Merry Christmas!!!

We had a great Christmas! On Christmas morning, my parents came over to exchange gifts. After we were done opening presents, my mom and I started making cinnamon rolls (a family tradition going on 30 years or more!) While we were waiting for the cinnamon roll dough to rise, we went out to lunch. Afterwards, we came home to roll out the dough and add the cinnamon sugar. I actually didn't get to do as much of the work as I had hoped because I was on the hunt for some more pans at the store while my mom was home with the kids. She said they had fun sprinkling on the cinnamon sugar, though.



The kids loved their gifts from Grandma and Grandpa B. They both got VERY nice things, but I have to say Ally's favorite was her baby doll that talks. It's called Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Doll. It's really cute. Ally named her Callie and she responds to her name when you say it. It's adorable. Tommy loved everything, but he was really excited about his Diego Toys. He had a lot of fun with his John Deere Barn, too!



After church on Christmas Eve, we went to Matt's parents' house where we had dinner with his parents, brother, sister-in-law, and our nephews and niece. We had a great time. The kids had a blast with their cousins and were so excited to open presents.

Katie (our niece) is always happy to take a picture for me. I hope she never grows out of that. :)
Ally got this Storytime Theater from Grandma and Grandpa. It's a projector that shines a story on the wall. She loves it. It's really neat. You can turn it on and let it play the story and it will shut itself off when it's over. So we've let Ally 'read' a story before bed when she's been good. Tommy loves it, too. It came with a Dora story, but we have since bought Lady & the Tramp and Nemo.
Picture of Tommy opening the Tinkertoys Grandma and Grandpa got him. He loves them!! He has been spending lots of time building things around the house!



It's very rare for me to get pictures of the boys. They are at the age where they are not happy with picture taking, so I tried to respect that and didn't get many pictures of them this year. I snapped this while they weren't paying attention. :)
They are all playing Ring Around The Rosey. The kids have SO much fun w/ their cousins when they are in town. They just love them so much!!!

Christmas Morning the kids had SO much fun. We opened about 1/2 the presents and then ate our cinnamon rolls (a tradition every Christmas morning). They were SO yummy!! Then we opened the rest of the presents.

Christmas was SO great this year! We had a lot of fun with family as well as spending some of it at home. It's so nice not to feel rushed like we have in the past. I can tell the kids actually have time to enjoy it now. It used to be that we weren't even really home at all from the 23rd-26th. lol Just to sleep, that was pretty much it. So this year and last were great!! Matt and I decided to get each other small gifts from the kids this year b/c we just bought a new flat screen tv. It was our big expense of the year (probably of the decade!! lol) We bought a Samsung 40" LCD flat screen. We love it. We just recently had the HD hooked up and it's amazing. Matt still needs to put the wires behind the wall, but we just haven't had a spare second.
We also ended up finally going to digital cable which meant upgrading our tivos. So we ended up getting two dual tuner tivos. We just knew we couldn't afford to spend much else on presents after all that. So we each helped the kids buy something. Ally got me a One Touch can opener (it's awesome. i love not having the electric one on the counter - it clutters it too much!) and Tommy got me an angled measuring cup. This is something I asked for last year, so I was glad to get it. Most of you know that I really like to cook, so I really liked these gifts. And for Matt, Ally got him a Blue's hockey tshirt and Tommy got him a Blue's hockey hat.
This gift was from Ally to Tommy. It's the cars Change-Up. he loved it and as soon as he opened it he told ally thank you and that he loved it. Then he gave her a kiss. It was really cute. Tommy's present to Ally was a wooden lace-up set. I couldn't find any pictures of it.

Tucker loved playing with the wrapping paper and tearing it to shreds.... This was the only calm moment he had all morning! lol

On Christmas night, we went to my Grandparents where we spent time with Grandparents, cousins, aunts, uncles, 2nd cousins, etc. We had a great time. We played Cranium and just had a nice time chatting w/ everyone.

Tommy got a big boy bed!

It's official. My Tommy is not a baby anymore. Here he is in his big boy bed. He's very proud to be in a big boy bed now. He tells everyone we see that he got a big boy bed. Matt and I surprised him with Little Einsteins bedding (his favorite). And his Aunt Bobby, Uncle Dan, and cousins got him a Leo and Little Einsteins PJs, so he's all set. The picture above is his first night sleeping in his big boy bed. He did great. He didn't cry at all. He slept so soundly all night. He even waits for me in the morning to come get him out of bed just like Ally does. Yes, i know... i'm SO lucky. :) In the morning, I hear, "moooooo oooooooom" and he just waits until I come in to get him. :) I can't believe it. I really thought that he would be running all over the house in the middle of the night. So far, so good!!

Tommy's 3rd birthday!!!

I can't believe he's 3!! It's amazing to think that just over 3 years ago, i was waiting for his arrival! He's such a big boy now. He's doing awesome with potty training. And his speech seems to be improving. We are still going to get him screened on Jan 8th. I have definitely noticed an improvement, but I would still like a professional opinion. Not to mention, they may have ideas to help him learn. He is VERY smart, we know that for sure. But he learns differently than Ally did. It's hard not to compare, and it's even harder to think of new ways to teach him that will work with his learning style. He loves to read, so we are trying to read to him as much as possible. He can count, although you'd never know it. If someone asks him to count, he won't do it (doesn't like direct attention) but if you leave him alone, he'll be counting his toys and gets it right every time. Matt and I used to praise him when we'd hear him counting, but then he would stop and get embarrassed. So now, we just let him be and when he's done counting, we just smile to ourselves and look at each other.

He's getting SO big. He is very rambunctious, full of energy, and almost always happy. He keeps me on my toes, that's for sure. He's such a loving, happy little boy. He looks up to Ally SO much!! They really love each other. Even when they fight, you know it's only because he looks up to her and wants to be like her. Then she gets mad b/c he takes her toys or something. lol The real way he feels is apparent when he gets around strangers or a group of people. Anyone who knows him wouldn't think that he is shy, but he really can be very shy, and doesn't like to be the center of attention unless it's on his terms. If he's put in a position of attention being on him, instead of going to me or Matt, he looks for Ally and hides his face in her shoulder. She puts her arm around him and says, "are you being shy, buddy?" It's adorable.

Tommy's visit to the fire dept.

Today, Tommy and I went to the fire department with a friend of ours. They all had a great time. Tommy was a little overwhelmed at first, but he couldn't stop talking about it all day!!!

O, Christmas Tree

Today, we went looking for a Christmas Tree. It was cold, rainy, and icky out. But we still had a great time. We went to a Christmas Tree farm about an hour away. The kids had a great time.

After we found our tree, the kids and I went to the petting zoo while Matt loaded the tree up. Poor Tommy's teeth were chattering, so we went in to the store for some hot chocolate. The kids just loved that! They even got to meet Santa!! They were SO excited, although neither one would sit on his lap or really even talk to him. Tommy just hid his face in my chest and Ally whispered to me what she wanted to tell him. lol It was fun, though. They had a great time.

Ally's Christmas performance

Ally's class had a wonderful Christmas performance tonight. It was SO good! The kids all did a great job. They were so excited to be there. They sang Joy To the World, The Virgin Mary Had a Baby Boy, and Go Tell It on The Mountain. They did SUCH a great job. Go Tell It On The Mountain had really cute motions with it.

We were so proud of Ally for getting up there and participating. A year ago, she wouldn't have done that. She's really coming out of her shell! She was very proud of herself as well!!

The pictures of ally up on stage didn't turn out that great. It was dark in the audience with the stage lit up and my camera just wouldn't do a good job there. But at least you can see her up there doing the motions. She did SO great! :)

Halloween pictures!

I thought I would update with some halloween pictures. The kids had a great time this year. They really enjoyed it and seemed to get more involved with it this year than in years past. Luckily the kids were healthy on Halloween. All of us have been sick, but Ally, Tommy, and Matt all got well by Halloween night. I was still miserable (and still am) but I was still able to enjoy it with them. I managed to take them to about 10 houses before I thought I would collapse. We came home and Matt took them around the block. They came home with SO much candy!! They had a great time. Ally was an angel and Tommy was a turtle. They both loved dressing up. The next night, Tommy was getting in his pjs for bed and he said, "turtle costume?" And I said, "no, it's not halloween anymore". and he said, "but it's dark outside!" I guess he figured since we kept saying, "we can't go trick or treating until it's dark out" on halloween, that meant we could go every night when it got dark. lol

The night before Halloween, we carved pumpkins. Matt did all of the work while I watched and took pictures. The kids really loved that. We got a free toy in the mail from Matchbox, so Tommy spent a majority of his time playing with that. It's a haunted house that you put a Matchbox car in and watch it go from room to room. Both kids have had a lot of fun with that.

The big pumpkin is our family pumpkin. Matt took a design from The Nightmare Before Christmas and duplicated it. The ghostly pumpkin is Tommy's and the scary pumpkin is ally's. Ally designed her own pumpkin this year. Matt helped her cut it, but she drew it on a piece of paper and told Matt what she wanted it to look like.

Pumpkin Patch!

On Sunday we went to two fun Halloween-related activities. First, we went to a corn maze. It was 10 acres! It was a lot of fun. Mother Nature had destroyed some of the stalks, so the design wasn't perfect, but it was supposed to be a train. The kids didn't care about the flattened stalks. They had a great time. It took us quite a while to get through it, but we made it. There were little stations here and there with clues on how to get out. It was fun. Some of them had questions you had to answer and some had little drawings you had to uncover using a crayon and rubbing the paper they provided. The kids had a ton of fun playing in the dirt on the trails and collecting dried corn.

After we made it out, the kids got to see animals and play in swimming pools full of corn! It was so much fun. They absolutely loved that part. I think they would have stayed all day if they could!

Because of the strange weather we've been having, the pumpkin supply was very low there. After we were done playing in corn, we decided to drive to another pumpkin patch closer to our house. That's where we picked out our pumpkins. The kids had a great day. They really enjoyed themselves.