Christmas

We got matching pjs - but couldn't get Pryor to get in the picture. Oh well! They are comfy and look cute.
I think this is the only picture of all of us from Christmas. We had such a great one this year. It went by too quickly!
Here's a picture of "My best Christmas of my life." I don't think I'm going to be able to convert the video I took - but it was awesome for those of us who were there. Alice had been asking for these and Santa brought them!! She screamed after she opened them up and rolled on the ground with them. Sheer happiness!
Alice and Grady were very "helpful" with Pryor. He was the last to wake up - about an hour after the other two woke up. Let me rephrase that: they were not allowed to come out of their room until 7:00 AM. About the time they were finished with their stockings, he came down.

Soon after he was finished, Grandmother & Granddaddy made it to GrandPatti & Papa's house. We all had a great time opening up our wonderful presents. This was a fabulous Christmas!

Like Mother, Like Daughter

Can you even believe how cute this is?!?!? We went to Macy's a few weeks ago and found this coat for Alice that perfectly matches mine! I think one thing that makes the whole thing even better - it was only $10!
There must be something on the lens of our camera - the bottom of the image is a little fuzzy. That's on all of these pictures - oh well! When we have worn these coats at the same time - we get rave reviews! I'm glad she wants to dress like me. We'll see how long that lasts!!

Making Christmas Cookies

We had such a fabulous Christmas vacation, I thought I'd relive it all by posting some great pictures. I have some awesome ones from the family Christmas pageant, but I'll save that for a later post.

We traveled first to Jefferson City for our break. One activity I knew I wanted to do while we were there was to make cookies and decorate them with icing. I couldn't have handled it without my mom!!
As is often the case, the recipe we made was sticky, so we had a very difficult time with the dough and transferring the shapes onto the cookie sheet. I also wanted to make sure that we had enough cookies - so we doubled the recipe! We had enough!! HA!
Grady and Alice really got into decorating the cookies. They both were pretty good at handling the cookie cutters. The icing of the cookies was even better! Both children really enjoyed and got into the different colors and making designs. It was a really fun project!

Pryor decorated maybe one cookie, but he was happiest cutting up paper. This is his new favorite activity! The trick is just to make sure that the paper he is cutting up isn't important!

Halloween in December??

I am finished with Christmas things, and don't want to pack for our trip yet. One last post...
Our neighbor, Yoshiko Sonoda, used to tie obis (the sash around Alice's kimono above) professionally - for festivals and what not. She gave this one to Alice!! It was amazing to watch her work. She had a thin piece of cardboard in the front to start. She tied it at 11 AM so Alice could go to a birthday party, and it lasted all day and into the night!These pictures don't do the obi (sash) justice. Alice looked beautiful! She loved wearing the Japanese shoes (although she almost didn't wear them when Yoshiko said they were men's shoes! We told Alice no one else at the birthday party would know that! Since the top was navy - that's what made it a men's versus a women's shoe.)
A smiley cookie (local restaurant - Eat N Park - their signature is the smiley sugar cookie - he has smiley body tattoos on his hands - they were too big for his cheeks), girl from Japan and Bob the Builder.

These are our jack o' lanterns. Daddy let them pick which design they wanted us to cut. If I had been there - I would not have let Alice pick out such a difficult one. Needless to say, I was stuck trying to cut out the spider legs!! It was ridiculously hard - but it did turn out well. Stephen got the easy ghost in the window. Next year we are doing a basic smiley face!!


I tried to capture on video the joy of Pryor and his enthusiasm running from house to house. Check out the above movie.

I am blown away at how much candy and other stuff they got for Halloween!


They can't possibly eat it all. Even with my parents here and all of us eating the candy for a week, we still had enough stuff left over to bring down for all the big cousins to eat at Thanksgiving! That's a lot of candy!

Breakfast with Santa?

I don't really think I need any explanation here. The video and pictures speak for themselves. I'll put them in chronological order:


Above is the video I took as we were getting the children ready to sit on Santa's lap. Pryor screamed last year and he wasn't so sure on this day...

You can see in front of me, Pryor sliding off of Grady's lap. Except that Grady was still holding onto him and his shirt, so his entire stomach is showing!
Trying to talk some sense into him...
Wouldn't even face the camera with me holding him!!!
This was as good as it was going to get. Oh well, there's always next year!

Christmas Programs!

I'll make this brief:

Yesterday, Grady and Alice had their Christmas program. My camera does not like the school auditorium - so the pictures are dark.
Here you can see Alice in the middle in a red dress. When Pryor saw her, he yelled "Hey! Alice!" and she saw her and waved. She acted embarrassed - but she loved it!

Grady had the first speaking part for the second grade! He took the time to memorize it (it wasn't too hard) and he remembered every word!

The above is a short clip from Grady's program. He is on the top row - middle. I only taped part of the song - figured a little goes a long way. HA!!

Pryor's Christmas program was today.

He is the one that is in the front row, on our far left. I love his actions (except no one else is doing them! ha!!) Plus, at the end of the above video, check out his bow.

Glad this is the last of these till next year! Pretty cute, though!

Museum of Natural History

OK - OK - I haven't blogged in *forever.* So I thought I'd write something quick so I can at least have something on record for November. However, I don't want to miss anything - so I'm posting from the middle of October when we had a friend staying with us for the weekend.

Curtis Shull came to our house on a Friday night and went home on Sunday night. We had a busy and fun weekend! On Sunday, we decided to go to the Carnegie Museum of Natural History.

They have an exhibit where you can be like a paleontologist. They have "bones" buried in "rocks." I don't know what the hard substance is - something like rubber or rock. They gave them each a chisel, brush and they had to wear the safety goggles.
Pryor wasn't too sure about the safety goggles - but since Curtis and Grady were wearing them - he decided he would too!
We stayed at this exhibit for a while. Sometimes they would all work together on the same site and other times they went off on their own. After they "dug up" these bones, we looked at the dinosaur bones and then decided we'd had enough of bones! It was a quiet ride home - we were all exhausted!