New Years

A couple days after Christmas a good friend from PA texted me and asked if she and her family could come celebrate the New Years with us.  I literally jumped for joy.  We adore the Rustin's. They stayed for a few days and we had a great time hanging out with them

Gina is a fabulous mom.  She is extremely patient and so soft spoken.  I love this picture of the kids cuddled up with her.

 She is a yoga instructor and taught my kids a cute little song that involves yoga poses.  A few weeks later I was doing yoga and Eliza saw me.  She immediately started doing the poses that Gina taught her.

We gave the kids sparklers to celebrate the new year.  Poor Teagan burned her finger on the first sparkler and refused to touch another one.   Thanks Pinterest for the failed attempt at putting a cup over the sparkler to avoid burns.

 We played a youtube video of the ball dropping last year so the kids could count down and celebrate and still go to bed at a decent hour.  They counted down then just stared at the TV.  They didn't understand the concept of celebrating when they got to 1.  They played with little poppers then we played the countdown again.  This time they understood and had a cute little celebration

 Cordon had his first experience with carbonation.  Of course we had to video tape the reaction.  He said it was spicy on his tongue and didn't want anymore.  Eliza also had her first taste of a carbonated drink but we forgot to film her.  She got all squinty eyed but loved it. 

Christmas Fun

Chris was able to get 2 1/2 weeks off for Christmas this year, although he did end up working a lot from home.

People are surprised that we don't go home for Christmas and that we haven't gone back in about 7 years, but we have come up with our own traditions that we love and it's even more fun to start sharing those traditions with our kids. It's also been fun to find new traditions with each move.

Cordon had a Christmas program for school.  It was so cute and so much fun to watch.  He is on the top row with the long sleeve white shirt.

We went to the aquarium and saw Scuba Santa.  It was a cute little show about how the reindeer ran away so Santa had to go underwater to get sea horses to pull his sled. 

We decorated gingerbread men.

 We fed birds

 Chris dressed Eliza for church.

The kids loved making cookies for Santa.  Cordon actually made cookies while Eliza treated the cookie dough like it was play dough.  

We went to Cheesecake Factory for dinner and the kids decided it was a lot more fun to look out the window then to eat their food.

On Christmas Eve night we read the Night Before Christmas and had Egg Nog.

Christmas morning was so much fun.  We were able to draw it out for 2 1/2 hours.  The kids did a great job of taking turns opening presents and watching the other person open their presents.

Cordon was very animated and had fantastic expressions on his face for every present he opened. 

Eliza looked like this the whole time.

She was enjoying herself and liked the presents but she showed no emotion on her face.  It was pretty funny. 
Then we got the infamous turtle....
my mom asked what the kids would like for Christmas and I told my mom some suggestions.  Two days later I called her and told her to take back what she had gotten for Eliza and get her a stuffed turtle.  Eliza has been obsessed with turtles for months and I knew she would just love a stuffed turtle. 

So my mom obliged and sent a box with a stuffed Squirt and a stuffed Nemo.  (apparently the Nemo was a random after thought)

Look at Elizas face while pulling out the turtle

Now look at her with Nemo.  She put Squirt in the new play kitchen oven and she hasn't touched it since.  Cordon has taken over the turtle and has carried it around everywhere for the last week while Elza insists on sleeping with Nemo every night. So much for my theory on her loving a stuffed turtle.

The final pile of loot

Christmas dinner sure was yummy

The kids got me presents for Christmas and my birthday.  Cordon got me the mirror and Eliza got me that purple glowing thing.  She handed me the gift bag, pulled out the tissue paper for me, grabbed the purple thing and ran away with it.  I had to wrestler her for it just to get this picture.  She cracks me up. 

Thanksgiving Week

Do you know what would be fantastic?  If Chris got a week off for Thanksgiving, we did all sorts of fun activities, I caputred all those activities with my camera on my phone, uploaded them to my copmuter then had the computer crash.

Fortunatly we only lost a weeks worth of stuff because of a backup, but unforutnatly I lost all my photos and videos from Thanksgiving week.  Chris did get few on his phone so we still have some.

So here is the quick version.  Chris had the whole week of Thanksgiving off and we were able to do a lot of fun things in the area.

We went to the Columbus Zoo.  Cordon kept complaining of the smell while Eliza kept running around telling everyone she got to see the 'oo oo ahh ahh's' (the monkeys)

 Once again we went to Cracker Barell for Thanksgiving dinner.  I just don't see the point in spending all day cooking and cleaning for just us. 

We took a train ride to "The North Pole" the kids got to meet Santa and see juggling elves.   This sounds pretty fun right?  Thats what I thought.  Unfortunately it was a pretty big let down.  The train had no heat so it was a freezing 30 min ride there and back. The train is on a schedule so your sort of hustled through Santa really fast and you basically have enough time to get a photo then get an ornament.  The hot chocolate and cookies that they website bragged about were pretty gross and the entertaining elves stopped long enough to make a balloon animal for the kids.  This is something that we will not be doing again next year, but Cordon said it was fun so mission accomplished. 

We decorated for Christmas which was a blast this year.  Cordon is old enough to fully understand how exciting Christmas is and Eliza kept feeding off his energy.  It was so fun to have two little helpers.

Grandma and Grandpa T

Chris' parents came to town and we got to have them for a whole week.  It's always so nice to have people around so I can have adult conversations and another set of hands.  Plus the kids love their grandparents.  When I dropped them off at the airport to go home Eliza started crying and kept saying "nama" (grandma) over and over. 

We had a lot of fun while they were here



Grandpa and Cordon watching mudskippers

 

Grandma and Eliza watching Otters

Cordon was getting over the flu and he was getting pretty tired after all the walking around at the aquarium

This game is my favorite part of the aquarium.  It's Frogger that you do with your feet.  It's incredibly addicting.

Grandma put Cordon to bed several nights.  She is a great story teller

Grandma and Grandpa bought us a rake.  Mary was very patient and re-raked a pile of leaves several times. Then those wonderful people raked and bagged all the leaves in the yard for me. 

 

 Every time I ask Cordon what his favorite part about seeing Grandma and Grandpa T is, he always says going on walks.   I'm not sure why Cordon is in the stroller and Eliza is walking.

We went to a children's museum and spent a good amount of time in the dancing room.  You dance in front of a screen and see color images of yourself.  This is Cordons favorite place to go and he loved showing it to Grandpa and Grandma

We went to a Wright Brothers Museum and we got to play on a flight simulator.  It was like flying an original Wright Brothers airplane.  I made it about a minute before I killed myself by crashing into a tree.  I like to blame that on my co-pilot Cordon.  John and Mary made it the full three minutes that the simulator goes. 

Family Photos

 We had a lady in the area take our photos.  It ended up being really cold and the kids were miserable, but she still managed to get some good shots.

Two days later we had beautiful weather so I took the kids to a park to get some photos of them that didn't involve blue lips and red noses.