Saturday, December 27, 2008

Happy Holidays!

I hope everyone had a good Christmas! And we wish you all a happy New Year!

Here are a few pictures we took on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day...

Beatrice voluntarily wearing the antlers ;)

Duncan in his new Batman jammies "checking" his Lightning McQueen Computer
Beatrice giving her baby doll a kiss
Playing with her Little People Castle





The paper was just as fun as the presents :)


Monday, December 22, 2008

Christmas Card

Well, here is our anxiously awaited Christmas card! ;) If you are lucky enough to be on our list, I am mailing them out today! I'm so behind!! ;) So I hope you will get them at least on Christmas Eve ;) If not, here it is.

Believe it or not, this one was the best of the bunch. We had to take at least 20 pictures. This was only about the second one we took, they didn't get any better... ;)

Thursday, December 18, 2008

Maria playing the saxophone at her winter concert last night :) the band did an awesome job!
Somehow the video of the winter concert ended up at the bottom of this post...

My favorite picture over the last few weeks... Daddy's gettin all kinds of love :)

Beatrice all bundled up :)
View of the snow from the front porch

And from the back porch

Ah... sharing the chair so nicely

The kids have been watching Shrek The Halls quite a bit, so dragging around their Shrek dolls. Apparently the big one is Mommy Shrek and the small one is Daddy Shrek... probably because Duncan knows who wears the pants in the family! ;)
Simultaneous Shrek chewing.

Duncan's Spiderman Hat! :) (that he wore for maybe a day before he went back to his "hawiian" superhero hat).

And here are the eagerly anticipated videos of Maria's winter concert... The first one is her announcing the song! She was so excited to be able to do that :) and the next one is the first song they did - "winter wonderland," and then the last one is the ending of the song she announced - "Do you hear what I hear."



Saturday, December 13, 2008

Getting Ready for X-Mas!!

I was finally able to upload some pictures!!! Yay!! I just had to do them one at a time, otherwise the upload failed out and some of them I had to try a couple of times before they went... but hopefully I have this much success from here on out! I thought I had solved my problem until some failed, but if I have to try a couple of times and only upload one at a time, its better than nothing! :)

As is traditional, we put up the tree and xmas decorations on the day after Thanksgiving! We all had a blast. Duncan really got in there and helped out :) He enjoyed it! It was too funny the way he just jumped in and started decorating the tree with the girls as if he'd always done it!

And this is what baby sister did while we were decorating the tree...

Here comes the antler fest ;)We've gotten a lot of Christmas mileage out of those antlers! :)

Friday, December 5, 2008

Still no pictures...

If you can believe it, I am still pretty much unable to upload pictures. And it really sucks! There's something wrong with my settings or something and I just can't figure it out. Oh well... guess you will all just have to do without adorable pictures of the kids for a while.

Everyone is doing really well and getting all geared up for the holiday! I think Duncan actually has a good idea about what this Christmas/Santa thing is all about this year. It should be pretty exciting for him this year. He actually helped the girls decorate the tree this year! He just jumped right in there and started putting things on the tree as if he'd always done it. Of course Beatrice felt pretty left out. We've been watching Rudolph and Frosty and Santa Claus is Coming to Town since Thanksgiving. Duncan's favorite is Rudolph.

Maria will be playing her saxophone for the Christmas concert at school and she's really excited about it! She's been practicing quite a bit.

Our Christmas card this year may be a little on the silly side... we were going to try to get one with everyone dressed up, but then spontaneously did the pictures right after we got the tree up and decorated, so everyone was still in their jammies :) and we had an especially difficult time this year getting a decent picture (just try to get 4 kids to all cooperate and smile at the same time).

Anyway, I hope everyone is doing well and getting all their Christmas shopping done ;) I know we are a tad behind on that one! :)

Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Go Vote for Me!

Hi there! Hope everyone is doing well. Still having photo upload problems here... but working on the issue. I probably have a virus or something, so one of these days I will have to go fire up the old desktop and do pictures from there...

Anyway, I entered a contest to win a wii, so go vote for me here!!

Happy early Thanksgiving to everyone!! Hope your celebrations are wonderful!

Friday, November 21, 2008

Hello, it's been a while

:) I'm sure its all because I made fun of Ally that now I haven't posted anything new since Halloween!!

Seriously, several times over the past couple of weeks I have tried unsuccessfully to upload pictures for your enjoyment. Every time I try, I get a page load error that says the internet connection reset itself while trying to upload and interrupted the connection. Grrrrrrr. I don't know what the deal is (obviously my lame rural internet service provider?). But its really annoying. So I apologize for lack of cute and funny pictures, and promise to get some up as soon as my internet stops getting all quirky. I have a few good ones :)

Not a whole lot new going on here. We are just still all giddy about Obama's victory :) And just waiting until January!!

Oh its been really cold here. It was a whole whopping 4 degrees this morning. And its been snowing off and on. No real accumulation (maybe an inch a couple of times). But I'm sure we will be burried in snow in no time ;)

Now I just need to figure out how to keep Beatrice from pulling off her shoes/socks/gloves/hat. I don't think they make buntings for 15 month olds. But I might have to check.

Other than that.... pictures will come some day - hopefully soon.

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Spooky Stuff ;)




So nevermind that the pictures are lacking order... for some reason I have a hard time getting pics in the right place with Mozilla, but like to use it to blog because of the integrated spell check feature ;) (yes, it is that hard to just push a spell-check button). But of course I tried to use iexplorer to mess around with the picture order, but it is messing with me and not loading... grrr... so anyway... you will see the completed pumpkins here before the carving pictures... The pretty girly pumpkin is mine, all mine ;) It just didn't look quite as fancy glowing. Maria's is the next one here, she started out trying for one of the fancy template designs, but she chose a particularly difficult one, so decided to just free hand it here and it turned out great.













And Mike's turned out the scariest! Duncan was checking out those big teeth! On the other side of the scary one, Mike carved one of the template designs, its a wolf howling at the moon! And as much as we love pumpkin carving around here we love roasting those seeds even more! They turned out yummy!



We did most of our trick-or-treating in Winter this year, more houses to go to. The kids had a blast! Duncan actually said "trick-or-treat" a few times, it was between houses, but with all the houses decorated and people dressed up, he was a little preoccupied ;) We did get him to say "thank you" a few times though.
The funny thing was that last year the first house we went to Duncan just ran right in and made himself at home, of course the old couple had invited us in, but it was just funny the way he went right in and sat on the couch. This year it was the last house we went to and he did the same exact thing, ran right in and sat on the couch! The lady got a big kick out of him and he actually told her trick or treat and thank you. And she gave him a big kiss and an extra piece of candy :)


Thursday, October 30, 2008

What a slacker ;)

It seems like I'm posting more and more infrequently... At least not as infrequently as Ally ;) (no new post since like June or July?)

Anyway, we are getting all geared up for Halloween here! I'm sure I will take bunches of pictures and post them sometime this weekend. We will be carving our pumpkins tonight! Nothing like waiting 'till the last minute eh? Of course we got the pumpkins a few weeks ago and had nothing but good intentions. And I've been meaning to go look upstairs for our Halloween decorations all month, but somehow I lost track of time. I kind of doubt we'll have any trick-or-treaters anyway. We haven't the last 2 years.

What else has been going on around here? Well, little miss Beatrice learned how to climb into the rocker and is completely thrilled with herself :)


Duncan enjoys his time in the rocker too... looks kinda like a big sandwich.And did I mention that Beatrice is my major attitude baby? ;)
And Maria is just as happy as ever! :) She's really looking forward to Halloween! :)

And did I mention that it snowed here this week? There was a dusting on the ground Monday morning... and then it flurried all day! It was cold! But luckily the snow didn't really stick. I'm just not looking forward to the snow!

Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Just a Little Something

Maria went to her early Halloween party this past weekend. She had lots of fun. These people really go all out for Halloween. They ran around in a cornfield and played games and had tons of snacks. We let her stay the night this time so she wouldn't have to leave early and miss out on all the real fun :) They ended up staying up until 3am! She was a little tired on Sunday when I picked her up. But she did have lots of fun!


I just love this picture of Duncan. He looks so pensive :) Doesn't he look like such a big boy? We have been working with potty training for the past few weeks, and really he's not doing too bad. Of course a lot of times I'll ask if he want to go use the potty and he will tell me "oh no. later mommy. oh no. tomorrow." But some days he will actually go quite a few times in the potty chair!


Beatrice is doing really good with her solid foods. And boy does she love her pizza crusts! See how tight she's clinging on to it with her bottle there? She's getting that walking thing down pretty good and is just about running around :) And she's become quite the climber. She figured out how to get herself into the toybox ;)


Mmmm. Whip cream and chocolate syrup on ice cream! :) And Duncan wears it so well.


And did I mention that Beatrice likes to climb? She can get halfway up the child gates. But now her latest craze is climbing on to the couch to jump. Several times I left the room to come back and find Duncan and Beatrice gleefully jumping on the couch. Many time-outs for Duncan and many putting the couch cushions back on later I figured out who the real culprit was. I came back into the room a little sooner than expected and caught Beatrice getting the cushions off. And this is how she does it :)


There is an Eagle's nest across the street in one of the neighbors trees. I was able to catch a picture of this guy here who sat in that tree looking at us for a really long time. Beautiful.

Anyway, so that's our latest :)