Friday, December 25, 2009

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas from our house to yours!

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And here's a few more pictures from the "photo shoot."

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Monday, December 21, 2009

My Handsome Boys

Here's my favorite boys in the whole wide world before church on Sunday.

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Sugar Cookies

It's just not Christmas without sugar cookies. Yum!

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Our official taste tester

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Like Daddy Like Son

Tyler likes sleeping with a blanket over his head. Darrell's cover of choice is a pillow. (Sorry, no pictures of Darrell with his head covered.)

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Boy Toys

Tyler has discovered that our house is full of all kinds of toys that us grown-ups had never thought of. Here are a few:

The bottom dishwasher rack

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Glue sticks, hot glue guns and electrical outlets

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Headphones in the headphone jack

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Spatulas in the big tropical plant that we had to move out of the front room to make room for the Christmas tree. (Does anyone want a huge, overgrown, real tropical plant? We'd love for you to take it off our hands!)

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And finally, a real toy: playdough. Tyler's learned that little pieces can fit in every boy's "collector": front pockets. (Where does he learn this stuff?)

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Thursday, December 10, 2009

O Tannenbaum

We put our Christmas tree up on Saturday. We got it at Home Depot for about $25--not bad for a real tree with REAL Christmas tree smell. I LOVE it!

Here is Darrell de-branching the bottom branches so the tree would fit in the tree stand.

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Tyler took a nap while we set the tree up and put on the lights. We were just getting to the ornaments when he woke up. Here is his first look at the tree.

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Needless to say, our tree is very top-heavy with the "good" ornaments--the ones that could be considered on the "endangered" list if a toddler had access to them. There are a few ornaments down below for Tyler to touch and pull off.

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Here's Tyler with his one and only chance at holding a ball. He carried the ball in one hand and the metal "hanging thingy" in the other hand. It wasn't too long after this picture that Tyler decided to bite the top of the ball. It broke, and that was the end of that.

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Thursday, December 3, 2009

Thanksgiving 2009

We went to my parents' house for Thanksgiving this year and had such a great time! All of my siblings and their families were together. It was awesome.

The nut cups

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Some of the cooks and the carvers

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The feast (minus Brooke's pies)

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The family

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The grandma's boy. Tyler only wanted my mom to hold him. He would hang on her legs as she tried to work in the kitchen until she would pick him up. If she tried to pass him off to one of us he would cry and throw a fit until we put him down, and then he'd hurry back to Grandma. (I think they had a secret pact to get my mom out of cooking. Hee! Hee!)

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One night we went out to eat at the local bowling alley. Surprisingly the food was super yummy there.

Here we are waiting for our food.

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Having a blast bowling.

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Black Friday

My parents live in a small town "out in the middle of nowhere," which means that to get to a town with lots of good Black Friday deals, you have to travel 2-3 hours. So, after making our Black Friday lists (and checking them a bazillion times), we left at 12:50 a.m. (yes, that's in the middle of the night) and drove 3 hours to our Black Friday "pick city." We arrived at the mall at 3:40 a.m. and were some of the first in line to get in on the 4:00 a.m. good deals. We then headed to Shopko and waited in line for the store to open up at 5:00 a.m. (One bonus here is that Shopko handed out tiny maple bars and printed instructions on where to find the deals and how to check out.) We then headed to WalMart, Target and KMart before stopping to eat breakfast at Mc Donalds. We ended our shopping frenzy where we began--at the mall, where the rest of the stores had FINALLY opened up. We made it back to my parents house around 1;00 p.m. with a van full of good deals. It was such a fun day!

I don't have a picture to go with this year's Black Friday experience, but I'll include the one from 2 years ago. That year Brooke, Kimberly, Darrell and I headed out at 3:00 a.m. (sheesh, we got to sleep in that year) to make it to the 5:00 a.m. deals in a town 2 hours away. We had a great time and got lots of things that filled up Brooke's van. Brooke decided to get some toilet paper at Costco, among other things, as we headed out of town. She secured the t.p. on top of the van with bungee cords (there literally was not room in the van) and off we went. Imagine our surprise as we were heading down the freeway to find rolls of toilet paper bouncing off the van and on to the freeway. Kimberly, Brooke, and Darrell tried to salvage what they could (I was pregnant and stayed in the van), but alas, we never could find all of the rolls. Anyway, we had such a good laugh out of it and a great memory to talk about at subsequent Black Friday ventures, that I had to post about it here.

Here we are with some of our recovered t.p. Brooke has a prized one--it was very rare to find a roll with the wrapper still on.

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