Merry Christmas!

Here is a picture of the kids at Tanners wedding. We could not find our camera before church started to snap a pic of the kids in their christmas outfits (we might have to try and recreate the moment this Sunday:)

Halle has been so into dress ups lately. Whenever it is time for me to pick her up from a friends house she usually has some sort of dress up on. So I searched around for some dress ups and was so discouraged at the $20 a pop dresses at Target and everywhere else...so if you need dress ups heres what I did. I went to Toys R Us the day after Thanksgiving (Thanks for calling me Becky...I would have liked to have waited longer for them to go even cheaper, but if I would have waited they would have been gone) and got the $12.99 dresses for 50% off...$6.50/dress. I bought 5 of them so my total was $32, but they gave me a $10 gift card for buying that many costumes that day, so I pretty much got them all for $22! She loves them, and we have officially changed her dresses/shoes 400 times since Christmas morning:)

Tyler was so pumped to get a "video game" for Christmas. Our version of a video game is a leapster leapfrog. He has loved it so much, we are going to have to set some rules about how much he gets to play it. I was watching him play it and he started rolling his neck like it was sore:)

The kids had a good time playing in Tylers new tent from gma and gpa pearson. Halle got a tinkerbell lantern from her aunt chloe, and had a good time playing with it and other toys in the tent. It took up pretty much the whole basement, and I promise we let them out when they wanted, their faces look all smashed up against the door:)

My hard worker

Yesterday Tyler came home from school and told me they had started talking a lot about leaves. He ran into the house and straight into the backyard picking up different leaves, then plopped them all down on the kitchen table showing them to us. We put a piece of paper over the leaves and rubbed over the top with a crayon to make a leaf picture, they really thought that was fun. Tyler then asked if he could rake the leaves in the backyard, and I was more than happy to get him a rake and let him have at it. He raked and raked and raked! He kept shouting into the house for us to not look out the window until he was done. He was out there for over an hour just raking away. The other day he got run over literally by two big boys on their bike and got pretty scraped up on his elbow and knee (you can kind of see his bandages) which didn't make the raking any easier. I was so proud of him for keeping after his job he started, I just love this little boy:)!

Here is the big pile of leaves Tyler had when he was all done! Way to go bud!!

Heres what Halle did while Tyler raked:) She started helping Ty rake for awhile but I'm pretty sure he shooed her away after she messed up his pile one to many times! She loves this sand box, and despite sand everywhere (in their hair, clothes, in the house, really everywhere) it is worth it for the fun they have in it...it just means extra sweeping and a gritty tub:)

I just thought I would add these last 2 pics. This is a tutu (spelling anyone?) we made for Halle awhile ago. She has no dress up clothes and it is her favorite thing to do! We will be raiding all stores after Halloween for dress ups, if anyone wants to join me.

She loves this tutu and wears it all the time. She tells me she is so special and a princess everyday, and she is! I hope she never forgets it:) My friend gave Halle these little ballet slippers that her little girl never got around to wearing, so cute...thanks Audrey!!

Family Fun Fest

This past Saturday we took the kids to the Family FUN Fest at Pattersons farm. A good time was had by all:) They had fun slides that were really long and not too fast, a tree house slide, a playground kind of in the forrest, a playground covered in hay that was being thrown everywhere, a tractor to play on, a kid corn maze and a bigger one as well, yummy food-we liked the kettle corn, yum, anyway, the kids loved it and could have spent the entire time going down the long slide! The hay throwing at the playground got old really fast, but other than that we had a great family afternoon:)

This was taken obviously afterwards, I got the pics a little out of order. Tyler had a soccer game before we went to Pattersons and was completely zonked out for the ride home.

Heres shimmying (is that a word?) up the pole on the playground. We had a hard time convincing him to change into pants after his soccer game, hence the hay poking everywhere out of his shin guards.

Tyler showing off at the slide with his backwards skills:)

Halle sliding down hanging onto her apple. They had big bins of apples you could eat, it grossed me out because everyone was just reaching in and picking up apples and then putting them back, you never knew how many people had touched your apple, ick, we all ate one anyway and nothing happened to us:)

There was a tractor that took you out to the fun fest, the kids thought it was cool and that it looked like the tractors at Grandma and Grandpa Pearsons:)

Here we are at the corn maze. It was a little muddy in places but the kids had fun trying to find their way out.

They had all of these pumpkins for sale as well as a huge pumpkin patch. Halle had fun touching every single one, knocking them over, and trying to roll all of them, she made me tired just watching. We had such a fun saturday as a family, Chase has been hard at work in school so it was nice to have an afternoon to be together!

First Day of School

Here is Tyler on his first day of school! Sending Tyler to ALL day Kindergarden has been a bittersweet experience for us. I was really having a hard time with the fact that he was going to be gone that much, but since he loves school so much everything has been just fine. For his first day of school I got to go with him for the first hour and a half. We put all of his things away and looked around the room together, and then they took the parents out to talk with us while the kids stayed in the room with their assistant teacher. I started to tear up when we left the room for the parent meeting and immediately thought oh no this is going to be really embarassing, but I held it together whew:) We made it through the parent meeting and went out on the playground to say goodbye, just then my friend who was watching Halle for me was driving by the school and saw me, and ended up just handing Halle over the school fence since we were leaving then anyway. I started to feel all of the symptoms of a meltdown, sweaty red blotchy face, tears welling up in my eyes- and the only way to keep them from pouring over is to open them as wide as possible:) Just as I was ready to let it all out and get the embarassment over with, Halle burst into tears yelling "No Tyler, come home! Come home Tyler!" She was so distraught that it distracted me and not one tear ended up being shed, Thank you Halle!!! As we left instead of everyone thinking who is that crazy mom balling her eyes out, everyone was saying how sweet it was that she would miss her brother:) Halle ended up crying the first 2 days we dropped Ty off at school, and now she loves going into his room while he's gone and playing with all his stuff and has adjusted just fine. Tyler is loving his school and teacher, and we are just glad that he is happy!

Our new place

We are so excited to be living here! We were renting an apartment about 10 minutes away from this house, and weren't really planning on moving...but this summer some 4th year dental students couldn't sell their homes and contacted us with the possibility of renting...and here we are, and we are loving it!!!

I can't take credit for any of the paint jobs in the house. Lucky for me I love the colors they chose:) Oh ya, those aren't new couches, just some slip covers over our old ones. We don't have much on our walls at this point, but it's all a work in progress.

The kitchen

The kitchen. You can also see the door that leads to the garage. If you are facing the garage door, there is a half bathroom off to the right, and stairs that lead to the basement to the left.

The dining room.

I love our backyard. It is always shady back there thanks to all of the neighbors trees.

Heres the backyard. I have loved having a backyard so much. It is all fenced in and Tyler can't even get the gate open, hooray for caged in kids, ha ha.

Halle loves her new pink room! Tanner, we left a big bed out just for you! Halle is so
excited that Uncle Tanner is going to come and sleep in her flower bed, lucky you:)

Tylers bedroom. He loves his room because there is a closet that leads to the attic. It's like a secret passageway.

This is Tylers bedroom, we need to do something about those curtains though:)

The Great Wolf Lodge

Chase had spring break this week, so we took off to Sandusky OH to the Great Wolf Lodge! It is about 60 miles away and it's a hotel with a water park inside. We went with a couple of our friends the Barnums, Welch's, Cowdens, and Flemmings, and had a great time! There was a baby area with little slides for babies (and where my water fearing children spent a majority of their time:). Then there was a pool with b ball hoops and a big blow up snake. There was a kid area with kid slides, where Ty and Hallster actually spent about the last hour of our time there. Then there were a few bigger tube slides for all of the older kids and adults. There was a lazy river, and a hot tub also. If it was up to Tyler he would have stayed in the hot tub the ENTIRE time, he cracks me up.

Tyler and Halle posing in the kiddy pool, we spent a lot of time here. Halle kept telling us that "gwandpa need a spwash me in da pool," followed by "and gwandma need a come too." She associates pools and hotels with your latest visit mom and dad!

Tyler going down one of the kid slides, he is about as long as the whole slide:) He did get brave and go down a few slightly bigger ones.

Halle on the playground. There was this huge playground/jungle gym type of a thing with water spraying out all over the place that the kids could play on. There was a HuGe bucket of water at the very top of the playground that would fill up with water. When you heard the bell start dinging you would see a herd of people rushing over to stand under it to get DuMpEd on! When we heard the dinging my kids would make sure they were nowhere in the vacinity of the dumping bucket water:)

Chase with Ty and Halle floating on the lazy river which was VeRy lazy and slow. Halle thought she was so big getting to sit on the tube and hang on all by herself. Tyler just liked it because it was slow and water didn't get into his eyes:)

We had such a great time with our family and friends, it was just a perfect little getaway! We plan on making it a spring break tradition every year!!!

Happy Birthday Tyler!!!

Happy Birthday Tyler!! We can't believe you're 5 years old! We love you goofball:)
Tyler got a basketball hoop for his birthday - I don't know whose been playing with it more, Chase or Tyler! Today we were playing a little 2 on 1, Chase against me and Tyler, I don't know the last time I have laughed so hard it was a little wild:) He also got a green spotted snake , and a snake cake which looks like it might have been frosted by Tyler himself ha ha. We had a couple of friends over to help us celebrate Tylers special day, and I think he felt pretty special!