New Years

We took the kids to the YMCA for a New Year bash this year. It was so much fun with swimming, games, treats, and a New Year count down at 9:00!

New Year's Resolution: Keep up with the laundry (this is one week at our house)

Christmas Morning

Plum tuckered out!

(We found Gavin asleep like this at the end of the day)

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve was spent with friends

Aren't these adorable? Reindeer cupcakes. They were almost too cute to eat. Almost...

The kids were stir crazy waiting for the Christmas Eve party so Cade played games with them. One of them was "how many crackers can you fit in your mouth?" It was fun.

Ahh, the Nativity. Courtney keeps trying this every year picturing a quiet evening where the children, dressed in costume, imagine themselves at Jesus's birth while listening to the calm narration of the Christmas story. Isn't that the way it's supposed to be? Instead, we have tired, overstimulated children that really need to go to bed but are too excited to do so. What we ended up with this year was a huge pile of costumes in the front room (cause no one could find quite the right outfit after 30 minutes of picky searching), an angel that had a meltdown because the sheet made him look like a girl, a wise man that pouted in the corner because there are no superheros in the nativity...or something, a "baby Joseph" that kept running off with the baby Jesus, a narrator that had to shout over the tumult while madly trying to shorten the dictation as much as possible, a Mary that put her head in her hands and cried saying "Why does this have be so stressful!", and a shepherd that knelt and prayed through it all. Courtney decided this was the last year. Next year we'll sing the nativity song and watch Luke 2.

Gingerbread Challenge 2010

The kids actually beat the challenge this year by consuming the entire house in less than a week. It helped that the house was half the size of last year's and had twice as much frosting. As a reward Cade got them a 2 ft x 2 ft cloth checkerboard with 4 in pieces!

We are in Wisconsin!

...okay since August...but it's taken us a while to unpack our things and get our minds back together.

Liberty Jail

We had extra time, so we just made a nice road trip out of the move and stopped in Independence and Adam Ondi Amen along the way. Cade and the kids had never been to Liberty Jail.

Pictures of the valley of Adam Ondi Amen. It was hard to get a decent picture of the valley. THere was so much vegetation and trees!

Visitors' Center in Independence

Liberty Jail

Bye Windsor Pointe #2004

I can't say any of us were incredibly sad to leave Windsor Pointe Apartments. In fact with only a couple hours to go of daylight, we decided to head out of town toward Waco anyway. A wave of calm and peace swept over me as we parted the throng of children playing in the street, drove over the curb-sized speed bumps, and past the buzzing garbage dump (with a hole much too high to swing a full garbage bag into) all for the last time.

We will, however, miss many parts of Texas and most of all the great friends that we made there. We miss you all so much already!