O’well

Karly had always had a difficult time saying Noelle. On a lot of her words she leaves out the first part of the word so it can sometimes be difficult to understand what she is saying. It used to be that Noelle was just “well” so some of us just called Noelle “well” just to go with it. But as Karly has gotten older we have tried to get her to actually say Noelle.  Here’s how a couple of our attempts have gone….

 The last few weeks she has done better at saying Noelle if you prompt her to but honestly now that she says it correctly I kind of miss her O’well. I guess she can't win with her Auntie.

Valentines Day 2014

Valentines Day seemed to go by so quickly this year. It’s one of those holidays that if the kids weren’t around I wouldn’t celebrate. Since we did have a few things happen I’ll quickly cover those moments.

Karly went to her first Valentine’s Day party at her preschool on Thursday 13th. She was very excited to share her Valentine’s cards with her friends.

 

Then on Valentine’s Day she and Hope had a Valentine’s Day party at their daycare. Noelle and Thomas both had parties in their classes also. It was kind of a hectic morning so I wasn’t able to get pictures of all the kids.  

As you can see in this one, Karly did not want to participate in the photo session.

I could not believe how much stuff the kids brought home from their parties. This is going to make me sound really old….. I remember being in school and getting a Valentine’s Day card from my classmates that was in a small white envelope and it was a real treat if there was a conversation heart in the envelope.  I put all of the kids candy together and was able to fill up a grocery bag with all the candy, pencils, trinkets, and erasers.  It was a real eye opener!

Here are the cards that Kelly made for the kids to give to their friends.

Thursday night after Kelly and Dave dropped the kids off, I went to get some milk for Hope and found these. They were absolutely fabulous!!! 

Then on Valentines Day I was given these beautiful flowers by my Dad.

All and All we had a great Valentine’s Day holiday here.

Family trampoline fun

It was such a beautiful day that we spent the majority of it outside playing on the trampoline.

The kids think it’s so fun when the adults get on to jump with them. The adults think it’s fun to see how high we bounce the kids. It’s a win win for everyone! 

Here Hope is confused between running and jumping but either way she is having fun.

I wish I would’ve thought to get the camera out sooner. Kelly and I were having a contest to see who could get the highest and who could touch their toes so I had to get the camera out to capture it all. Here are the results.


I think Kelly was the clear winner on this one. 
Here are some quick video’s of the kids doing their “tricks”. I’m really glad that Kelly and I didn’t have the bright idea of videoing us doing ours!!! 

I think Santa did pretty good this year with his gifts. There has been a lot of quality family time spent on it in just a couple of months. 

Family Trampoline Fun VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Happy New Year

I’ve had some pretty bad luck over the past few months. Back in November my refrigerator broke, a few days later while cleaning out all the nasty food that spoiled in the said refrigerator the pipes from the garbage disposal backed up and all the nastiness backed up into the washer pipes and ended up in the garage. My car battery died and needed to be replaced and I got a nail in my tire that needed to be fixed. The week of Christmas the pilot light went would not light so I had almost a week and a half of no hot water (luckily I was able to stay at Kelly’s so I could have a hot shower). Then on New Years Eve my garage door opener decided to break. So, my first purchase of 2014 was a new garage door opener. 

On the positive side I did a pretty good job at saving money in 2013 and had the money to fix the things that needed fixing. I also have very handy and supportive family members that were here on a moments notice willing to help me fix the things that needed to be fixed.  I only needed to pay someone to install the garage door opener. I don’t know where I’d be without such supportive people in my life.
 
Kelly and Dave had to work on New Years day so after finding my garage door opener Noelle, Karly, Hope and I got the chance to hang out. We took a ride out to Wal-Mart with Grandma to get Pop some new socks for his birthday and some other things.

Noelle and Karly found this Duck Dynasty hat and thought it would look great on Hope.

Then we came home a played a little. Hope decided to take Noelle’s snack and give them to her baby doll. Noelle was a good sport and tried to feed them to the baby and Hope. Hope didn’t find that funny. 

         

While Hope napped Noelle, Karly and I did some baking. While we were at the store the girls picked out a Funfetti cake mix with hot pink frosting. Karly decided that the cake needed to “fun” to so we used some dye to make it purple.

We spent a little time talking about the New Year and what that means. Made a special dinner, played a little more and took baths.  Then they got to spend time decorating their cakes and eating them.

I think that the girls were in bed by 8:00 which gave me a little time to relax and enjoy the rest of the evening. It was a great day and perfect way to start 2014. I’m looking forward to all the adventures that this year is going to bring.

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve is the one holiday out of the year that I host at my house. I get a little stressed out because my house is so tiny but it always turns out just fine. This year Mom made a pork roast, I made “crack potatoes”, and Kelly made a corn casserole and fruit salad. For dessert I made my first completely from scratch chocolate satin pie and reindeer cakes for the kids.

 

 

After dinner we opened our gifts from the names that we pulled from a hat.

Noelle had me and I had her….

Thomas had Hope

Dave had Thomas

Karly had Kelly

Hope had Karly

and Kelly had Dave

While we were cleaning up the kitchen someone left the refrigerator open and Hope found her way into it and got her hands into my pie. She was very proud of herself!

 

The reindeer cakes were a huge hit with the kids.

The kids were dressed in what Pop liked to call their Little House on the Prairie Christmas pajamas. I thought they were awfully cute.

After dessert we hurried and cleaned up the house, packed up the car and headed back to Kelly’s so the kids put cookies and milk out for Santa.

Remind me next year that this really isn’t fun.

All week I have been tying to come up with one last Christmas activity to do with the kids this weekend. I searched Pinterest and found what looked like an easy way to make gingerbread houses out of graham crackers. Since I already had the graham crackers and the stuff to make the royal icing, I went with it and went and bought candy to decorate them with. Friday afternoon I started working on the houses so that on Saturday we wouldn’t need to wait for them to dry before decorating. What a mess. You’d think I could make an easy graham cracker house together but nope, no can do. My graham crackers were breaking, the walls wouldn’t stand up and the roof collapsed. At this point I was in panic mode because I had promised Noelle and Karly all week that after we delivered the Christmas cards out at the nursing facility we would make the gingerbread houses and they were counting on it. So, off I went driving around town trying to find a gingerbread house kit. You’d think it would be easy to find one but nope it’s not that easy. After driving around town for an hour and a half I found a cheap gingerbread house and train kit. They were going to have to do and I got home just in time for Kelly to drop the kids off before work.

Early Saturday morning I put the house and the train together so they would be dry by that afternoon. They were totally ugly but the kids didn’t care. They were so excited to put them together.

Noelle and Thomas put the gingerbread house together. They worked really well together and actually made a pretty nice house together.

 

Karly and I worked on the train together. For such an ugly start it turned out rather well if I do say so myself. 

 

Hope sat and enjoyed some candy canes while the rest of us worked.

 

Although the kids had a lot of fun doing this project, I’m pretty sure it wont be put on the list of things to do next year. We did some less complex ones last year that didn’t work out very well either so I’m ready to scratch this off of my fun holiday projects list.