Getting Ready for Christmas

I can't believe we are only a few days away from Christmas.  This month FLEW by!  It was another busy month to say the least!  Girls trip to Chicago, Santa visit, Christmas shopping, Christmas parties, basketball tournaments, holiday baking...

Our annual trip to visit Santa was a success.  We got really lucky and only had to wait about 20 minutes.  We have waited over an hour in past years.  Ryan was a little unsure about sitting on Santa's lap and walked pretty slowly up to Santa, but with Drew and Kayley up there with him, he was happy.

My last official day at work was Friday.  Andy's last day was Thursday, but he has had to work every day of vacation so far.  :-(  All three kids had their Christmas parties at school on Friday.  I helped at Kayley's party this year and her class had a lot of fun playing games and eating their treats.  Ryan's party was at the end of the day so we all went to that.  Here are a few videos of our little singer.  

Mom and Dad flew in from Phoenix Saturday evening.  On Sunday, we went to Drew's basketball game.  We had a light basketball weekend with only one game on Saturday and one game on Sunday.  :-)

I guess I managed to get a picture with the ball at the bottom of Drew's dribble: 

Here are Drew's faithful cheerleaders.  Not surprisingly, they do much better when there is only one game a day compared to the all day tournaments!

Yesterday, Mom, Kayley and I baked ALL DAY.  It was exhausting!  Kayley was such a trooper and stuck with us most of the day.  She only took a few short breaks.  Drew also helped with decorating the sugar cookies!

Thanksgiving

I'm a little late on a Thanksgiving post, but I haven't had a lot of time to sit down to do the blog.  I feel like we are going 100 miles per hour all the time!

My parents and brother came for Thanksgiving again this year.  Thanks to my Mom, we had a great Thanksgiving meal on Thursday.  Ryan didn't appreciate it though.  "What IS that?  I don't want that.  I want a ham and cheese sandwich, Mama (his new term for me)."  Ah, the joys of little kids at Thanksgiving.  Well, maybe not all kids, but definitely our kids when they are little!  

We spent time on Saturday going through toys to decide what we could donate.  Ryan rediscovered his talking Elmo and it has been joy (and a little annoying) ever since!

We watched the Iowa-Nebraska game Friday afternoon and went out for dinner to celebrate after their big win!!  Ryan was pretty excited.

My parents left Sunday morning.  After they left, I was picking up the family room and it hit me that I hadn't put a Christmas card together yet.  UGH.  We didn't have any family pictures taken so I frantically went through all of my pictures from the year and there was nothing that was good enough for a Christmas card.  So, I quickly got some clothes together and put the kids in front of the fireplace for a quick, cute picture.  If only it worked out exactly as I had planned.  Ryan was in no mood to take a Christmas card picture.  He was much more interested in being funny and making Andy and Matt laugh while I attempted to get the picture.  After many, many takes and a promise of 3 cookies, he finally sat still long enough for about two usable pictures.  And I really want to get family pictures taken?

After the boys got to change back into their "real" clothes, they posed for one more picture with Matt before he left.

I went to Chicago for a shopping trip with two of my friends this weekend.  It is so nice to be in the city during the Christmas season.  The lights are beautiful.  We had fun shopping and had a great dinner last night.  A great girls weekend!