GO COLTS!

We had a great time Sunday watching the Colts beat the Jets and make their way to the Super Bowl!! Brian even got the kids excited about it. Mary saw some face paint at the store and asked if we could paint our faces for the big game, so.....

...... here we are getting our "game faces" on:

I wasn't planning to put Hannah in a Colts shirt, but she saw the rest of us in our shirts and she heard us all saying "Go Colts" so she pointed to her own shirt and said her version of "Go Colts too?" So then I had to go digging through the old kids clothes in the attic until I found an old shirt that Jacob wore when he was 2.... she was very excited to be dressed for the game!

A funny story: During the game Brian and I were booing the Jets and expressing our frustration, and Mary said: "Those Colts are making me MAD!" We'll get to party all over again a week from Sunday when the Colts play in the Super Bowl!

Mary's Birthday

Mary turned 5 on Jan. 5! Here are some pictures from her birthday party. Her two buddies, Maryn and Evan:

Mary was lucky to have all of her grandparents here for her party. Here she is with Grandma Chris and Grandpa Dave: with Grandpa Charlie and Grandma Dianne:

and with Grandpa Bob and Grandma Emilie:

Eating tacos:

Mary on her new bike... she rode it around the living room for about 5 days, until we got tired of tripping over it, and now it's in the shed waiting for Spring! That's the trouble with winter birthdays.Time for cake!

Happy Birthday Mary!

Just a few Christmas Pics

I never got around to posting Christmas pictures, so here are a few...
The kids opened their gifts on Christmas Eve morning, and here they are wearing their new flannel robes that I made for them:
Jacob running his new steam engine:

The happy engineer!

And all of us at church on Christmas morning:

Brian's Birthday etc

Brian's birthday was a few weeks ago (a little late posting on this blog). Grown-ups always need a little help from the kids to blow out all the candles:
I gave Brian this sweatshirt, and Mary took this picture of us (no kidding!):

Hannah loves to sing, and now whenever she sees a birtday cake she sings "Happy Birthday" in her own language, of course. Here's her rendition (it's a little loud):

Mary got to be "Mary" in her preschool Christmas program. It was super cute.

Hannah turns 2!

Hannah's birthday was last Thursday... we had a great day! The weather was nice, and we were even able to eat dinner outside. We had an autumn feast... hotdogs, roasted root vegetables, homemade applesauce, and pumpkin-spice cake!
Here are the girls playing outside in the afternoon (while I'm inside cleaning the house and decorating the cake!)

Hannah opening her presents...

Blowing out her candles...

More cake, please...

And here are Jacob and Mary on Friday, getting ready for Halloween with their pumpkins:

Halloween Treats

The kids tried out their costumes Sunday at the Zoo. They have a special "Zoo Boo" every year, with decorations and trick-or-treating. Jacob is especially proud to be Peter Pan, as you can see in this picture. Mary and Hannah are Tinkerbell and Tiger Lilly (we went with a theme this year).
Here they are at the zoo:

I thought it should be called "Disney's Zoo-Boo," since half the kids (including ours) were dressed as a Disney character! At least we didn't see any duplicates of our costumes, since they're homemade (a must for Halloween costumes, in my opinion!)

Here are a couple cute pictures of Mary, the ballerina:

She's looking so grown-up!

Lost tooth and Apples!

Actually, the lost tooth and apples have nothing to do with each other...

Jacob came home from school today with a big smile and a missing tooth! He said it fell onto his desk while he was doing handwriting practice. The teacher gave him a baggie for the tooth and now it's under his pillow awaiting a visit from the tooth fairy! Isn't it funny how teeth falling out can be such a big event? Now on to the apples...

Last weekend we were blessed with beautiful, autumn-like weather, so we took advantage by heading down to an orchard that we usually don't visit until September or October. The great thing about going in August is that besides apples, we also got to pick red raspberries! We picked 5 lbs of raspberries, not counting the ones that we ate along the way (especially Hannah!).

There goes Mary sneaking one:

Since Sunday we've had raspberry muffins, raspberry pancakes, a raspberry cobbler, raspberries on our cereal, and still enough for a couple of quarts in the freezer!

After PB&J sandwiches in the car, we moved on to picking apples, which of course we had to sample as well...

The other advantage we found in going in August was that there were way more apples on the trees, and lower to the ground so the kids could actually reach them! Some of the varieties aren't ready to be picked, of course, but we came home with a 1/2 bushel of Jonathans and 1/2 bushel of Galas, which will last a while.

Maybe we'll go back in October to get more apples and pumpkins and gourds, but this was a fun treat for the end of summer!