Turkey Coma

I have some blogging to catch up on and I promise to get our Christmas pictures up soon, but in the meantime, here is Jake eating our Christmas dinner. Notice that he has abandoned his fork, is diving in with his hands and eating in half of a coma.

Jingle Bells

Pants Off-Dance Off

From October, but worth posting, it was somehow overlooked on the camera prior to now :)

Piggy confusion

Jake knows what pigs are, as in real animal pigs. (of the oink, oink variety) He also knows that his feet/toes can be called piggies. Apparently, what he doesn't know is the distinction between them sometimes.

Jake was looking for a particular book the other day; the book was on his bookshelf and on top of his bookshelf is a piggy bank. This was what happened when he got the two "piggies" confused:

Jake: *wandering around the playroom, looking for his book*
Me: Jake, your book is on your bookshelf.
Jake: *blank stare*
Me: On your bookshelf, right under your piggy!
Jake: *lifts up one foot & looks under his 'piggy' for the missing book*

San-na! San-na!

We've heard Santa's name being chanted in our house over the past few weeks by a little elf named Jake. It started with an innocent viewing of "Merry Madagascar" when it was on TV (cute show, by the way); Jake loved it & started asking to watch "San-na! Animals!" I then picked up a few books from the library that were about Christmas; his favorite was a lift the flap book and he loved the Santa page and saying "ho ho ho!".

While he really enjoyed the idea of Santa and looking at his picture in books & talking about him, I didn't have high hopes for the actual meeting of the big man. During a trip to the mall this weekend, we made a stop at the North Pole. He was fine in line & was talking about Santa; however, as soon as we were within 5 feet of him, the kid was shimmying up my neck making terrified sounds and saying "no no no Santa!" FAIL.



After leaving the North Pole area, Jake was all, "Whatever, who needs Santa when they have fish at the mall?"



Santa's got NOTHING on the play zone!

Ugh, I can't take reading about the Steelers loss anymore!!

Elf Yourself!

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Our family: 1, Christmas Tree: 0

Yeah, that's right....we defeated the Christmas tree, it's up in our living room (and doing so did not involve any blood or trips to the ER and very minimal swearing) As you read in my last post, I was a bit nervous about this tree....my fears were completely founded as it truly is ginormous. BUT, after getting the lights & ornaments on, it really is a beautiful tree.



Gracie drug herself off the couch long enough to pose for some pictures:



Don't you just want to squeeze her adorable little schmuffin face??

The true test for the tree will take place tomorrow morning, when Jake wakes up to find a shiny, sparkly tree with a bunch of presents underneath!

"That's not going in our yard, Russ..."

"....it's going in our living room".

Classic quote from "Christmas Vacation", or a conversation that took place in our own family today? If you guessed "both", you are correct.


Some of you may remember my post from last year about Brian having a longing to chop down his own Christmas tree from a farm (as opposed to my family tradition, which includes driving to the nearest Lowes and dragging one up to the cash register) I won't go into the details as to why I'm so opposed to Brian's tradition, I whined enough about it last year, so you can refer back to that post if you're not familiar with my case against this.

However, since I'm such a nice wife, I agreed that we could hike 3 miles in the snow (uphill, both ways, of course) and do manual labor. And I really do mean in the snow, it snowed here today! :) Now, I'm not going to say that the experience was all bad...it was very festive, what with the snow & all, everyone was all bundled up....if only it hadn't been so muddy!



Anyway---I think I said I wouldn't whine in this post, so back to my original story. We have a small house...our living room is a decent size room, but our big huge couch takes up the majority of the space in it. So what do we do? Why, we pick out the fullest tree we could find, of course! At first, I thought maybe I was just exaggerating the proportions of said tree in my mind....until we hauled it up to our car & everyone stopped to look, laugh and make comments like "wow, they must have a huge house!" as Brian was trying to tie it onto the car. Not to mention the fact that even the people who worked there said stuff like, "Holy cow, look at the size of that beauty they got!"



The tree IS gorgeous...and I'm sure it will look very nice once it's up (we lacked the energy to do anything with it tonight, so pictures of the decorated tree will come later) Keep your fingers crossed that we don't pull another "Christmas Vacation" move and bust out our living room windows while trying to put it up....

Happy Thanksgiving! (yea, I'm late, I know)

Better late than never, yes?

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Any day that is dedicated to taking some time to pause & think about everything in your life that you are thankful for, is a good day in my book. Of course, I have a lot to be thankful for...supportive friends and family, a wonderful new job and an incredibly special & sweet little boy, who is happy and healthy.



I was also grateful to be able to spend the day relaxing at my parents house...the men took advantage of the decent weather & spent some time outside.



I'm grateful that we had someone to take a family picture of us, it seems like we are never able to get a shot of all 4 of us!



I'm also grateful that my brother is healthy....he had to have some pretty major surgery 2 days before Thanksgiving and though he was uncomfortable most of the time, at least everything is ok now. Here he is enjoying his "diaper hat" from Jake, it's very fashion-forward.



Jake says, "Gobble, Gobble!!"