Christmas Festivities!

This Gingerbread house is ALL real gingerbread and candy. It's pretty amazing!

I think knowing we won't be here next year has made Lance really want to take advantage of all the Purdue events we haven't yet participated in yet so today we did it all and had a blast. We started off this morning with Breakfast with Santa. We had some pancakes and sausage, saw Santa Claus (Maddi wouldn't get near him without me right there and even then it was still a little too close for her comfort.....Mia was happy as could be and told Santa that she would like a Reindeer for Christmas....he said he'd see what he could do!), and then did few Christmas Crafts. Then we headed home for naps and as soon as everyone woke up we got dressed up and headed off to the Purdue Christmas Show. The girls really enjoyed MOST of the show... the first hour was the more upbeat holiday type of songs and then the second hour was more religious which we thought was nice to see however not as captivating to a 18 month old, however all in all we felt it was a success, then we headed off to grab a bite to eat, and then ended the night by attending a baptism for a new 17 year old boy in our ward. It was a tiring day but so fun to just hang out as a family all day!

Mia's First Dance Recital

Mia had her first Dance recital about a week ago. She has been taking a little dance class from a friend of mine and has really enjoyed it. And I was so proud of her the night of the recital. She had a lot of fun watching all the other classes perform and when it was her class's turn she got right up there and smiled away as they did their little 2 minute dance! Actually her whole class did really well they all remembered the steps and stayed together....pretty amazing for 3 yr olds. :)

Family Trees

In Young Womens we have been working on this Family Tree project since August (I got the idea from my sister/Red Envelope) and two of the girls came to my house a couple weeks ago to finish theirs up to give away as Christmas presents and these were the results! They actually still need to add their Family Last Name at the top of the Canvas which they embroidered but I was still pretty impressed and it makes me want to get working on my own now.

Day After Thanksgiving

As much as I enjoy Thanksgiving I think I get just as excited about the day AFTER Thanksgiving. I love the early morning Black Friday Shopping, and Beginning our Christmas celebration by setting up Decorations and listening to Christmas music!
This year the Black Friday ads weren't as promising however this ended up just saving me time and money and I still got a steal of the year ( A kitchen set for 19.99 reg. 45.00 I was pretty thrilled) I had actually already purchased this Kitchen set from another store but had been saving my receipt just in case I found a better deal. I got up at 3:30 but was home by 6:00 and got a couple more hours of sleep before the day really started going.
We spent the evening setting up decorations, drinking smoothies, and enjoyed a little impromptu Nativity reenactment during date night. Lance got our Christmas lights up on Saturday right before we got our first snow. And the couple days we had with snow on the ground the girls would get so excited waiting for Lance to come home so that they could get all their snow clothes on and have him pull them on the sled in the backyard. At one point I saw Lance using a sled and the small hill in our backyard to give the girls a little lesson in Snowboarding!

Thanksgiving!!!

We always look forward to Thanksgiving and this year especially because we were trying something new with our turkey......DEEP FRYING. When I was in college I spent thanksgiving with some family friends in Seattle and had the best Turkey I've ever had! The key was that they marinated the Turkey in Italian Dressing for 3 Days and then Deep fried it. After lots of research and thanks to a wonderful Food Network Video on How to Fry a Turkey that a friend emailed to me, we came up with a contraption to make the process much safer and the results.... Incredibly easy set up with no fire scares, a Turkey that cooked in 42 minutes and came out golden brown, and tasted wonderful. Moist, and flavorful just how how you would like a Turkey to be without half the work of normal cooking! This will definitely be a yearly tradition for us.

Chicago Trip

Lance and I trade babysitting every year with some friends so that we can each have a chance to go away for an overnight trip without the kids. This year Lance had a conference in Chicago where he was presenting a research poster he had been working on, and so I decided to go with him. The hotel was paid for so it was really nice to tag along. The hotel was really nice and right downtown in Chicago about a block from Michigan Avenue. We had a great time, I got to relax in the hotel or go shopping by myself while Lance was busy, got to attend parts of the conference with him, and then took me out that night to go see the Twilight movie. It was very relaxing and fun to get away! Thank heavens for wonderful friends when you don't have any family around. :)

Fun Friends

We watched our neighbor's little boys overnight while our friend's got to go out of town and the girls had so much fun! Alex is one of Maddi's favorite little friends and it was cracking me up because they are both attached to a blankie and are finger/thumb suckers and it was like they had a little understanding and throughout the weekend they would find each others blankie and bring them to each other!

Poor Little Maddi

I think I mentioned how accident prone Maddi is, and this is the latest and greatest of her injuries. The culprit the dreaded Coffee Table and a winter coat laying on the living room floor. And you know the more I added up these injuries I am noticing a pattern of these accidents always occurring on Sundays! We had some friends over for dinner and the girls were playing in the living room while we were talking in the kitchen and Maddi slipped on her coat and fell right into the coffee table! I remember Mia falling and bonking her head fairly often as a toddler but her falls just never left the Marks that Maddi's seem to! Her eye continued to get more and more black as the week progressed until it finally started going away.

My little artist

Recently Mia has been opting for "Quiet Time" rather then sleeping during Nap time and one day she wanted to do some painting during Quiet Time. I got the paint supplies out and left her alone and awhile later she came running into my room so excited to show me what she had painted. When I saw her painting I could see why she was so excited. She had used one of the painting techniques we learned about in preschool a couple months back when we studied Jackson Pollock....Splatter Painting. I was really happy to see her apply some of her learning, however when we learned about this technique in preschool we practiced it OUTSIDE and if you notice on the painting the splatter heads off the page and what you can't see is that the splatter continued onto many other surfaces throughout the kitchen. She was so proud of herself I couldn't be upset about the mess! :)

Halloween: Snow White and the one little Bumble Bee

Getting Princess Hair Ready. Mia kept saying "Beautiful as a Princess" While I was curling her hair!

I've decided that if your Husband has to be gone on a holiday Halloween isn't such a bad one, since it's such a social holiday! Although we missed Lance, Dressing up, and eating lots of Candy is a great distraction! Plus it helped that my friend was also husband-less. We had lots of fun getting ready, eating pizza for dinner, and then heading off to the Ward trunk-or-treat, and then coming home and doing some "Real" trick-0r-treating to a few houses on our street.

Waiting for Preschool to Start

Every week on the days we get ready for Preschool (which starts at 9) Mia says at least 5 times to me.... "How come it takes SO long for the kids to get here!" The week of Halloween we had a Halloween Party and just like every other day she planted herself at the front window "trying" to wait patiently for her preschool friends to get there!