The following are some pics and a video of Christmas Morning.
Enjoy, and Merry Christmas.
This is a set of marble ramps, where you build your own track.
"Must get the candy," Ella thought.
They both concentrated hard when opening their presents.
New Jammies.
This is a yo-yo turtle from the Bahamas. You pull the string out, then as you let it back in it makes the turtle walk.
Christmas Morning!
Miss Ella spent the year learning and growing. She went from crawling to walking, followed by running (either after her brother or away from her parents), sitting to standing, she's gained a pretty good vocabulary (including such favorites as "cheese", "ni-night", and "all done"), and gone from baby food in a jar to her own fork and bowl. She has learned to fight with and annoy, her brother, loves brushing her teeth and can even sing her ABC's.
Mister Nathan grows taller (and thinner) everyday. Every other sentence out of his mouth is a question. And he can remember every answer. Often his questions lead to science experiments, geography lessons, or math using candy. He knows the days of the week, but this knowledge comes via an ulterior motive: In Memphis Tuesday is free-day at some museums and the zoo and he just can't wait for Tuesday so he can go to one of them. He also played soccer for the first time during the fall season, and while he is still trying to grasp the whole concept of the game he had a great time playing and running and kicking.
Both Nathan and Ella loooovvveee the park, playing hide and go seek, and just being outside. The two of them can't get mom and dad to read enough books, and Family Night is such a hit the two of them beg to do it at least twice a week.
Pete and Kadie completed several projects around the house, making: a "Zans for cans" (a stack of rolling shelves to keep cans on, see "One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish"), shelves for the attic, a work bench in the garage, and a raised garden. Not to mention adding shelves to bedroom closets, painting walls, and doing some decorating.
The family went on several small and large trips including: a visit to Shilo Civil War Battlefield; to a Civil War reenactment at Parkers Crossroads, TN; a trip to Maine; and a trip to Utah. And lets not forget the most important trip of the year. Yes that is the one where Peter and Kadie invited -- read bamboozled -- Grandma into staying at their home with their two adorable children (who are sweet little angels not little tornadoes) while they flew off to Orlando for 11 days to play at Disney World and go on a cruise.
May the spirit of Christmas fill our hearts as we remember Christ's birth.
Love, Peter, Kadie, Nathan and Ella
making cookies, playing games...
seeing lights, playing hide and seek, and just having fun.
Poor Nathan misses Grandpa a lot, and just sobbed as we left the airport after dropping him off.
Thanks Grandpa.
Nathan thought dressing up was cool, but blocking darts as daddy throws them at you is even cooler. However the coolest part is later throwing the darts back at dad who is un armed. Who knows if Nathan understood the lesson but he had a blast.
Yes, Ella was there. She tried on the helmet, then later became the dart retriever. She loved the fact that her brother was getting hit with flying objects, and resupplied daddy as fast as she could.
So, while grandpa was visting with us, we decided to take the kids to go see the lights at the zoo. They loved the lights and the few animals we got to see (most of the animals had been taken in for the night).
There were so few people at the zoo we almost had the place to ourselves. It even happened that we ran into the zoo keeper in the nocturnal house who invited us to watch her feed the ardvark honey and play with the bushbaby's. She gave us a flashlight to help the kids see the animals better and talked to us about the animals. It was great. And lets not forget, Nathan got to ride the train. He was very excited.
Once in a while Dad gets to celebrate his birthday with a giant turkey dinner. This just happened to be one of those years.
Nathan was excited for dad's birthday, but a little worried about the birthday cake situation. For a week he had been asking what kind of cake daddy would have (which means what will it look like; a dog, a monster, etc.), and mommy kept telling him we would have pumpkin pie because it would be Thanksgiving. Nathan continued to insist pie was not cake, and that cake is what you eat on your birthday.
So, knowing Daddy does not eat dessert before 5pm, Mommy came up with a great idea.........Breakfast Cake, a.k.a. coffee cake in the shape of a bow tie. Nathan was okay with that. However there was a small candle shortage (Mom thought she had enough, Daddy's just so old now it's hard to find that many candles), and we had to get creative. Yes, he still blew all his candles out in one breath. The help only came with the second round of candle lighting.
Nathan just couldn't wait for nap time to come and go so he could get dressed up as Captain Hook. And once he was dressed he couldn't wait for Ella to get dressed up as Tinker Bell. Then once everyone was dressed, it took some convincing to get him to eat dinner.
First our little tricker-treaters visited all the neighbors on our street, then started the walk down to the church for Trunk-R-Treat, gathering candy all the way.
Nathan loved the hay ride at Trunk-R-Treat. Our trunk won second place in the decor contest. And after going around to all the trunks once, and knowing the rest of the kids were going around as fast and as many times as they could, Nate very anxiously asked if he too could go around again and was sooooooo excited mom said yes. He just couldn't get enough candy. We are working, slowly to get more info up on our page.
We can't enter the internet age too quickly you know. Because, let's see, we've only been married for 5 years and of that time we've had the internet for nearly the last 5 months, we've got some catching up to do. haha.
