The Christmas cookies are made...almost!!

While Skylar and James were at school, Kellen and I baked cookies all day (I literally mean all day long!).

We made chocolate chip, oatmeal raisin, snickerdoodles, sugar cookies and buckeyes (a new addition this year thanks to Jen!). Don't worry, we saved some cookies for Skylar and James to decorate!

We also made the dough for the Swedish gingerbread, but that has to be refrigerated overnight and then rolled out, so that is the project for tomorrow. The finished products!

Our first weekend at the lake house (Valhalla)!

People voted and decided that Valhalla is the name we should go with. Anyway, we had a great time getting to know our house a little.

Our first dinner!

Enjoying our new couch!

Playing outside on the frozen lake. We love it (even though mom forgot our ice skates!)




Burrrr...it's cold!

Playing in the snow!

We got home today from school and went right to the snow pile to build a snowman!

Winter Hits!

Well, we are now paying for the wonderful weather we had in November. It was still 50 degrees here last week. Overnight it dropped 40 degrees and has stayed that way. Today we are getting slammed with a blizzard! This is just the beginning!

Nothing helps to make it through a cold winter day like a cup of hot cocoa! I actually made the real deal this time (instead of hot milk with Hershey's syrup in it) and the kids just loved it. I guess there is no going back to the "yucky hot chocolate!"

Brennen's walking! Finally!

He is finally walking everywhere! A little wobbly, but I love it!

The tree gets decorated!

As soon as the kids got home from school, they were yelling to get the tree decorated. So, we put on our Christmas music and the kids went to work. They really loved it and did a pretty good job. There is a large concentration of ornaments in the front of the tree, but I'll spread those out later:)

The lights checker! Kellen is just in love with the lights of Christmas!

The decorators!


The destroyer! Brennen was pulling off the ornaments faster than the kids could get them up.

The finished product!

It's time to decorate for Christmas!

Sorry, it has been so long, but for the past two weeks, I have been literally running from one thing to the next and then collapsing in bed! After the chaos of closing on the lake house, Skylar had a swim meet, we had Taekwondo testing for our orange belts, then we ran up to the lake house to show the kids and Marilyn and Jim. Then we left early Sunday morning for the 14 hour drive down to Nashville (just me and the kids). All sorts of fun stuff for the week; the Boulevard Bolt, baby showers, 17 people in one house plus four dogs... Do you think I could manage to get a picture of anything? NO! Finally, we ended up with a 15 1/2 hour drive back from Nashville due to bad traffic, flat tires and being pulled over by the police for having a taillight out. We made it back Sunday at midnight. Since then, I have been running around like a manic trying to clean out the car, do tons of laundry and get everything back in its place. However, you can't start December without the advent calendars up, so we had to pause a little in all of the craziness to get out some Christmas decorations. The kids were so happy to get out the decorations, wear their santa hats, and listen to Christmas music. We only got a little done today, but no worries, we will get the rest done tomorrow (Skylar was a swim practice and Brennen refused to wear his hat). I pick up the tree in the morning and they are really looking forward to decorating the tree!