Saturday, December 26, 2009

Christmas Day 2009

When Madelyn found her dress-up shoes and tiara and earrings from Santa, she politely asked to go get dressed before she continued playing. She came back looking like a warmly dressed princess!

Our Christmas blizzard (I know you can't really see it, but it was coming down hard!)

A tradition of blueberry muffins and egg nog. We usually make the box blueberry muffins (Ben prefers them) but realized this year that all the boxed kinds that I could find at our local grocery store were "processed in facilities that may contain nuts". So we went homemade this year. We really liked them. They might be our new tradition!

Madelyn created a "memory box" for her Daddy. We bought the box and Madelyn did most of the staining and poly-ing of the box herself. We put a few pictures and keepsakes in to help start it off.

Mad received a VERY cool pop-up book from Aunt Liz this year. It is the story of Cinderella and is the most intricate pop-up book I have ever seen.

What boy doesn't love Thomas the Train?

Madelyn also loves her new craft easel and supplies. (As well as the new doll!)

Just a pic showing the snow we got over Christmas Day this year. See the kid car in the yard? It is half buried!

Greyson favorite presents this year. He has been asking for a drum for weeks. He was ecstatic to see it waiting for him on Christmas morning. But truth be told, he loves the harmonica more.

We also had a terrific Christmas dinner - a HUGE turkey with stuffing, mashed potatoes, asparagus, homemade gravy, pineapple, and of course, whole cranberry sauce. It was so yummy! Lots of leftover turkey and a turkey carcass for making broth! Sounds like a job for tomorrow...

Sledding and Snowblowing

These pictures are from a sledding trip to our neighborhood hill (a very large hill!). Although, that was *before* our large snow dump of the past couple of days. The kids had a lot of fun! And we had fun watching them.

The next three pictures are from around the house when we (in reality Ben) went out to snowblow/shovel the first load of Christmas Eve snow from the driveway. As you can see, Mad and Grey have discovered our hill between our house and the next. After this, it continued to snow all night and most of Christmas. It was beautiful to watch coming down! With above freezing temps the rest of that day and sub-freezing temps today, it is now mostly one big block of heavy ice! No snowmen here for awhile!

Just Fun Pictures

Christmas gifts arrived in the box to put under the tree. Once they realized that we weren't going to let them open the gifts, they turned to the next best thing - the box they came in!

We all got a huge kick out of how Greyson found his TRex (apparel provided by Madelyn).

Wednesday, December 23, 2009

Merry Christmas to all!

Click to play this Smilebox greeting: Christmas Card 2009


(This is our family's economical and green solution to sending a Christmas card... We will, however, be sending several out to those friends and family that don't have internet access. Enjoy!)

Thursday, December 17, 2009

And the dryer has no heat... Updated

Part on order... should be here in 7-10 DAYS!

Update: The part came and it still doesn't work... now to decide to be real engineers and troubleshoot and fix it ourselves or just call the service guy (that Ben swears will know just as much as we do). All I know is that the drying clothes decor we've got going in the basement is a little too eclectic for my taste. :)

Tuesday, December 08, 2009

Warning: Old Posts Coming! - Updated

For any blog readers I have left. I am about to kick start those old posts that I referred to previously. In order to get SOMETHING up, I'm just going to post the pictures I've had sitting in a folder called "blog" on my laptop - they've been accumulating for ages! I'll eventually fill in background and interesting tidbits. I hope.

State Fair 2009
Madelyn's Trip to Duluth with GaGa and Grandpa
Additional State Fair Outing 2009
Time With Family

More posts to come! (Thanks Tracy for the idea on adding the links!)