{ new year's eve celebration }

Simple celebration at home with lots of sparkling grape juice, champagne, candles & sparklers.

{ summer fun list - #43 }

Our town throws a fabulous small-town Fourth of July parade every year, and lucky for us, the parade starts at the entrance of our neighborhood so we don't have far to venture. As usual, we geared up in lots of red, white & blue, and watched the parade with lots of our friends & neighbors. This year, the parade was loaded with lots of free give-outs, i.e. beads, recycling bags, t-shirts, oscar meyer weiner whistles, bottled water, tons & tons of candy, and ultra-cool headbands.

{ V-Day fun }

The boys & I had a great week filled with lots & lots of hearts, friends, yummy treats, hundreds of "I Love You"s and loads of Valentine's Day fun. Here is a sampling of our {heart} day activities...

CJ is quite the multi-tasker
Easy (and way less messy) way to stamp with sponges. Cut your design out of a sponge and attach a wine cork to the sponge with hot glue. I bought a big bag of various sized sponges at Dollar General for $1 and we use them for lots of crafts & fun activities.
Easy painting activity incorporating the alphabet and Valentine's Day
Thumbprint clay magnets made for the grandparents
Yummy sweet treats made for all of our friends. Click here for the recipe.

{ Halloween countdown }

My favorite holiday is quickly approaching and I have lots of "tricks" & "treats" up my sleeve for the boys in the coming weeks ahead. Today, we made ghosts out of empty cartons that we will line up and light along our driveway on Halloween night. T-man got to draw his own ghost characters and I was pretty impressed with his creations. The two cartons on the right are his...he just drew them in red marker (his color of choice) and I traced over it with black marker. According to T, the top ghost on the carton pictured directly above is a ghost with a mustache..."just like PaPa". :)

Also, check out this ultra-cute Halloween video that J created tonight...love it!

Day o' Fun

We had a lot of fun celebrating St. Paddy's Day this year.  The boys received a special gift in the mail from the Carlson's filled with lots of St. Paddy crafts & treats to enjoy...thanks BC!  T crafted this cute leprechaun hat and also made tiny shamrock stickers to pass out to friends & neighbors.  Baby CJ thought he was pretty funny wearing his shamrock headband, making weird sound effects (which sounded more like a dying duck than an Irish accent) whenever he had it on.  I got a little crazy with the green food coloring, transforming ordinary foods/drinks (milk, yogurt, eggs, beer) into St. Paddy Day treats.  The day wouldn't be complete without some traditional Irish jigging done BNR style.  I don't think any of us will be joining the Riverdance dancing troupe anytime soon but we sure had fun.  

Special St. Paddy's Day lunch - Shamrock (green pepper) cheese toasties with green milk

Resolution List

Here's to much happiness and good times in the New Year.  We are grateful for all the wonderful times & blessings we experienced in 2008, including the birth of our beloved Baby CJ

(a.k.a. the New Year's baby).

I love writing resolutions for the new year, but I must admit that I am terrible at keeping them. This year I am trying a different tactic and sharing my resolutions with everyone...that way I will have a little motivation in keeping up with them all year long.  Here it goes...

1.  Run a race with my hubby. 

2.  Create a Family Fun folder filled with different activities to do with the boys.

3.  Look put-together every day. 

4.  Grocery shop, Clean the house and do the laundry on the same day every week.

5.  Go camping with the kids.

6.  Have more date nights.

7.  Be more consistent with my weekly meal planning.

8.  Organize all my digital pictures.

9.  Organize our storage closet.

10. Take an advanced photography course.

Our Sickmas

With all my shopping done last week, I had great intentions of having a special "Countdown to Christmas" week filled with lots of holiday activities, much like Halloween, and finalizing all of the last-minute Christmas details.  Instead we were greeted by an unexpected visitor of the unwelcome kind - 

the nasty flu bug.  

Baby CJ was the first to be caught by the bug on Monday and then it was a total domino effect for the rest of the week, hitting Baby CJ again on Christmas Day.  Scrumptious holiday fare was replaced with Sprite, Pedialite & crackers; yummy holiday smells had been swapped with smells of yucky bodily fluids; mounting presents by the Christmas tree were joined by towering piles of laundry; matching Christmas pajamas were kept on only long enough to take a picture.  Though we were trapped inside (and still are), away from all of our family & friends this Christmas, we have been able to share some very memorable moments together i.e extra cuddles in bed and watching endless number of Christmas shows together.  I think this will be the first & only time that I will be able to get T to watch "White Christmas" in its entirety.  This is definitely a Christmas we will never forget!

Here are some of my favorite pics capture on Christmas day.  

Opening "Santa" gifts Christmas morning wrapped in traditional red tissue paper.  

Caught stealing Santa's leftovers

Standing in the puke bowl that was present with us at all times

Poor Baby CJ was miserable Christmas morning and wanted to be held the entire time while we opened presents...except when he darted off to steal a cookie. 

Playing with his new Leapster.

Another "Santa" favorite - a cool rocket launcher.  Watch out!

T loves building castles & other structures with his super set of wooden blocks.  

J taking a quick moment to relax by the fire in his holiday pajamas.  

Baby's First Christmas...I adore this pic!

Sick Mr. T cuddling in my lap

Merry Christmas to All

Turkey Day Feast

I wasn't able to take alot of pictures during Thanksgiving as I was too busy stuffing myself with all of the great yummies, though I did capture the boys taking their first bites of the

Thanksgiving feast.

Priceless!  

I think we will declare Thanksgiving as Baby CJ's favorite holiday so far...he ate everything in site!

Advent Calendar

This year I wanted to create a special 

Advent Calendar

for our family that would be fun for all of us.   Instead of going out and buying candy or trinkets, I decided to start a "Christmas Book" Advent countdown with the idea of having the kids & us read a Christmas/holiday-themed book each night in front of the Christmas tree.  I gathered 24 books....some from our collection, some from my mom that were mine as a child and a few from our local library.  Using leftover wrapping paper, I wrapped each book and then tagged them with stamped circle tags that I made from scrap cardstock.  The boys have a blast each evening before bed gathering around the Christmas tree to unravel the day's book and having it read to them.  On Christmas, we give them another book to add to our existing collection.  

I think this is an Advent Calendar that we will continue to keep each and every holiday season!     

Craft Time with Mommy

T & I made a Thanksgiving craft yesterday based on a cute book that we have been reading all week called 

Setting the Turkeys Free.  

We heart craft time!

Christmas Decorating

I caught him checking himself out in the glass ornaments...too funny!

We broke out all of our Christmas decorations last weekend and got an early start to all of our Christmas decorating.  T was a great help helping carefully placing ornaments on the Christmas tree.  He declared that it was the "best tree he had ever seen."  Baby CJ kept himself occupied by getting into all of the opened boxes filled with Christmas decorations.  He particularly liked the garland.  So much, that I have had to take the garland off the bottom half of our Christmas tree...ornaments too.  

Martha Doesn't Live Here

 

(1) Martha Stewart Halloween Craft Kit 

+

(1) crafty toddler  

= picture above.  

Click here to see what it is really supposed to look like. :)  

Many thanks to Aunt J for the cool Halloween kit.  We had a lot of fun making our first paper-mache craft.  

Week of Halloween Fun

I am FINALLY getting to all of our hundreds of Halloween pictures.  We enjoyed a week full of Halloween activities - yummy Halloween fare, multitudes of crafts, tons of candy and lots of fun with family & friends.  I documented the entire week, taking pictures wherever we went, in hopes of creating a new photo journal each Halloween.  Here are some of my favorite pics from our 

fun Halloween week.