Football Coma...

Not sure if the football game was THAT boring to them, or if they played too hard this afternoon ;-)

Who Says You Can't Get In The Christmas Spirit When It's Warm Out?

Looks Like Our Elf Found Us In Charlotte!

A Day Of Christmas Decorating

We put the tree up this morning (which by the way looks very small now that we have a living room with cathedral ceilings!) and put together the dough to bake "dog dirt in the snow" cookies, with the help of the Kaplans. 

This afternoon we got to work decorating the porch, which is still a work in progress! 

Here are some pictures: 

Thanksgiving 2014

We ate ourselves into a stupor this year and had a wonderful thanksgiving with Grammy and Grampy and the Kaplan clan!

Here are a bunch of pictures:

Thanksgiving Prep

I got today off from work at the last minute and THANK GOODNESS because Grammy & Grampy and I spent a solid 6 hours cooking today! We made three pies, a crockpot of sausage, pepper & onion, a crockpot of sweet and sour meatballs, a sweet potato casserole, a buffalo chicken dip, and prepped gluten free chicken fingers to be fried tomorrow. I also brought over all the alcohol, wine glasses and martini glasses to Mandy's house, so tomorrow all we have to do is make the bacon wrapped dates, cook the buffalo chicken dip and sweet potato casserole, fry the chicken fingers, bring the beer over and heat up the meatballs and sausage, pepper & onion... Oh and make the hot spiced cider... :-)

Game Night With Grammy :-)

Grammy And Grampy Are Here!!

Grammy and Grampy arrived in Charlotte after an uneventful flight from Boston. We are so happy to have them with us for the week!! 

Here are some pictures from this evening; they brought large blow up sumo-wrestling toys for the kids which had them bouncing off the walls and each other! And Grammy was roped into bedtime story duty, of course!

Helping Mommy With The Pumpkin Custard!

(She needs to work on those egg separating skillz tho ;-)

Stocking Up For Thanksgiving And Our Grammy & Grampy Visit!!

School Spelling Bee

Congratulations to Charlie on an outstanding performance in the school spelling bee today! He was competing against third, fourth and fifth graders and made it through a whopping 19 rounds to finish FOURTH in the entire school, and was the last third grader standing! AWESOME JOB CHARLIE!! 

In honor of his performance he got to pick where we went out to dinner tonight. So where did we go? Qdoba, of course!

Forced Movie Afternoon

Yesterday I was expecting a large delivery from Santa via the U.S. Postal service. AIthough I had it sent to Mandy's house, it was still problematic because normally the kids are playing outside when the mail truck comes and they generally chase it up and down the street like a pack of dogs when they see it, so getting a package into anyone's house unnoticed is extremely difficult. Therefore I wound up with Charlie, Amelia, Ben and Rebecca all watching a movie at my house, plying them with popcorn and Oreos so that no one would want to go outside until the mail truck had safely arrived and Mandy was able to hide the box (which didn't come till after 5pm.) 

With all the trouble that was, I'm thinking Santa will have to do the rest of his shopping at good old fashioned stores. 

Brrrr!

We've forgotten what it's like to be cold! 27 degrees this morning with a high today of only 41 -- Amelia insisted on the full get-up for her walk out to the garage... 

A Productive Sunday

Today was a productive day which involved taking the kids to get winter coats (finally -- had to wait for the 25% off sale and scored some good deals!), cleaning out Amelia's room and organizing it, which involved taking out an entire bag of trash, the usual putting laundry away, making Hungarian beef goulash and a pumpkin pie for dinner, and taking Amelia to a birthday party across the street. 

Here she is painting a masterpiece at the birthday party:

Movie Night

So Amelia was not nearly as enthralled with Pirates of the Carribean as Charlie was...

Too Many Leaves

a.k.a why I ache from head to toe-- didn't I just do this last weekend??

Spelling Bee

Charlie won his class spelling bee yesterday, so will be competing in the school spelling bee next Friday; way to go Charlie!!

Christmas Card Spoiler

(But it's just too cute not to share!)

Buddies

Leaves

I spent FOUR HOURS raking leaves today and now officially ache from head to toe. 

Here are a couple pictures of the kids, who kept me company for ohh about 10 minutes of the three hours it took to take the back yard...

Hockey Game

Charlie was treated to a minor league hockey game last night courtesy of Uncle Joel, who had been planning to take Ben and Becca, but Ben had slept over at his friend Jared's house the night before, and apparently could not be woken up when it was time to go to the hockey game. Charlie had also been at Jared's, but since he was not allowed to sleep over he was not comatose yesterday and so was available to go to the hockey game in Ben's stead ;-)

So here are Charlie and Becca enjoying themselves at the rink -- thanks again Joel!

Watermelon Cookies

Since Charlie got to go to a hockey game with Uncle Joel last night, Amelia announced she wanted to do "something special" with me. This "something special" turned out to be baking one of the recipes she has been watching on YouTube, which we remarkably had all the ingredients for. 

Since her "watermelon cookies" were rather involved and required multiple sessions in the fridge, we made the dough last night and baked the cookies this morning. 

Here is a picture of Amelia putting the "watermelon seeds" on, and also of the finished product (which was very tasty and is now entirely gone):

Toast-y Tuesday

Mike picked up the ingredients to make pumpkin spice martinis for me last night --yum!!

"Can We Keep Him??"

Saturday Date Night

Mike and I had a great night out last night; my OT student babysat for us at a discounted rate and we went uptown to a wine bar called The Wooden Vine and a restaurant called Blue, both of which were extremely delicious! 

Here's a picture from the wine bar, yum!