Sophie's 2nd Birthday

Sophie with some of her Birthday loot! Such cute baby dolls (from Yaya, Auntie Rachael and Grandma) a fun stroller from Yaya and Papa (Mom and Dad just got her clothes). Katie and Taylor got her her own legos (duplos).

Thanks to the Hunsburgers for coming for the party and for the cute little cozy outfit!

Elmo is looking "starry-eyed" don't you think? hee hee hee hee

The Pizza party! We were going to go out to Red Robin (as we do traditionally for Birthdays) but the thought of dragging everybody out in the cold and crazy holiday weekend traffic was off-putting. We ordered Dominos! YUM! I even got half pepperoni and half cheese so everybody was happy (Craig and I got our own hawaiian).


This was breakfast.

Last Saturday was Sophie's 2nd Birthday. We had a really fun day. We started out with pink sprinkle waffels and ended it with a pizza party and Elmo cupcakes. I'm glad I thought to make cupcakes this year instead of a double layer cake. I made Katie and big Elmo head cake one year. The thought of a whole cake in our house right now was too much! I think the cupcakes were easier to make and serve. Sophie really got that it was her day and it was so fun to celebrate with her! She is not as easy as she was last year (she has lots of opinions on stuff now), but she's so wonderful to be with and watch grow. I'm so glad she's in our family! When she was first born I kept staring at her and wouldn't have believed that she was ours if I hadn't been there. She just didn't look familiar. THAT has all changed!!! I can't believe how many times I've been told "I have never seen a mom who's kids look like her as much as yours do!". I especially like it when people will say things like " Your kids are so cute!" followed by "They look JUST like you!". Gee, thanks!


I loved that Sophie knew to wait until after we finished singing to blow out the candles and she did it all on her own! We didn't even talk about it before! She really picks up on everything!

The long overdue Christmas post

Katie taught Sophie to eat snow, she loves it.

The first snow fall!

Sophie is into everything now. I went upstairs to switch over the laundry and came down to this. I don't think she's old enough to wear make up yet, what do you think?

Here's us decorating the gingerbread house. It was a lot of fun. I know it's dumb, but I'm always surprised by how much the kids want to eat the candy. Aside from the M&M's none of it looks worth eating to me.

We were the only ones with chairs, not a surprise now that we know how short it was going to be! Perfect in my opinion! Enough of a parade to be fun, but not so much you had to wait for it to end.

The kids got to make these star ornaments at the church in the village.

Here's the preview to the nutcracker. Katie LOVED it! I'll have to take her to the whole thing sometime. I did get "Fantasia" for them this year so I'm sure she'll love that as well.

This is Taylor on our trolley ride. They even got people to carole as they drove through the village! Isn't Ada fabulous???!






The tree looks pretty great, huh? It's a fake tree friends in KY gave us! Thx Adam and Kristen!

Well I meant to post this way back at the very beginning of December (when this pic of the Christmas tree was taken, the Sunday after Thanksgiving, when we put up the Christmas tree). I was going to entitle this post "It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas" but now it's almost Christmas! Wow! How time flies. We have been having so much fun though. It's great to be together this year. A year ago, Craig was up here working and I was down in SC with the kids. Christmas is much more fun when we're all together (and not in the middle of a move).

The week after setting up the Christmas tree we went to the little village of Ada (a mile from us)and they had a night where they had a Christmas light ceremony at the covered bridge and an old time Santa walking around and free trolley rides and activities at all the local businesses. It was fun and really cold. Free ornament making and cocoa and cookies and a planetarium show about the Christmas star and a preview of the nutcracker ballet. The following Saturday they had a little Christmas parade in the village. Best Christmas parade. We went half an hour ahead and parked on a little side street by the Historical society barn (where they had free cookie decorating and cocoa) where we could watch from the van. We watched from the street. The parade was about half an hour, one marching band, lots of candy and then Santa on a fire truck. We got in the van and drove home! No waiting! AWESOME!

Tradition dictates that we decorate our gingerbread house during the Christmas Devotional but now that we are on Eastern time and it doesn't start until 8pm we decorated it early, put the kids down and listened to it in blissful quiet. Sophie has learned to pull a chair over to the counter and eat all the candy off the house. YUCK!

Here's the dancing cow video!!

This is what it's really like at our house, just in case you were wondering.