small group christmas party

This year, our small group went all out & did a turkey dinner, complete with mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes, cranberry sauce & rolls. Yumm! It was so good.

After dinner, we decorated cookies!

The kids loved it & the grown ups all helped out with the decorating & eating! :)

Each kid had their own knife & bowl of frosting. Good thing, huh? :P

Cedar was very interested in eating his frosting covered cookie.

The whole group.
This year two more families joined our group.
Back row: Kenton, Cedar, Colin, Katie, Frank, Justin holding Ava, Jon, Amy & Emma
Front row: Katrina, Stephanie, Macey, Finn, Malia (baby girl due in Feb), & Ethan

After cookies, we played the Father Christmas dvd for the kids & had a white elephant gift exchange between the adults.

Kenton almost ended up with some new art for his office...

Jon ended up with the gift Kenton brought - a CD case wall display kit. :P

Amy ended up with the gift I brought. :)

I came home with a pretty cute frog statue & Kenton got an over the door wreath hanger. Not too shabby for a white elephant gift exchange. ;)

christmas lights

I was so excited to go on a Christmas Lights drive this year. Cedar has been noticing all of the lights around town, saying "Ooooh" or "Wow!" Finn is at a great age for appreciating nice decorations. I thought, for sure, the kids would have a great time. Everyone had their own cup of hot cocoa. It was great...for a while. But I forgot to factor in short attention spans. ;)


Cedar likes Christmas lights!

Finn really wanted me to take his picture - fake smile & all. ;) This was just before Finn started complaining, "This is taking a LONG time."

I suppose the kids were impressed for the first few houses, but apparently, you've seen Christmas lights once, you've seen them a thousand times. Nothing special anymore. Oh well. Can't please them all. :P Kenton & I were impressed.

grace community preschool christmas program

Cedar was so happy to be in the big auditorium at church for Finn's preschool program.

Finn & Griffin standing right next to each other, singing so nicely. The kids were supposed to wear green or red, but Finn ended up being the only one in his class wearing green. Doesn't he look nice? :)

Cousin Cohen's class.
He did a great job singing & doing the motions too!

"...the little, Lord Jesus asleep on the hay." :)

All 3 classes together.
They all did so great! I loved seeing all of Finn's friends & his cousins up front, singing songs. They were so sweet. :)

happy birthday mummi

Mummi's birthday was on December 6th. We celebrated with dinner & dessert. Finn was excited to show Mummi that he had written his name in the card. He also told me what message to write. :)

Place card holders - just what she wanted. :)

Written by Finley on his white board. He is just now becoming more interested in letters & writing his name. :)

And this is a totally random picture of Cedar after he had put his friend Ava's boots on all by himself. We didn't see him do it...he was just walking around showing us what he'd done. So proud of himself in her pink, sparkly boots. Adorable. :P

happy birthday griffin

On Friday, November 26th, we celebrated Griffin's 4th birthday!

The happy, birthday boy!

The "Novemberists" gathered around.

Griffin got a giant nerf gun from his parents that all the kids were interested in trying.

Tyler & Cohen taking some time to cuddle Tate.

Digging in to the delicious Batman cake!

Cedar enjoyed putting the darts back in the holder.

Group photo. This one includes Erik, who was down for Thanksgiving, but is missing Aaron, who was at work. Hard to get everyone in a family photo lately, but this one was close. :)

thanksgiving #2

We celebrated with the Hecht side later that evening, at 7 pm. We waited for my dad to get off work & then feasted (again, for some of us). :)

The spread.

Pumpkin pie from our own home grown pie pumpkins. Based on this recipe from last year's sweet meat pie.

I also made the traditional Henry family cranberry orange salad that was Kenton's great, great, great grandmother's recipe. So yummy with whipped cream! :P

Again, no pictures of people, only food. Go figure. There are more photos of people coming up. :)

thanksgiving #1

We celebrated Thanksgiving early Thursday afternoon with the Henry family.

I made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies for a "lighter" dessert. They were very soft & tasty.

Finn watching They Might Be Giants: Here Come the ABC's...or Here Come the 123's...or Here Comes Science. He's been very into all three. He loves the songs & the videos & can often be heard humming or singing the songs at any time. Pretty cool. I especially like hearing my 4 year old singing, "The sun is a miasma of incandescent plasma..." :P

The delicious turkey.


Pappa carving the turkey.

The feast.
So delicious, of course. No pictures of the people, just the food. I'll work on that. :\

snow!

We were spoiled the week before Thanksgiving with a small dusting of SNOW! So cool! Only way it would have been cooler is if we were in school & could've had a snow day. Oh well, we'll take it!

Happy kids! This was before Cedar's gloves came off & he quickly became very unhappy. But a little hot cocoa did the trick! ;)

Happy chickens...

...I think. Hard to tell with chickens.

more tate & a fort

Tate ended up having some complications with Bilirubin levels & had to go back to the hospital. A whole week went by before I was able to see the sweet boy again. I was going through withdrawals. So sad. So we made a trip over to their house once Tate had returned home again & the family was settled in.

Proud older cousin, Finn

*****

Later that night...

I helped Finn build a fort in our living room.

The boys had fun with flash lights & books.

Fun to see the boys playing together in their cool fort! :)

date night

We cashed in on a date night (a gift from Carolyn & Jesse for our birthdays this year - childcare for one night a month for 12 months!) & went out for Sushi at Izumi.

We were brave & ordered things that we hadn't tried before. Some ended up being raw & freaking me out a bit, but I still tried it. It tasted great, but still freaked me out. :P After dinner we went to see a movie. It was a nice, relaxing, tasty night! Thanks Carolyn & Jesse!