My Birthday Dinner - celebrated on Dec.23, 2010

Here we are in the car either before or after a yummy dinner at Four Square in Durham! This must have been before because I think this was the night that I decided to have two martinis and that turned out to be a bad decision!! It was a fun and yummy night though!

Gingerbread House Decorating Party! Dec.21, 2010

Ayden and his kindergarten classmates hard at work decorating with all kinds of candy!

Ayden with Mrs. Woodruff!

Ayden with Miss Todora!

A cute photo of Gabriel and Peyton during December...just had to throw in the pic of this cute little pair! :)

Happy Birthday Jesus Party! Dec.18, 2010

This is a fondant creation that my friend Wendy made to help celebrate Jesus at her second annual Happy Birthday Jesus Party!

The kids playing a party game! I think they had to guess what the drawing was...kind of like pictionary, but with Christmas related objects.

Here's Ayden guessing what Alex's (Wendy's son) drawing was.

Time for cake! I think I took a photo of Ayden answering the question that Wendy was asking about why we celebrate Christmas. He had such a great answer, wish I had it on video, but I do remember thinking that all of the time I've spent telling him about Jesus paid off in that one moment! :)

The Real Santa! Dec.18, 2010

So, if you were reading from a recent holiday post, here is the rest of the story on Santa! I got SO EXCITED about this part of the holiday basically because it has been a hope of mine to keep the magic of Christmas alive for my children for as long as possible! Ayden is a quick one and I started becoming afraid of him figuring things out this Christmas, but luckily, he still believes!! When he wondered why the Santa Train santa wasn't the "real Santa," I realized that in order to keep the hope alive, I would have to track down the real Santa from the library that we had visited in the past couple of years . Well, the real Santa was not going to be at the library this year, but Julio happened to be talking to our neighbor Jim about this issue. Jim told him that the real Santa from the library is actually a friend of his fathers! Jim emailed his dad for us to ask where his Santa friend was going to be this Christmas and we found out the two locations! I think it was at one of the downtown museums on a Friday night and then at a Holly Springs restaurant on Saturday morning. I think that I planned to go to the museum on Friday night and then accidently spaced it until it was too late that evening, but we made it to the restaurant for Saturday morning breakfast and a visit to see the "REAL SANTA!!!!" The kids were in awe!! And this completely made my whole day!! Oh, the joys of having children and watching them discover and enjoy life...this one ranked high on my list for sure!

Ayden reading Santa the items on his list! He wrote the list all by himself!

I think Gabriel was skeptical of Santa the whole time, I couldn't get a smile from him. :)

The whole fam with the Real Santa!!

Holiday Creations! December 6, 2010

Here are Gabriel's creations from art class during the month of December. Mr. Snowman is on the left and here is one of the examples of the love affair with raindeers! He got to hang these two ornaments on the playroom tree! 2010 was the first year to have a playroom tree and the boys loved decorating it! I hope I took a photo of it!

I think if I remember correctly, Ayden wanted to make Gabriel a number and letter chart so that he could learn them both. He even added the list of vowels! He is always coming up with thoughtful projects that he makes for his brother. :)

Snow Day in Bond Park - Dec.4, 2010

I guess I was actually on it this year for holiday activities because not only did we get Santa Train Tickets, but we got to go sledding the next morning at Bond Park in machine made snow! I think a couple of years of not getting my act together and missing some of the fun events motivated me to sign up for all the fun stuff in 2010!

Gabriel finally agreed to go down a smaller portion of the hill by himself. The whole morning, he insisted on riding down in the front of my sled with me. :)

I was so glad that I signed us up...my only screw up was that I forgot to sign Julio and I up, I didn't think about it...I just thought one had to sign up their kids! But of course Gabriel couldn't go down the big hill by himself and so I pleaded my case and they let me buy a ticket for one adult at the last minute! They would have let Julio buy one too but he didn't have all of the snow gear since we got ready at the last minute and he couldn't find it all. Oh well, you can't have everything perfect and at least we had a photographer! :)

Santa Train - continued

Here is Ayden telling Santa a few things from his list that he wants for Christmas this year! There is actually a funny story to this! Ayden asked why this Santa from the Santa Train (at the Museum of Life and Science) didn't look like the "real Santa!" I figured out what he meant because we had been to the library by our house the last two years to visit Santa (a different man playing Santa than the Santa Train Santa)! He remembered what that Santa at the library looked like and couldn't be fooled! So, mom explained that Santa sends his helpers to be in different places for "Santa" events since he cannot be everywhere at once. I explained that I would do my best to make a trip to see the real Santa before Christmas! More to come on this in a future post! :)

Gabriel attempting to tell Santa what he wants for Christmas!

The Selkirk family came with us to enjoy the Santa Train! We had tried to get tickets for us all last year, but I didn't reserve them in time...but I was on it this year! :)

Face paintings and candy canes!

The Santa Train - Dec 3, 2010

Face Painting before the train ride!

Gabriel of course wanted to have a reindeer painted on his face because the whole Christmas season has been focused on reindeer! I always get very excited about the advent season and start playing Christmas music on the car radio before it is even December! I think it all started with us belting out a few popular, children friendly Christmas tunes, one of which was Rudolph, the Red Nose Reindeer! Gabriel couldn't stop singing this song for the whole rest of December! It cracked me up every time...I sure hope I have a video of it! There were plenty more raindeer loving moments that month, but this one sticks out in my memory since I am having to journal about our life, five months ago! :)

Here is the Santa Train all lit up and on its way!

We're going for a ride!

I believe Granny and Papi were able to be here for the Santa Train before their plane left for home the next day or so!

Tree Trimming Party! Nov. 28-29, 2010

We start out by decorating cookies. I think that I wasn't quite prepared or couldn't make it out to the Fresh Market for the gingerbread cookies that we used last year and so we made some sugar cookies to decorate the same night that we went out to get the tree. It was a start! :)

Julio thrilled that I am taking his photo in his lounging wear! I remember him saying, "Why do you need a photo of me putting the lights on?" Caryl and I said, "It is part of the process of the Tree Trimming Party of course!!" ha,ha!

The next day, we went to Trader Joe's and they happened to have gingerbread man decorating kits...perfect! So, the Tree Trimming Party continued!

YUM! Well, not really, actually! They sure looked cute, but they tasted like cardboard! Trader Joe's pleases me with so many of their products, but this one only won points for looking cute!

Tree Farm Trip - A Few More...

of course the little one found a branch that was more interesting than a photo session!

Outtake pic from the day...just made me laugh!

Trip to the Tree Farm! Nov 28, 2010

It was such a sunny and pretty day that day. Granny and Papi were with us for a few more days after the Thanksgiving beach trip and were nice enough to take some family photos! We found a nice, tall tree to take home for the tree trimming party (my new family tradition)! :)

Catching Up!

So, I am now about four months behind in my blog...ahhhh!! I purchased space so that I could keep posting and that didn't work, so I had my smart husband check out my account and he found out that the problem was that I had used a background website to upload a background that moves (snow falling). For some reason this html code was interfering with my blog, causing me not to be able to post. Don't really know why, but that was the issue.
So, here I go...in my attempt to catch up to April, 2011!
Hold on...I am editing this on May 19th, 2011 and it turns out that whatever the issue with not being able to post to my blog was, I finally found a way to easily post via Picasa! I went on Blogger and found someone who had a similar problem and they had success posting through Picasa, so I decided to give it a try and it works! So, five months behind and I am going to catch up now, finally!