A Lot to tell!

Here is a picture of Taite with his cake that Grandpa Ken brought. I'm not sure why Brayton's nose is glowing, but I think it's a reflection off of something ;~)


Monday morning, my mom was watching the twins, but had a haircut appt, so I was the back-up's back-up. hehe
I decided to make Christmas cards with them (obviously just one for each). I had forgotten what a 3 year old's "antlers" would look like. :~) We had used brown ink to do a thumb print for 3 reindeer. We used markers to make the eyes and antlers and one of the reindeer had a sparkly red nose. This is Mason working on his antlers.


Landen working on his antlers.

Mason. . .

Landen. . .

Landen with his finished product (they each had 5 winter stickers to add to their cards)

Another shot of Landen's card. We also wrote Merry Christmas on their cards (they held the marker and I held their hands and said the letters as we wrote them).

Mason's final product. When I was saying the letters for 'Merry Christmas' on his card, we got to the 't' in Christmas and when I said 't', he said something totally different, so I tried repeating 't', 't', but still nothing remotely close, so we moved to 'm' ~ he said "chicken nuggets" LOL It was too funny and we all got a laugh out of it (Bray did too when I told him the story)!

Another shot of Mason (they were tired and didn't take their thumbs out for long) :)

As we were working on the cards, the school called ~ Taite didn't feel good and had a low grade fever. Chris picked him up early and he was home on Tuesday too when they were let out of school due to the storm. Sometimes you just want to strangle your children. . . Chris and I were at the office when Brayton got home from school. We had called home a few times to see if Brayton's bus had come yet and one call with Taite he said "well, he might be on his way to the house because Baby is barking at something" (remember there was a blizzard going on. . .). When we got home, Chris discovered that Taite never did let Brayton in the house. Bray tried to unlock the door, but couldn't get it open so he eventually went down around the house to the patio door downstairs to get Taite to let him in! UGH!!! It wasn't like he didn't know his brother was coming home! He was just too lazy to go upstairs and wait for him!!! We let him live, but discussed that his behavior was NOT acceptable!

Tuesday morning we had the snow tires put on the van (totally make a difference when driving!!!) and I ran some last minute errands before the big storm. One of those errands was to get some fabric I had seen when I was waiting for Chris to be done with surgery. It was so cute and had these small mittens on them! I couldn't get it out of my head and knew it would look perfect for stockings for the boys. I have been meaning to make the boys new stockings because I just wasn't liking the traditional red/white ones we had. My only fear was making the embroidery turn out correctly so I could get their names on the top. Well, they turned out super cute. Not perfect, by any means, but I still really like them!!!
Here is my machine in action:

And the finished product up close. . .

Yep, those are their school pictures peeking out from behind the stockings! Didn't plan that one!

Since I had my snow day project finished the night/morning before the snow day (1 am), I helped the boys complete their snow day project that Grandma gave them: Gingerbread houses! They were made by Wilton and pretty neat ~ the houses were built, they just had to decorate them. We used up some Halloween candy since there wasn't too much sent with the houses. Our grumpy little elf mixed up the frosting for the boys:

He didn't want his picture taken :~)

The candy selection:

The roof of Taite's house:

The roof on Brayton's house:

When we were almost done, and after both bags had leaked out the back of them with frosting all over the table, I put on a twist-tie and a chip clip so that wouldn't happen again.

Taite resisting eating his house. . .

The front door of Taite's house:

The back of Taite's house:

Brayton's house ~ front door and a bench to the left of the door, a bench on the right side of the house. . . he's all about comfort at his place!

Brayton spent a lot of time making patterns and being consisten on the colors.

One of my errands on Tuesday morning was to pick up a thermo coupler for the fireplace upstairs. Chris wanted this running just in case we had to rely on the fireplaces for our heat if the power went out. At the fireplace store, they had this: (boy am I GLAD I hadn't made up my Christmas list yet for Chris! This is it!) LOL

Here is our Little Green Tractor at work again! Chris is still in love!!!

Yes, he's wearing a snowmobile helmet to keep the snow off his face a little, except the shield thing was all fogged up. Even a new fog-free helmet is much cheaper than a cab for the tractor (which a salesman said we would never get our $$ back on, if we sold the tractor ~ that and Chris said if he had a cab on that, we wouldn't see him all winter. . . we won't be getting one! LOL)