December

I could tell you all about our Christmas.  How much of a success and how much fun we had.  But really what we did this year was make the most out of a bad situation.

All of December someone in our family was sick.  And people are still sick as we near January.

I have to apologize to all the relatives who got cash or are getting cash for Christmas.  If it wasn’t bought over black Friday, then you probably are not getting the gift I planned on getting you.  I did not get out to the stores to buy gifts and I did not get things done I wanted to make.

Let’s break it all down.

Oliver had fevers/stomach bug for a few days right after Thanksgiving.

Kristen had stomach bug for a few days.

Bella had stomach bug for a few days.

Oliver had coughing/cold for a week.

Bella had ???  She just wouldn’t eat and wasn’t feeling good for over a week.

Oliver got a fever with more coughing and being miserable for a week (to include a horrible Christmas Eve night and Christmas Day).

Kristen got coughing and still has it.

Bella got coughing/achiness/general fussiness??????? and still has it.

Jesse is starting to get sore throat, stuffiness, etc.

I also could mention that on almost every one of our advent Christmas activities someone was sick when they were happening.

Here is our Christmas photo for this year.  The fact we are all in our pajamas is because everyone was feeling kinda crappy.

Hey at least we are trying to smile!

Here’s hoping somehow miraculously that we can ring in the New Year all in good health!

Children’s Programs

I know I have mentioned this before, how weepy eyed I become whenever I watch any children’s program.  This time I am specifically talking about the Children's program that we watched at church the other night.

This time around it was a little different as my emotions were pulled in two different directions.

Half the time I was thinking that Bella should be up there, she should be able to enjoy putting on a Christmas program for her family and friends.  Would she be the child that was shy and just standing up there?  Would she be the child that was constantly waving at her parents the whole time?  Would she be the child that was proud of herself and singing every word and doing every action?

The other half of the time I was thinking that Oliver would be up there signing next year.  And the songs were simple and cute enough, I knew that if he had been up there this year he would already know all the words and actions.  He does pretty well with memorizing kids songs.

But pretty much the whole time I had tears in my eyes, just ready to spill over as I kept telling myself “Get it together Kristen, there is no reason to cry”.  “Eyes, dry yourself out, there is no reason to cry”.

I wonder if it will ever get easier.  I wonder what will happen next year when I am watching my son, starting to do all the things I wanted my daughter to be able to do.

Countdown to Christmas

During the holiday season I will be blogging about our 25 days till Christmas countdown over at my other blog

Crazy Creations

A Crack in the Wall

We just spent a lot of money on our house.  A lot of money for a really boring and never going to be seen project.

We had our house piered.

We had some pretty major cracks in our basement wall.

We had main house support beams that were not bearing on the wall anymore.

Our house had settled a few inches, which was causing the cracks in the basement wall, cracks upstairs in our drywall, cracks in our exterior brick…etc.  We had this problem a few years ago.  We tried some other solutions to see if we could get the house to come back up on it’s own without having to spend the money to pier it.  The house did come back up, but then it went back down again.  So we took the plunge and hired out a company to come and fix our problems.

They are not exciting pictures, it was not an exciting job.  But it’s all done now and we are hopeful that it fixes our problems.

In case you are curious, we had 9 piers added to our house along two different walls.  Our Southeast corner was the worst, had dropped the most, and it got jacked up 1 1/4”.  We also had granular fill added on the outside of the full basement wall and a sump pump installed so that the wall will not continue to move inward and should hopefully never have any leaking problems.  And now buried under the house are all my dreams of getting a kitchen remodel in the next 5 years.

As for what we have been doing around the house lately.  We are still working on the basement, trying to get the mudroom and stairs finished up.

Then we move on to work on Bella’s room, which was the reason we bought the house in the first place.

School Carnival Time

This weekend Bella’s school had a fundraiser, a school carnival.  We were also in charge of watching the class pet, a stuffed frog named Tad.

Bella enjoyed showing Tad all her favorite toys.

They became good friends.

Bella and Oliver have been enjoying “Despicable Me”, we are currently borrowing it, but I’m thinking it needs to be added to our collection.

I made pumpkin pancakes while Bella and Tad supervised.

Then we headed over to the school carnival.

Oliver really wanted to go down the big slide, but the poor kid couldn’t make it up the stairs.  He tried a total of 5 times to get up, but in the end he had to settle for the plain moon bounce.

Bella also got to enjoy the moon bounce.  She wouldn’t smile for the camera, but she was definitely smiling while being bounced around.

Both Bella and Oliver got their faces painted.

Bella also did the cake walk and won a cake.  Then we headed down to the cafeteria for some carnival food.  Bella and Tad had to watch, as there was nothing for them to eat.

They were so exhausted from the busy morning they ended up taking a nap as Jesse and I watched the football game.

It was a good weekend, but I think Tad realized he spent a lot of the time upside down!

It was a quick trip

We took a short vacation this last weekend.  Short meaning amount of time, not distance traveled.

First we headed up to Nebraska to drop the kids off with Grandma.  Then at 6am on Friday morning, we headed off to Minneapolis, MN.  We arrived in the early afternoon and ventured off to a few establishment, had dinner, went to another bar for some drinks, and then were tucked into bed by 9:30pm.  Yes crazy vacation…right?  Except we had been up since 4:30am that morning, when Bella woke us up and somehow on a 6 hour car ride neglected to take a nap.

My only regret of the first night was not hopping aboard the biking bar.

Have you seen these things?  You sit up at the bar, but pedal as you drink to move around the streets of downtown.  It looked fun, but it was cold, I had on high heels, we were tired.  Excuses, excuses….we should have just done it (well except I think it was full at the time so we couldn’t have anyways).

But hey, we were actually there for the Saturday activities.  Tailgating for the Nebraska/Minnesota game which started at 7am (the tailgating I mean, not the game time).

During the game, Jesse and I headed to the stadium.

But only for a quick picture, then we headed right across the street to a BW3’s to enjoy the game in the comforts of indoors with beers, food, and big screen tv’s.

I would say it was about a half Nebraska/half Minnesota crowd at the bar.

And then the game was a huge disappointment, at least for us Husker fans.  We did enjoy Minneapolis, but the 10 hour drive home on Sunday wasn’t too much fun.  At least we only had the kids with us for 3 of those hours…as they provided quite a treat.  Oliver was crying at one point because he couldn’t see any pink water towers.  Yep definitely something to cry about!

October Roundup

I thought I would post any pictures we took in October that I never got around to blogging about.

I made these pretzel rolls from scratch….delicious.  Recipe Here.

We did sneak in one pumpkin carving time for Father and Son.

Bella had picture day at school.  She wouldn’t hold her head up for me, so I’m pretty sure the class picture is going to have Bella with her head down !

Bella also had her first Dentist visit this past month where they actually cleaned her teeth.  We finally went to a special dentist that just got in her mouth and did what needed to be done.  Bella actually did a great job and I think because we were there for almost 2 hours towards the end she was getting very cranky and did start crying, otherwise if we could have kept it shorter (less waiting around) it would have been a huge success.

She did get a balloon for her troubles, and cracked me up that she held it the whole ride home (doesn’t happen very often).

We also took a short trip to Minnesota and the kids went to grandmas…post coming soon.

Follow the Yellow Brick Road

Or as Oliver’s favorite song of this Halloween season goes – “Ding Dong the Witch is dead.  Which old which?  The wicked witch. Ding dong the wicked witch is dead.”

As I mentioned Bella had a witch’s costume for this year, and I was trying to think how we could incorporate the whole family theme based from that.  I came up with the idea of having the house fall on Bella, and she would be one of the wicked witch’s from “The Wizard of Oz”.

Jesse made her a cardboard house.

I painted and decorated it.

We got quite a few compliments as we went along on Bella’s costume parade at school.  And a surprising number of people would say….”Oh look it’s Bella”, as we went by.  As long as we were moving Bella had her head up and was talking away in her costume.

Bella’s Kindergarten Class all dressed up.

After participating in Bella’s costume parade I had to quickly drive to Oliver’s school to see him participate in his costume parade.

Oliver got to choose between the lion, scarecrow, tin man and flying monkey.  I do believe he picked the one with the most pieces.

Later that evening we headed out to go trick-or-treating.  Both kids did great.  Oliver loved running from house to house.  Most times he would say Trick or Treat and then Thank You.  Bella had a button to push and you could hear “Trick or Treat” over and over again as she pushed it.  Unfortunately almost all the houses have steps, so she only went up to a few doors.  Oliver was happy to give her all his candy, so he could go get more!

Flying Monkey’s have to fly!

We had our costume party this weekend.  I went with the wicked witch, since it just meant making a black dress that could be worn for other occasions.  I owned everything else already, except for the green face paint.  I even bought two different ones and both were much too dark….oh well.

Jesse had a last minute decision to change from being a tornado to the Wizard of Oz himself.  He choose the door keeper costume, which I then had to quickly make in the span of 2 days.

And here are the pictures from the party itself.

It was a small gathering for our party, but that enabled us to play games.

We did a spin off of the awkward family photo game…Halloween addition using pictures like these:

Hope everyone had a great Holiday, I know our family did.