and in the middle of the Christmas Chaos

And in the middle of it all Tim has a birthday. My hubs is now the ripe old age of 34.




We celebrated with a reindeer cake - since he didn't shoot a buck, this might be close enough. The green frosting was not my best idea ever but it's the holidays, so at least we had a festive color going on fingers/hands/mouths/lips/teeth.

Happy Birthday baby!

and the Christmas Chaos begins....

This weekend began the craziness of Christmas Exchanges, parties, and December birthdays.

Our first event (and of course out of order photos - thanks blogger!). We had our annual exchange with the Slenker family.


Abby has received her first BB gun - not sure if it's really more for Tim to kill rabbits in the garden or for Abby, but she was pretty happy to see it.


Megan received a Tinkerbell hair set and we are all the more beautiful now because of it.

And here are the presents before they tore into them.

The next morning we packed up the truck and headed to Carrollton, IL for the Schmidt Family Christmas gathering. It's entirely too much food for the whole day, but I don't think it stopped anyone from eating because it was so good! We did have a special visit from Santa though.....



And by some miracle Megan actually sat in Santa's lap - what you don't see is me taking her up there and talking with Santa to coax her into it. It helps that each child got a present too from Santa. And Megan stuck with the same request - "I want a football."



Then it was on to the little kid gift exchange - Abby and Megan are waiting patiently for the green light to open their presents. We now have a couple more Barbies to add to our mix, they were very excited.


Here's the post opening photo of the little kids. Most of them have run to their parents to get their presents out of the boxes so they could play with them right then.


Sunday we spent the day in Collinsville, IL for our nephew Theo's 2nd Birthday. The theme was Fire trucks/Firemen.


An out of order photo - Abby with Santa in Carrollton. Also a miracle that she is sitting in Santa's lap, she watched a couple kids get some presents ahead of her so I think that was her motivation.



Theo and Tim's birthday's were celebrated on Sunday.


After presents Betsy and BJ had set up for the party to go to the Collinsville Fire House for the kids to check out the trucks.

Abby and Megan enjoyed all of it.

Here's all the kids, Theo had a new fire truck he carried around the whole time.

Our birthday boy!

So that rounds up the festivities for this weekend. We still have a couple things left to wrap to finish our Christmas preparations and it should be smooth sailing next weekend. The girls are very excited to meet their cousin "Baby Kitty".

And maybe you'll see a Christmas card from us.......still waiting on the photos.

Cookies and Santa

This past weekend was the completion of the "Christmas preparations" which concluded all decorating and baking projects. It wouldn't be Christmas without Great Grandma Papke's molasses cookies. I've got my handy decorators helping out as usual.



You would think that the cookie trays would have been a good idea to keep the sprinkles from getting on the table.......


I believe there was some taste testing going on as well - Megan's mouth is a little too red.

Sampling after we were done.



All thumbs up from the Schmidt girls. As Abby said "these are the best cookies" and I can't argue with that.



After the cookie decorating (and outfit changes as the girls thought they needed to pick out their own clothes) we headed to Bass Pro for our annual meeting with Santa. Many of you will be disappointed that the girls actually liked Santa this year. It was a little sketchy while waiting in line, Megan needed a little coaxing and wouldn't take off her coat like she was ready to bolt. Abby went straight to the reindeer (last year's spot) and Santa asked her a few questions and got her interested in talking which in turn eased Megan into it. So there is a photo without crying and Megan asked for a football and Abby a dolly.


Some outdoor posing with Santa's sled.

And ending the night with a little adorableness. Ahhh, I love Christmas, and it was the most pleasant Santa visit we have ever had. It was a good night.

It's Beginning to Look a lot like Christmas...

This past weekend commenced the beginning of dragging all the Christmas decorations upstairs - can you tell how excited I was, since I'm the one who has to do the dragging.
It is one of my favorite times of the year though and the fact that my kids love it just as much makes it all the better.

A new addition to our decorating this year was for the girls to have their own tree in their room to decorate with their ornaments. Really we have too many ornaments for our other tree and this was an idea to make more room - and give them something fun to do.

So I purchased the tree after last Christmas - and I know it's a little Charlie Brown looking - but once it was dressed it looked great. We headed to Home Depot to buy the lights, tree topper, garland, and tree skirt. The girls picked out everything on their own - and everything I saved for getting a tree on clearance last year was wiped out - but they love it.


They each put on their own ornaments - Abby even shared since she has about twice as many as Megan.



And then the finishing touches - which includes rearranging the ornaments everyday and clustering random things under the tree for "decorations", like stuff animals, a pretend curling iron and hair dryer, you know, "decorations".

Ahhhh Christmas, got to love it.