Christmas at school

A couple days ago, I had some Christmas music on and Brady and Jorie (a little girl I watch a couple days a week) were dancing to Jingle Bells, Frosty, Rudolph...etc.  Then a slow song came on.  Jorie, who is the girliest girl possible, decided to teach Brady to slow dance.  It was the cutest thing.  Brady was done with it in about 5 seconds (typical male) and Jorie kept trying to convince him that they should slow dance to every song that came on-even the fast ones! 

Dancing to Silent Night

At Brady's school, they had a cookie exchange and sang some Christmas songs.  It's always fun to go and watch a bunch of 4 &5 year olds sing their songs.  Some are so clueless and some are so animated.

 I took this quick little video of Brady singing.  I could tell he knew all of  the songs but only sang some of them.  Here's one that they all got into and most of them didn't stop when the song is over-including Brady.

Early Christmas

Since Aaron was leaving before Christmas, we had an early Christmas with the kids and Aaron before he left.  I tried for weeks to get a good time/place for a family picture before he left.  Finally, the Saturday before he left we asked our neighbor, who was out taking pictures of the kids playing in the snow, to come and do it.  We actually got a pretty good one and we used it for our Chrismtas card.

This year, thanks to Karla, we started the Elf on a Shelf tradition and had such fun doing it!  Brady named him Elfie and each morning Brady woke up to find Elfie in a different spot in the house.  By the time Christmas was over, even Collin would look for Elfie in the morning.

We let the kids "open" their presents early since Aaron was leaving.  Collin got a new tricycle we can push him on from Grandma Gray (she had bought if for him at Thanksgiving and had him open it here so that way we wouldn't have to transport it back from IL).  And Brady got a new 2 wheeler bike with training wheels from us.  They were both so excited and we let them ride them around inside for a couple weeks after.

Collin showing Brady how to rev his handle bar.

Showing off their new bikes in front of the tree. 
Yes, Collin is our little dare-devil!

 Aaron had to leave a couple days later and the boys actually did pretty well with it.  We did a couple fun things in those couple first days to try and keep their minds off of it.  I took them to see Santa and play at the Santa Wonderland at Bass Pro.  And we made a gingerbread train (I went the easy route and bought the kit!).

Collin did great on Santa's lap, especially since he is a Mama's boy!

Collin was enjoying the candycane from Santa!

Brady proud of his gingerbread train

We will miss Aaron for Christmas this year, but we were glad to have a fun little celebration with him before he left.  He got several presents that he was able to take with him on his deployment, so that was good.

Thanksgiving with the family!

We were able to host Thanksgiving for everyone again this year.   We had my family and Aaron's all together once again and it was a fun time.  We had my parents, sister/brother-in-law and the girls and Aaron's parents, grandma and sister here with us. 

We stayed up late, ate a lot of delicious food and just had a great time with everyone.  I do love hosting at my house and having all the kids here playing together and all of the adults catching up and just enjoying the company. 

We had beautiful weather.  It was weird though because I needed it to be a bit colder to put all the pies outside to keep them cold because of the lack of room in fridge!  Go figure!  I guess if it was cold, I would be saying I wished it was warmer.  Oh well!

My Mom was the photographer (as always) and I could only choose a handful out of the hundreds I had to choose from.

What up home boy??

These are two peas in the same little spunky pod! 
Sadie loves Collin and they have very similar personalities.  Look out world!

At the kid's table getting ready to feast!

Too many cooks in the kitchen?  I think not!  Too much attitude in the kitchen?  I think YES!

Aprons made with love from Miss Karla!! :)  And we do love them!

Taking a walk after dinner.

Collin was was pounding down the Coke! :)
(BTW, the bottle is empty-my kids do not drink soda!)

Traditional after Thanksgiving crafting craziness!  We were making a Christmas craft and Hadley was helping us again! :)

Is that Lance Armstrong?  Ha ha, nope just my Dad!  Hitting the bike trails in full gear!

We missed the rest of you that weren't able to be here with us!  At least we go to skype with everyone though!

The rest of Thanksgiving weekend

We enjoyed the rest of the weekend Black Friday shopping, putting up the Christmas tree, going to the Children's Museum and letting all the cousins have fun together.

Rub a Dub Dub-all 4 kids in the tub

Ava playing checkout lady

Sadie had a little lamb

Who's enjoying this more?  Grandpa or Brady?

The balls dropping on their head!  I think Hadley is having as much fun as the girls!

O!  what a fun trip to the Children's museum!

Great weekend everyone!!  Same time, same place next year! :)

Thanksgiving week at preschool

We love going to Brady's preschool with him.  Every Thanksgiving, they have a little program and Thanksgiving feast for all the preschool kids and families.  They sang some songs and then we all stayed for a Thanksgiving lunch/feast.

Brady's on the top row in the green vest

Feasting!

 Also, right before Thanksgiving, Brady's class was learning about bread.  I volunteered to go in one day and help out in his class and do a little experiment I used to do in kindergarten with yeast.  I am very fortunate that Collin is usually pretty cooperative and I can just bring him with.  I also love that Mrs. Brown loves for parents to come and help and that she doesn't mind that Collin is there with me either.

For the experiment, we put different warm liquids and sugars in small plastic bottles with some yeast.  Then you put a balloon on top.  Whichever balloon gets bigger is the one the yeast likes the most.  We used root beer, apple juice and then regular water with just some sugar in it.  It's hard for kids to understand exactly how the yeast makes the bread rise and this is a perfect visual example to show them how the yeast "eats" the sugars and gives off air (gas) to make it rise. 

The kids really enjoyed helping me out and loved watching the "Yeast Beasts" get bigger.  Mrs Brown is very science oriented in her class and the kids really enjoy observing and doing different experiments with different things so this was a perfect fit for them.

Brady's class and you can see the balloons rising on the table

Here's a close up of the bottles/balloons.  I let the kids draw faces on the balloons with dry erase markers to make them a "Yeast Beast"

The kids also got to make their own pizzas that day.
Here's Brady with a couple friends at his table enjoying their pizzas they made.

Whenever I get to go help in Brady's class, it really makes me miss teaching.  But it is fun that I get to go in and help from time to time, and Brady really loves it when his Mom gets to come to school with him.  I know he will only like that for only a few more years so I'm going to enjoy it while he does!

Love all my boys!

I am surrounded by boys in this house!  But they are pretty fun to be around and here's a couple pictures from the past week to prove how fun they are!

Collin loves playing with Aaron's camelback, even if it is as tall as him!

Silly boys playing on the floor together

 It was a beautiful day, so we decided to go to the zoo on a day that Aaron could actually come with us since he was off for Veterans Day.  And I just realized that even though Aaron was with us, he is not really in these pictures!  Oops!

You can get really close to the lions here!  She was just standing here by us for a while and Brady was right there!

Telling Collin about the baby goats before I let him loose to pet them

He did pretty well

Riding on the carousel with  my big boy

Feeling back "at home" in the Sonoran desert area in the Desert Dome.  We love those funny little javalinas!

 We also had Aaron's birthday this week!  Happy 33rd birthday!  Here's our cake we had at home for him. 

Week in review.....wacky weather!!

This time of year, Mother Nature can not make up her mind!

This week was a perfect example!

MONDAY (Oct 31): 

Halloween, perfect weather.  Kids wore long sleeves and pants under their costumes.  We wore hoodies to take them out Trick or Treating.

WEDNESDAY (Nov 2):

First Snow of the Year! 

Started out raining and turned to snow in the middle of the day.  It was that big clumpy, wet snowflakes and it was really heavy and we got maybe an inch.

View out the back door

It was perfect snow man weather!

It was so wet and clumpy and it started to melt later that afternoon.  It actually reminded me of the snows we got in Tucson-wet and clumpy and didn't stay for too long.

 THURSDAY (Nov 3):

I went to help in Brady's class at school for their Harvest Party.  It's a good thing the snow melted!  They did all kinds of activities with corn, pumpkins, scarecrows and apples.

Making homemade applesauce

Popping popcorn

Making a corn in the husk art project

Pumpkin bowling (I snapped the picture too late to get the pumpkin in there)

 By the afternoon, Collin was a cranky bear and sometimes the trick to get him calm is to take him outside.  It had gotten colder again and the wind had picked up.  So I bundled him up in his winter coat and brought him outside.  It mellowed him right out!

 I started raking some leaves in the backyard and wanted to see how Collin liked the pile.  He was a little stiff because he still wasn't used to his big puffy coat.

Throw brother in there and he's having more fun

Playing in the leaves together

 SATURDAY (Nov 5):

Pretty much the same as it has been for the last couple days.  Definitely need heavier coats especially when the wind is blowing.

Brady is traipsing through the woods with 2 of his friends.  He's on the far right with the orange/yellow/green Nerf gun.  The other 2 had some sort of "weapons" with them too. 

He LOVES playing with his friends that are at least twice his age! They claimed to have heard/seen a snake and the foxes but I'm not so sure about that.
As you can see, the green is going away and the brown, bare branches are beginning to show again.

I really have enjoyed having fall here.  After being in Arizona so long, I kind of forgot what it was like.  And this fall was so great because we had a longer fall instead of like a week or two of it and straight to winter.  Unfortunately, I think winter is right around the corner here though.  Am I too young to be a snow bird and go south for the winter?