Monday, December 27, 2010

Christmas part II

Every year we are home for Christmas. It is just us and we don't usually have a lot planned. This year we were invited to our Pastor's house for fellowship on Christmas Eve. We were the only guests but had a fun time playing games and munching on goodies. Christmas day was pretty much no fuss. I wanted something relatively simple for the main meal and was going to get a beef tenderloin until I saw how expensive they are. We went with a pork roast instead. I put that in the crock pot with a shallots & mushroom sauce, a first time using shallots. Then we just had mashed potatoes, green beans, cranberry sauce and rolls. We put together a gingerbread village and played outside in the snow. Later in the evening I rolled and cut out cookies while the kids played. Matthew helped a little but he likes decorating more than cutting them out. After church on Sunday we just took it easy and cleaned up a little bit. After nap time I made the icing for the cookies and we decorated a few. Matthew and Brian took some over to the neighbor and Matthew thanked him for clearing the snow from our path so we could walk :-) All in all we had a nice time. Emily's favorite gift was her new doll that makes noise when you feed it. She's such a little mommy with her dolls and stuffed animals! Matthew even likes her doll and tells Emily what to do when her baby is crying.

Something else we learned this past weekend is that Emily isn't quite afraid of snow anymore. Her first couple times out she was more timid with the uneven walking surface and she tended to get upset when she fell over. On Christmas day she was trying to climb the snow pile and when we'd take her to the top of the hill, she liked to scoot down it all by herself. She also enjoyed sledding and didn't mind too much when she fell over and got snow in her face. She actually got upset when she had to get out of the sled to take it back to the top. I think she's going to really enjoy the white stuff as she gets bigger and stronger! This is Matthew's first winter of not asking to come in before we tell him it's time. He and his daddy sure have fun and he's glad we found new gloves that stay on his hands the entire time. Thanks Auntie Denise for introducing us to them, we haven't needed to adjust the gloves a single time!

Friday, December 17, 2010

Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Christmas & Such


I decided since I've been MIA in the blogging world lately, now is just as good a time as any to start up again. Emily is potty training. She's doing really well and we had 3 whole days without a single accident. Her fourth day was accident free except for being wet when she woke from her nap. Then we went out of town and that put a little wrench in progress but she still did well. Had a few accidents but part of that was our fault for not having her sit. Matthew still enjoys preschool although he usually says every Monday night & Wednesday night he doesn't want to go and sometimes again in the mornings when he's being woken up early to get ready. Once he's there he's fine. He's like his dad and takes forever to wake up and it is best to let him wake on his own, but he doesn't get up early enough on his own. It is something I dread because it is a constant battle, I don't want to think about what it'll be like having to do this every morning.


This past weekend we were supposed to have our family Christmas with my side at my brother's in Sartell. We knew a storm was on the way so Brian took Friday off so we could get there before the storm hit. We would have gone on Friday anyways to maximize our time with family but Brian would not have taken the whole day off. The storm hadn't started by the time we went to bed Friday night but it paid us a visit during the night. Saturday was actually not that bad. It ended up that we were the only ones to make it. It is interesting that we are the only ones with kids that had to travel, Brian had to take work off and our area got hit the worst but we were the only ones there. Our Christmas 2 years ago had worse weather and it is the only time every single person was in attendance. When we woke up Sunday morning I checked MnDot's site and saw no travel was advised for our area. We kept an eye on it and decided it was best to stay another night. If we had tried to make it home and hit really bad roads, we would have had to turn all the way around or stay in a motel, neither of which sounded fun. Having already been through this scenario before and not making it home, we didn't want a repeat. Brian had to take Monday off and we had good roads most of the way. There were areas we knew would not have been good had we come home Sunday since they weren't the best by the time we were on them Monday afternoon. When we got home we couldn't get in our side of the alley and it was interesting getting through the other side. We had asked a friend to blow out our parking area and when we got home we had a path to our house, the front steps were cleared out and the sidewalk was done. Not sure who all did that since our neighbor told us he'd take care of the sidewalk but regardless, it was GREAT to not have to spend time shoveling just to get everyone out of the car (we've had to do that before, too).

The kids had a great time playing with their cousins. We had a nice visit and good time playing games. This is what Christmas is about, spending time with family. Exactly the reason we went on Friday. If we're going to say spending time together is important than you better believe we will do everything we can to get there. One of the reasons Brian saves his PTO, which allows him to miss work and still get paid.