Christmas Card Photo Attempt #1

We decorated our tree two weeks ago when Caitlyn was home and we had just enough time before Caitlyn had to leave to get the kids dressed in red, white and green and take pictures. I originally thought that we would use these for our Christmas cards, but the lighting was poor and the resolution on these pictures is not great. Out of about 30 pictures, these two were the best. Whew, I don't ever want to have the job of being a photographer!!!!

Merry Christmas!!!!

I finally got all of the Christmas decorations up, or at least all that I'm going to put up this year, and the house is relatively clean. I figured I should take pictures before it gets messy again! Some of you have been to our house for Christmas and seen it decorated. I only did a few things differently this year. Trying to minimize the number of lights that need to be plugged in and unplugged every night was one change! We still have about 8 different outlets that need attention and two or three candles that need to be blown out.

This is our family room.

Here is another angle of the family room.

One more angle of the livingroom. It's such a large room that it's impossible to get everything in with one picture!

Our Christmas Tree. Ryan really likes the star on top!

Our fireplace. We have gas logs and actually do light the fire a few times during the winter, but most of the time, the weather is too hot for a fire and it is just decorative. The stockings were made by my mother. She made them a couple of years ago and had leftover fabric for a sixth stocking that we'll be using next year!

The china cabinet in our dining room. I also decorate the table but haven't quite finished that job yet, so I did not take a picture of it.

Yes, even the Computer Room/Den gets decorated. A strand of led snowflakes in coordinating colors do the trick.

I have a few Christmas themed stuffed animals and some snowmen/teddybear items that fit better in a kids room than anywhere else in the house, so I did a little decorating in the boys' room. They helped me with their tree.

Another angle of the boys' room showing more snowmen items. My mother-in-law made the door decoration with her fancy embroidery sewing machine.

And last one is of the outside of our house. We didn't go overboard this year as it was kind of late in December when we finally had time to hang these up. But we had to do something because the boys just love Christmas lights and yell "Christmas!" every time we drive by a house with lights. Now they can say "Christmas!" when we drive by our house. :-)

The Playground Project

Here is a long overdue post on our end of summer/fall project. We finally decided that we were in desperate need of playground equipment or something for the boys to spend time on in our new fenced-in back yard. We chose something rather big as we didn't want the boys to grow out of it in a year! This one should do the trick, we hope. The set was a little over our budget but with contributions from both sets of grandparents and the savings that we had put aside for this made it possible. This was actually a present for Charles' birthday on August 29th. I think the playground was actually finished the weekend after Ryan's birthday, the end of October. It was a looong project, half of the work was flatening out the land and filling it with sand. I'm happy to report that all of the hard work was worth it! Both boys absolutely love to go outside and play. They play "pirates" and chase eachother around, going up the ladder, inside the fort, then down the slide and back around, occasionally just running aroudn in circles in the yard. It's sort of a follow the leader type game. The boys also prefer the swings to anything else on the playground. Boy if only we knew that before-hand!!! :-) Ryan can get up on the glider by himself and single-handedly makes it go very very high. That is by far his favorite activity. Sometimes he just takes a 5 minute break in his day to go swing, and then comes back inside. So funny! Here are a few pictures that were taken, thanks to Caitlyn. Neither Seth nor I were very good at stopping to take pictures of our progress. We had more important things to do. Sometimes the boys would bring their toys out and play on the picnic table/area underneath while we were working away on top. Charles helped out with shoveling the sand for the playground in the wheelbarrel and then pushing the empty wheelbarrel back to the sand pile after Seth dumped it. My job was to rake it out flat once it was dumped. Caitlyn helped with putting together some of the hardware and bringing us the required pieces of wood for the next step. Although Seth and I clearly did the most work, it really was a family project!