santa claus is comin' tonight

We had our family's Christmas tonight. Loved it. Sweet memories. Pictures say it all. 

Here's a couple of things I learned.  Two year olds LOVE to open presents.  Every time Eli opened a present he would say "OHHHH pretty!".  One year olds LOVE to eat paper off of presents.  Every time Isaac would take some paper off his present it would immediately go in his mouth. 

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This video is of Eli helping Matt sort the presents into Eli's pile and Isaac's pile.  Isaac is having second dinner by finishing off pizza crust. 

Oh, and Santa is coming tonight- he's bringing a Thomas the Train and tracks (courtesy of my friend Kim's garage sale)- and Santa's also coming on Christmas eve when we're in KY.  Lucky boys get to have santa twice!

ride a little horsey times 2

happy birthday- you're 32!

Happy 32nd birthday to my sweetie husband. We love you!!

He got to blow out his birthday pancakes and tonight we're celebrating by going to Chick-fil-a for receipt day (save your receipt & what you buy today you get again free in Jan! pretty cool huh!)

santa take two and other stuff

So when Eli woke up from his nap we told him we were going to town so he could sit on Santa's lap he yelled- YEAH! and may have fist pumped the air and done a little dance too.  But you never would have known it when he got on Santa's lap.  He sat very still and quiet and finally with a lot of prompting he managed to get out the word "Thomas" when asked what he wanted for Christmas.  

 Isaac only spent about .2 seconds with Santa- he wasn't feeling the Santa vibe today.  Thank you to Discovery Depot Toys for having such a jolly Santa!

 And this is who we went to see Santa with.

And this is what we did after we saw Santa.  Don't judge, the McDonalds has a really nice play place, especially when its 40 degrees outside and gets dark at 4pm.  We played for a good hour.  And yes, the picture below is Eli screaming in delight with the realization that he gets to play on THAT!

 He absolutely loves these things but since he's only two, mommy or daddy goes with him.  Daddy went 3 times and mommy once.

 Isaac got in on a little action too.

Fun "small group time".  Great idea Amberly.

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this is totally unrelated to tonight but i just had to say I FINALLY finished our stockings.  when I realized that Christmas is, uh, like next week I decided i should actually get to work.  so here they are.  they're made out of wool sweaters from Goodwill. the idea came from Pinterest of course- where else ;)

I also finished making the last Christmas present tonight. H-a-l-l-e-l-u-j-a-h. that's all I have to say about that.

pancake art

So the boys totally scored with this 'Pancake Pen' from our friend Dani.  We eat pancakes once a week so this morning I made these way cool letter pancakes and spelled our names.  HA!

When Eli ate his 'name' he said to me "I eat the E".  So fun to eat art. Thanks Dani for the boys' way cool gift. We all love it.

Santa! I know him!

So tonight at church we saw santa! Oh and had our church's Christmas party, exchanged gifts with our friends, and ate yummy desserts- stuff like that.  Since last year's santa visit was a little tramautic for Eli (click here) I decided I was going to prep the boy this year.  So I've been talking about Santa, santa's lap, etc, etc for the past two weeks that way when Eli actually saw the jolly-ol-guy he wouldn't be freaked.  It must've worked, because when Eli saw santa walk in the gym he actually ran up to be the first one in line! So proud of this big boy (and a little boy too) who sat on Santa's lap without so much as a quiver of the lip.  Here's to more visits with santa!

Thanks to our friends who took these pictures...Phil with our camera and Jennifer with hers!

the boy can walk

and yes, Isaac gets upset every time he gets stuck. by the end of the night I had Eli trained to help his brother.

the weekend

So I'm not really sure why but the weekends just go by so fast! Only two more until Christmas (aka Isaac's b-day).  Here are a few of the things we did this weekend...

I was cooking dinner to take to church on Friday - Eli was watching me cut up carrots and decided a carrot would be the perfect snack to go with a waffle :)

on Saturday we went to a friend's Christmas party where Eli got to play the piano

he also got to eat bean dip and wear a really cool hat

Eli has also decided that he needs to get "exercise" by walking around the circle.  No kidding, he'll say, "exercise mommy" which means, walk with me about 40 gerbillion times around the circle.  So we do it.  Here he's roped daddy and brother into getting "exercise" too. :)

tonight (and Friday) we worked our church's Live Nativity.  tonight we were Mary & Joseph at the Inn. 

the boys didn't even notice we were wearing some kind of costume

here's our scene

A cute story for tonight- I took Eli around to look at the different scenes and when we went to the scene of Mary and Joseph with baby Jesus in the manger Eli said "Jesus is born". Sweet.


The last scene is Jesus with a 'modern' family.  Eli went up and gave Jesus a high five, my personal highlight of the night.

december days

So this is what you do on a cold and snowy winter day.

color with daddy

be silly

read

check out the snow

behold the lamb of god

So last night we were able to go to Knoxville to Andrew Peterson's "Behold the Lamb of God" concert.  It's one of our top two all time favorite CD's so it's no surprise that we LOVED the concert.  The words in the songs are so meaningful because they tell the Bible's story of the coming of Jesus.  I now love the CD even more (as if that were possible) and have decided I must now own all of Andrew Peterson's music. You can peruse his and other great artist's works here www.rabbitroom.com 

And this is what I'm doing right at this very moment. After 6 hours of non-stop playing, feeding, cleaning, disciplining, hugging, and reading I'm doing absolutely nothing. yes.  round two begins in approximately one hour.

deliciously dirty

Pasta for lunch = delicious.

yes, i do believe he's trying to lick the sauce off his tray. it's just that good.

yes, yes, we're still here

So I'm not really sure why but being out of town makes me not want to blog...thus the reason for my recent lack of posts.  When we're home for long stretches I try to throw some pictures out there every couple of days for the grandparents viewing pleasure, so here's my attempt to get my blogging groove back: a really looong post about random things we've done for the past two weeks.  So here goes.

Here's the little boy "helping" daddy load the dishwasher. Eli doesn't try to bother the dishwasher anymore so we've forgotten  why I started doing dishes at nap time.  

Now we remember.  Nothing like getting a crying picture of your kid for old times sake! HA!

We also had our church's Thanksgiving Banquet. A personal highlight b/c the table we sit at eats gluten free (mostly). Here's the big boy  starting on his first ever piece of pumpkin pie.  He now officially loves pie. 

We spent the weekend before Thanksgiving in St. Louis with our dear friends John & Hollie and their daughter Ava. Here's Ava and Eli playing in the backyard. She's playing in the sand and he's jabbering her ear off. 

And here's the sweet Ava helping Eli down the slide. 

And no trip to St.Louis is complete without a trip to the best store known to mankind.  No guessing which store I'm referring to. 

We also went to see a favorite comedian of ours at the Fox Theater.  Way Cool theater that looked straight out of Phantom of the Opera. Company wasn't too shabby either.

Here's his name on the marquee. 

Ok, and here's me Hollie and the little boy after church Sunday.  We're both wearing our favorite color. 

When we got home I put up Christmas decorations.  I did this after Eli was down for a nap but Isaac was still awake.  In this picture he's managed to find tissue paper- shred and eat it, and then he busted that mug. 

We also got our first snowfall of the year. Very light dusting but it snowed all day and Eli kept saying  "snowing" "snowing" when he looked out the window. So sweet.

Oh yeah, we also spent a whole week at my parents house in Arkansas but I only got TWO pictures the whole week and they are not blog worthy. I'll post some when my mom sends them to me.
So there you have it people- our two weeks in a nutshell.  I welcome myself back to the blogging world. :)