and cars and the like.
I saw this cake in one of Claudia's cookbooks and thought it looked
super easy, all I had to do was cut a 9x13 cake in half, paint it red,
stick on a few extras and tad-tah!! Well, it turned out much more
complicated than I thought. Here are some shots of the poor,
pathetic cake.

First, my white icing never turned red. I used over half of a bottle
of red food coloring and it just kept getting "hotter" pink! So, pink
firetruck it was. Then, the cake broke in half before I even assembled it.
Thankfully, little Aaron still knew that it was a firetruck cake and thought
it was great.
Warning: this is a REALLY ugly cake!!!

Birthday pancake

Football face

I snapped this pic the other day when Greta was watching football
with Steve. Thought her expression was hilarious!

Who's dumb idea was this anyway?

I am now fully convinced that Christmas cut out cookies are from the
dark side. For what ever reason, every year they call my name, I adore
their cuteness, and think that it will create some wonderful atmosphere
in my home. I always stubbornly refuse to buy the premade stuff, I insist
on mixing my own.
So for whatever reason, it was snowing today... the romantic side of me
began to be teased by the thought of me and my children happily cutting
out and decorating shapes. Let's just say it was all downhill from there.
2 containers of sprinkles all over the floor, cookies all stuck to the tray,
dough that is too thin, too think, stuck to the table and broken shapes,

trying to teach Aaron that the cookies need to be baked before they are

eaten.  Uggh.

The best part of the day was this adorable shot of Aaron rolling the cookies


Moments later he was dumping sprinkles on the table. Obviously
it was my fault, I was too busy trying to get cute picts of him to
notice that he was about to dump sprinkles all over the place!!


Morgan faithfully cleaning up after her brother


Good ol' Clauida doing the job well


The finished product. There may be 3 or 4 unbroken ones in the whole batch.

More NYC

I have a few more random picts of our trip to NY.

My girls in Times Sq.




A cool old church in the middle of the city


Rockafellar Sq. The big unlit tree in the background


Cool looking, oversized Christmas bulb ornaments

More Tina picts...

Doll fun

We had some friends from church over the other day who have
3 girls and they all also have an Am. Girl doll. What fun for a little
girl to play with her new toy and her friends!!

The progressive smile