Happy New Year!

I welcome this new year more so than any other.  It has to be a better year than the last year was!  Happy New Year to all of you!

Still recovering from the fun!

We are still in recover mode from all the festivities of Christmas!  The kids got a lot of fun stuff and by far their favorite is their Leapster explorers.  Although the mp3 player and speaker that lights up is a close 2nd for Grace!  My kids were very spoiled by their grandparents this year and I am thankful since we couldn't do as much as we would have liked!  Our best Christmas present this year was definitely David getting a job and the 'normal' paycheck that came on Christmas Eve as we were leaving for church!  We attended a wonderful Christmas Eve service to get us in the spirit of Christmas and then headed off to great-grandma and grandpa's house.  Christmas morning the kids slept in until about 8:30 and then we enjoyed a quiet Christmas here at our house.  I made pecan caramel rolls and David and I had a quiet breakfast before the kids got up.  After we opened our presents we visited our neighbors Bill and Wendy and told them all about what we got and saw the train that goes around their tree.  Then Papa Wayne came over and we had dinner and opened more presents.  It was a great day! I made some scrapbook pages on my computer already and I'll share a couple of them with you! I'm not completely done with them but you can see some of our Christmas this way!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!

Special People

 Ms. Staci who is just absolutely fabulous with all kids!  She has such a heart for children and she is the director of Sonshine Choir and we are so thankful for all the time she puts into it.  The kids are learning to lead others and they lead worship twice a month for the 4's and K's at church and it is such a wonderful thing for them to learn. We are so blessed to know her!

Our neighbors Bill and Wendy whom my children love dearly!  We go sit with them when it is warm and talk and the kids play on their huge driveway riding bikes or exploring!  They always have whoppers(malt balls) for the kids or popsicles in the summer and sometimes both!  Right now they have a gum drop tree out for Christmas which makes the kids very happy.  We try to visit with them every couple of weeks in the winter.  They live just across the street and they came to Andrew's concert and that made him so happy.  We don't have grandparents that are able to come to things like this.  Papa Wayne works a lot and if it happens on his day off I'm sure he'll go!

Sugarplums

I made these for Grace's preschool party that was supposed to be on Monday (20th) but she was sick and we didn't get to go.  I got the idea at Eighteen 25.  Click to go to the original post and see how cute theirs turned out as well.  I also added the tag that reads "may visions of sugarplums dance in your head."

Santa showed up at the Christmas Party we went to on Saturday night.  Andrew had no trouble talking to Santa and sitting on his lap but Grace wanted NOTHING to do with Santa!  In fact, Andrew said that Santa "cut off his words" when he was trying to tell him what he wanted for Christmas so he went up to him later to tell him.  It was the cutest thing! Below is the picture of him telling Santa that he wants a transformer for Christmas.

Below is Grace peeking over the couch at Santa.

And finally, Andrew and his cousins....Grace still wouldn't get in the picture.

Christmas Party

These pictures are from the day of Andrew's party at school.  In the top picture is the picture of Mrs. Green's gift.  We made her a movie basket.  It had a 2 liter of diet coke, 2 coca cola glasses, 2 bags of microwave popcorn, 3 boxes of candy, 2 popcorn buckets, and a gift card for movies.

A surprise for this week:  a post will be up each day with pictures!  That's my gift to you!!

School's Out!

School is now officially out for 3 weeks.  Andrew doesn't go back until January 10th.  That also means we are getting closer to Grannylou's visit!  Of course that also means we are closer to Christmas which I am not ready for.  This year I am making a lot of my gifts and actually I only have 3 left to do and once I sit down it will go quickly but I don't have very many days that I don't have to go somewhere which is the problem!  I wrapped a few presents yesterday but I'm really going to have to work on it when David is home to distract the kids.  He is working overtime through next week (which is good) but it makes the evenings seem so short!  His company is off the 23rd and 24th but he won't get paid since he is not salary yet.  It will be nice to have him home though to help me get everything ready for grandma's on Christmas Eve and for Christmas day.  There is still so much to do.  Does anyone ever quite feel ready (or finished) for Christmas? 

Well, I really don't have anything exciting to talk about so I guess I'll stop rambling.  I'll take some pictures of my gifts that I'm making so I can show them after Christmas!

Too bad I already made my Christmas card....

because I got some cute pictures of my kids yesterday before the Sonshine Choir concert at church!  The concert by the way was awesome and I really wish I could upload the whole thing for you guys to see!  The kids were so cute and did such a great job!  Andrew enjoys being up in front performing.  He was really, really nervous before it started but he just kept telling me it was b/c he didn't know where the kindergarten line was.  Poor guy!  He was Ms. Staci's helper and then hung out with Ms. Sarah until I realized what was going on.  Here's pics of the kids...

These were the only ones that would upload.  I'll try the others tomorrow when my storage is updated.  I had to purchase more storage space to continue adding pictures!  Everything is linked together so in order to upload more pictures to picasa and add pics to the blog I have to have more storage.  Anyway, hope you enjoy the pictures!

Employed

Yep!  You read that correctly!  My hubby is now employed and starts work on Thursday!  We are so thrilled that this has happened and even before Christmas!  We (and a lot of other people) have been praying for this and we have been so very blessed with this news!  Although he has only been home for 12 weeks, we've know for about 18 weeks that he would need a new job and began looking immediately.  It's been great to have him home but I have to be honest....it will be great to send him back to work!  I've had a vacation for the last 3 months but now it's back to reality!  I know he is going to miss his kids very, very much and I feel sad for him.  It's so hard to leave them to go to work and I don't have to go every day so I can only imagine what it's like for him. He is so involved in every detail and loves taking them to school.  In fact, I asked him who he was taking tomorrow and he said both b/c it's the last time he will get to for a long time!  Poor guy!  Please pray for him as he has to go back and be on probation for 3 months and get used to working again and being away from the people that mean the most to him!

Something cute that happened tonight....Andrew was using his fingers to draw letters on the carpet and he said he drew the 1st letter of each of our names and a B.  When asked what the B was for he said for the baby that we are going to have in a long time!  Doesn't that just warm your heart?  I would love for that to be reality right now.  He has talked about it so much in the last year since we were pregnant and lost the first one.  I didn't even tell him about the 2nd time b/c I knew it would just break his heart if it happened again.  One of these days I think it will happen and then he can write the letter for that little one along with ours.

rambling....

It's been super busy around here yet again...guess it's never going to slow down!  Last week I ended up subbing in a 5th grade classroom for 3 days which I enjoyed!  We had our volunteer appreciation last Wednesday and I have some cute pics from the photo booth but I can't get my scanner to work so I can't upload them. On Thursday I had a craft night with the girls and on Friday was the craft fair!  Finally!  I sold a few of my crayon rolls....I can't remember exactly the number.  I was hoping to sell more but for now a friend is taking them to her kids' school and I'm sending some to my mom to try to get rid of.  Whatever I have left will probably get used for Christmas presents and then birthday presents throughout the year!

Today I had a Christmas party for church and tonight was my last night of bible study.  I'm working again tomorrow and then hopefully I will get a little break this week from all the craziness!  David got a job offer but nothing is concrete yet.....meaning we have the offer but no paperwork has been signed and there isn't a start date yet.  Hopefully we will get a date soon and get this show on the road.  We are so thankful that this is happening but anxious b/c we are tired of waiting.  We got really excited and started telling everybody that he got an offer but that was last Thursday and we haven't moved any further in the process.  It's hard to wait but that's what we are doing!

We finally got the Christmas decorations up and the kids decorated the tree.  Grace chose to hung all of her ornaments close together and one of the branches was hanging very low so when she wasn't looking I had to spread them out just a bit!  They tried to do it all on their own but since they aren't very tall I had to step in and help.  I'm ok with them hanging all the ornaments all crazy but couldn't stand that the top half of the tree was empty!

Have a great week and I'll be back soon.....hopefully!

Thanksgiving

I know it's a little late but thought I would share a couple pics from Thanksgiving.  Andrew had his first Thanksgiving dinner this year!  In previous years he would just eat bread and pumpkin pie!  This year he requested turkey, stuffing, a roll and then pumpkin pie later in the day!  Yes, I even took a picture of him with his plate!

 

Grace's plate is on the other side and she only wanted salad (like her older cousin) and didn't eat a bite of anything.  She had an upset tummy for about 3 days last week and didn't eat much of anything.  

Here is a pic of the kids outside in their outfits.  Someone else was taking their picture and he was on the ground which is why they aren't looking at the camera but I still like the picture!