Happy Birthday Mom!!

Happy birthday Mom!! We wish we were there to sing to you in person! We miss you so much and are so thankful for the wonderful mom and grandma that you are. We truly think you are the best of the best:) We hope you have a very special day!

Just embrace it

It's January in Cleveland! We're in the middle of a snow storm here and having a good time with it. I was supposed to go on a temple trip today down in Columbus with the youth but it was cancelled, so instead we made chocolate chip cookies, played in the snow, and Chase shoveled. The other day I told Chase I am so ready for summer, and we have months left of snow, so I'm sucking it up and just embracing it. I'm going to be brainstorming as much as my brain will allow for things to do in the snow, or fun things to do inside. Let me know if you have any great ideas! Tyler just came downstairs to tell Halle that they are headed out again to play for the second time , and Chase is headed out to shovel for the third time! Halle opted out this time to watch Barbie and the Diamond Castle...she loves that movie:)

How many times have I said "Don't eat the snow, it's gross!"
Halle is so coordinated with her snow attire, whatever works right? Can you even see big girl?

Tyler making a snow angel.

Chase just shoveling away, what a guy!

Making snow angels. You can't tell from the pic but snow was coming down pretty good, it was deep, and getting in their faces but I still think they had fun:)

Happy Birthday Dear Halle

Happy Birthday Sweet girl! We love you so much! Halle loves birthdays so much, and hers just happens to fall right on Christmas day. She thinks that sharing her birthday with the birth of Jesus is so special, that will probably change someday, but we hope to always make it a special day for her. She loves birthdays so much and couldn't wait for hers. For the last 3 weeks the bedtime song of choice was "Happy birthday" and when we would get to the "dear Halle" part she would get a huge grin on her face. We are thankful that we have friends that wanted to party with us on Christmas evening, it meant a lot to us and especially Halle. She loved her castle cake (ha ha the joke between Chase and I was that it looked like a project that my nieces Brianna age 8 and Emily age 6 would have done a better job at:) Halle got a Cinderella scooter to cruise on when the weather warms up. I can't believe you are three years old Halle and such a big girl, could you slow down on the growing up??? please!

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!