Family Game Night

This past week for our Family Home Evening activity on Monday night, I pulled out some board games!  Winry is getting very interested in games, but we haven't really played anything with her yet.  Winry had SO much fun!  In fact, it was hard to get her to go to bed, and there may have been a few tears when we put the games away.  We promised her we could play them again though, and she was willing to go to sleep for the night.

On Monday morning, Monica looked up the stairs and saw Brooke laying across the stair way like this.  As she was walking up Brooke said something like "Mom, once you get to the top of the stairs, you have to say 'banana pants'. That's the only way you can get past."  True to her word, Monica said "banana pants" and got to go by.

Back to family game night, after we finished a couple games of Yeti in my Spaghetti we pulled out Feed the Kitty!  It was also a hit!  While we were playing, you could definitely tell that Winry was really studying what was going on and trying to figure out the game for herself.

After the kids went to bed, we got a pretty exciting package.  We ordered some cat-nip for Jelly for Christmas, and I just couldn't wait to give her some!  She loved it!  Jelly rolled all over in it, and then started to lick it out of her fur!  Definitely a good buy, and I think she'll be really happy on Christmas morning.

When I was getting ready for bed, I accidentally interrupted Bear on the potty!  Sorry!  As you can see, play knows no bounds in our house.

On Tuesday, Monica took the kids to the museum.  Both the girls had a lot of fun in the play area of the museum, which had all new activities since the last time we'd been there.  There was a place to make cupcakes.

And Winry fell in love with light-brites and played on one for a LONG time.

The main hit for our kids is still the stuffed animals.  For us, the museum is basically the "still zoo."  But really, the museum has like 3 floors of animals, and in total it's probably at least a fourth of the museum.  It's kind of nice though, because it's usually the least crowded area.  They also have fun things at some animals like buttons that play noises, or model animal ears!

Everybody loves ears, right!?  As I understand it, everyone had a wonderful time and was very well behaved.  Though at lunch, Brooke threw some trash away and Winry thought that looked fun, so she asked for something to throw away and then threw away some trash too. When she got back, she was asking for her sandwich, so Monica thought she was actually going to start eating. Nope! As soon as she got her sandwich, she said, "Sandwich, Garbage!" And took off running over to the trash can! Luckily Monica stopped her before she could throw away her whole lunch!

On Thursday night, Winry sang to, and put a stuffed kitty to bed while we were getting the kids ready themselves.

On Friday at dance class, Brooke's class practiced their dance for the Winter Showcase.  Monica was able to get the whole thing, which is great because Monica, Brooke, and Winry are heading to Arizona next week and will be missing the actual Winter Showcase class where we would have seen it.  It's a little sad, but we let Brooke pick, and she said it was more important to "go see her best friend Eden" than to stay for dance class.

Friday night we made pizza for dinner, and one was Thanksgiving leftover pizza.  It was very good.

Brooke put her giant unicorn stuffed animal in her bed a few days ago, and sleeps on it every night.  Or, at least, she starts sleeping semi-propped up on it.  However, quickly in the night she'll roll off of it and it just sorta pushes her out of her bed.  It's always fun to go in and check on her at night because I never know what I'll find.

On Saturday morning, the kids were playing with Brooke's Frozen 2 microphone, and I noticed it had a line in port, so I grabbed a cable to test it out.  Turns out you can play any song into the microphone, which makes sense since it is for karaoke.  Brooke was excited to sing a new song with her microphone instead of just "Into the Unknown."

When we headed up to get ready for the day, Winry climbed into Brooke's bed and looked very pleased with the whole situation.

I also caught Winry looking very grown up and looking at a book on the couch.  Definitely looks like she's just reading some books to herself though!

Saturday night was my work's adult Christmas party.  It was at Wings over the Rockies, which is an aerospace museum.  Monica and I had a lot of fun there, and it's nice that the radiation group is so close knit because we actually had people to talk to all night long!  That was a first for us.  We did spend a little time looking at the exhibits, and I found one of the Apollo computers on display.  That is the flight computer, and all of those wires were attached by hand!  This is also just a fourth of it...  I'm glad we've been able to move on from things like this :).

Here's Monica and I with a plane in the background.  They had some planes that you could sit in, but I guess those all ended at 8, which was in the middle of dinner.  We were in line for one and dinner started right before we got to the front and we figured we'd go eat and just hop in real quick after.  It's a little sad we didn't get to sit in any of the planes, but it wasn't a big deal.  We still had a lot of fun!  I'd say this was also the first time we didn't want it to end when it was time to come home and relieve the baby sitter.

I hope everyone had a wonderful week, and that your Christmas is shaping up to be wonderful!  Have a wonderful week ahead.

Happy Thanks-Giving Machines!

Hello and Happy Thanksgiving!  We had a great week out here even with the kids being sick.  Also, I just want to note that right now Brooke is "singing" to me, and I have to repeat every line, so who knows how that will affect what I type...  Anyway, this past week most of my family came into town to my brothers house for Thanksgiving.  There were some crazy snow storms that put a stop to some travel plans, and made some other traveling pretty miserable.  But while we were together we were happy!  We even went to the Giving Machines one day with everyone as they have them in Denver this year!

Last Sunday at dinner Winry discovered her love for ketchup!  On Monday morning, she "fell asleep" while eating breakfast!  And that afternoon Brooke was asleep and Winry really wanted to do some yoga all by herself!  From the looks of it I'm pretty good at yoga too!

On Tuesday there was a huge snowstorm and we got about a foot of snow!  I just kept it easy on myself and worked from home for the day.  Here's the storm going in the morning.

I opted to keep my run inside as well.  My treadmill setup is pretty good, so I typically do most of my running in the winter inside.  However, Jelly didn't want to give up her own turn on the treadmill...  So I had to wait in line.

Monica took the opportunity of being trapped inside to do some cleaning, and Brooke was thrilled to help.  She even cleaned all of the windows by herself!

While were were all trapped inside, Brooke worked on her karaoke with her new microphone she got for her birthday and was singing the new song from Frozen 2.  You can also hear Winry's very hoarse voice.  At this point both girls were quite sick, and Winry had called Gram on the phone and had to keep singing songs.  There was no stopping her, and she just kept sounding worse and worse.

Winry woke up at like 4 in the morning on Wednesday, and I was not ready for that.  She was having a rough morning, so we turned on T.O.T.S. which is her and Brooke's current favorite show.  When Brooke woke up she joined us on the couch, and I woke up every 20 minutes or so to start the next episode.

The next morning both of the girls were pretty sick and coughing a whole bunch in the morning, so we took them to the doctor.  Winry had croup, which wasn't too surprising based off how she sounded, so she got medicine.  While at the doctor all of the misery of the morning was forgotten and the girls had a wonderful time and were talking to the doctor and dancing and just had a wonderful time.  Fortunately they both coughed many times, so the doctor was able to believe us.

We stopped for bagels for a late morning snack afterward since the girls were so good.  They had a little coloring corner at the restaurant where the girls sat while we waited.

We were all supposed to go join my family at the butterfly pavilion at 11, but with Winry being as sick as she was, she and Monica stayed home, and I took Brooke.  We had a fun time and saw some pretty cool looking butterflies, like these blue ones (only one has it's wings open).  Also, look at all the snow!

Brooke was really excited by the pill bugs in the Colorado Backyard exhibit.

And we got a picture of Brooke and her unicorn at the butterfly cutouts when we left.  We ended up getting there late with all of our doctor shenanigans in the morning, and so we saw the rest of my family as they were finishing up, and then enjoyed our turn exploring the facility.

Brooke also got a really good picture of me and unicorn "pretending to be butterflies."

After we finished we headed to Tyson and Tina's for lunch, and to pick up my sister Niki once she arrived.  She was supposed to have a flight the day before, but it was cancelled because of the storm.  She came back with Brooke and I so that she could run the Parker Thanksgiving 5k with us the following day.  It was pretty cold, but we all bundled up and were ready! Monica ended up not running because Winry wasn't doing to well that morning, so she stayed home with her. Winry ended up taking her nap at 7:45 that morning instead of the normal 12:30...so good thing they stayed home!

She also got a picture of Brooke and I as we were preparing to get started.  Also, I attached my camera to the stroller and got a time-lapse of the race.  Unfortunately, I turned the camera down a little during the race, and it made the video much worse until I turned it back up.  Lesson learned for next time.

After the 5k we cleaned up, loaded up the car and headed back to Tyson and Tina's house for Thanksgiving dinner!  It was a lot of fun to all be together, and things weren't as crazy as you'd think they'd be for having about 30 people there.  There was even enough calm for naps in the middle of the room.

After lunch/dinner we just stayed and all hung out together for the rest of the day.  Winry got... cuddly, I guess is the best word, at some point during the day and rubbed her face all over Monica's foot.

Later in the evening we went out for a little Black Friday shopping.  I must admit, it was pretty tame.  I think that a lot of deals got pushed online this year, and I know Monica got a bunch of emails in the morning saying things like "black Friday starts now, online only!"  It seems like a lot of people probably did their shopping earlier in the day online, so the craziness was at a minimum.

On Friday morning we met downtown at the Giving Machine!  We let the kids pick a couple things that they wanted to get from it, and then went to smash burger across the street for lunch.  It was a lot of fun.  I think it's a little more interesting to get to see/know exactly what your donation is doing as well.  The Giving Machine here in Denver is located at Writer Square, and you can find more information about all of the Giving Machines here.

On Friday evening we were going to go to the Parker town tree lighting, but on the way Winry had a really bad coughing spell and was almost throwing up in the car, so we had to pull over and take care of her and missed it.  That's okay though, we'll go down and see the trees some other time in the next week or so.  We were planning to get a Christmas tree after, and once we got Winry back under control we all headed out to get a tree.  King Soopers had trees 20% off for the weekend, so it was now or more expensive later.  Here we are in Luna with a tree tied to the roof!  I guess putting a tree on a Corolla is getting to be common, because I forgot to take a picture of the tree on the car.

However, we did get a special branch, and so I did take a picture of that.  Monica said it "wasn't distracting" so it was fine.

An hour or so later, our tree was decorated!

Friday night after the kids went to bed, Monica ran out to Costco to check on the sales.  Good news, there was a lot of chocolate on sale, and it tastes very good!  It wasn't snowing at all when she left for Costco, but by the time she came out half an hour later, the snow had decided to start dumping! 

On Saturday I was asked to decorate the outside of the house, however, as you can see the rain gutters were a little bit icy.  This was a more interesting picture than the gutter up high, but those were full of ice so I couldn't get the clips in to hang the lights.

Brooke and I did put up our big ornaments on the tree outside.  We only have one tree in the front now, so it got all of the ornaments.

We had my family down for dinner that night to show off our basement.  We had 14 people over!  Dinner went great, and then my sisters and mom showed us picture form their recent trip to Antarctica!  To steal a joke from T.O.T.S., it was SNOW cool to see all of their pictures!

We all had a great time together, or at least I had a great time while everyone was here.  We even had a group macarena with the flamingo!  After people headed back home Winry wrapped up a kitty in the blanket and sang to it to get it to sleep!  The best part is definitely that the blanket basically completely missed the kitty, and that she's holding it up by it's head!  Winry also loves to play with hair clips, and like to open and close them over and over.

Today we headed up to church with Tyson and Tina's family because Tyson got called as the bishop!  While we were driving up Winry kept saying "I want Megan!"  She was very excited to get to play with her cousin once we got to church, and spent most of sacrament meeting sitting on her lap.

We had a wonderful week out here with family.  I'm glad that everyone who traveled was able to do so safely, and I hope that everyone heading home today will be able to make it safely as well.  I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving as well!

P.S. I wrote this whole thing on Sunday, but when I gave my computer to Monica to proof-read it my computer died... so we're a day late.

Brooke's Birthday Part 2

Another week capped off with Brooke's birthday.  What a lucky girl!  My birthday has always been a single day so long as I can remember, but she got to celebrate for a full week!  Various gifts streamed in throughout the week, and we finished things off on Saturday with her birthday party!  We headed to Frozen 2 with some of her friends, and then they came to our house after for cupcakes and presents!  It was a lot of fun.

Going back to last Sunday, which was Brooke's actual birthday, we finished off the day with some playing in the back yard.  I gave Brooke a camera for her birthday, and she was crazy about it.  She took over 500 pictures the first day!  In fact, while we were in the back yard, she was taking pictures of everything!  Winry joined us outside and had a blast on the trampoline!  The swing and trampoline both got some good use this last week as the weather was pretty warm through the first half of the week.

On Sunday night after dinner we sang happy birthday and had cake and ice cream of course!  Brooke picked a strawberry banana cake!  I really like that she is willing to pick creatively (last year we had strawberry lemonade!).  Monica made banana and strawberry bread, and we layered the breads in the cake.  It was very good!

And here we are looking cute and chillin on a curb outside the church!

And Winry was just nom-ing a Belvita cracker and having a wonderful time!  What a cutie!  Also, when did she get SO BIG!?

We ended up playing in the backyard until pretty late one night.  We turned on the lights in the backyard, which cover the yard pretty well, but our fireplace sticks out on the side of our house and blocks the light from getting to the trampoline.  So we brought out a flashlight to keep jumping until dinner was ready.

On Tuesday we finally raked up and bagged all our leaves!  Brooke was really excited to sit on the bag of leaves.  She remembers that very well from last year!  Fortunately we had enough time before gymnastics to clean up and sit on the bag!

Last week Brooke had a hard time at gymnastics, so this week we made sure she took a nap before we headed over.  In fact, she woke up not much before.  Basically just long enough to sit on the bag (Winry and I cleaned up the leaves).  We thought that would help gymnastics go better.  She had a great time during warm ups, and even did this high balance beam!  However, when she finished she came over crying.  I held her for a little and she decided she wanted to go do stuff again.  I told her she could skip the balance beam if she didn't want to do it.  She worked her way through a bunch of things, and when she got to the balance beam she did it again, and then came over again.  She said she really wanted to do it, so not exactly sure what was wrong, but she decided at that point she was ready to head home.  Not 100% sure what's going on with gymnastics because she loves it half the time and cries half the time, but it doesn't seem like it's for her.

On Wednesday morning, the girls opened Brooke's gift from Eden (her friend that moved to AZ a couple months ago), and in it Brooke got a flamingo and a bunch of cute hair clips.  The girls have been wild about these all week!  I mean, just look!  Winry has like 5 in her hair.

And Brooke just stuck as many into her dolls hair as she could fit!  They've had to have one every day, and usually their stuffed animals and dolls have had to have some too!

Brooke is definitely a gift giver, and gifts is probably her biggest love language.  So with her birthday happening she got REALLY into the gift giving, and while I was at work she made AND wrapped (on her own) a gift for me!  It was a wonderful picture she colored.

Winry has been working on her dance moves this past week.  She got out the laptop and was having a great time.  Monica said she was doing a different dance for each song, and you can see several of them in the videos!  There was also some silly tickle time while getting into the car. Monica was trying to get Winry to turn around the right way in her car seat so the tickling began, and Winry was just laughing SO hard! And as soon as it stopped, she'd throw her head back to get tickled again!

There's a little horse you can ride at King Soopers, and Winry rode it for the first time this past week!

It snowed on Friday and so we HAD to play in the back yard that night.  We threw a bunch of snow balls, and the snow was actually really good for snow balls this time!  We also did some circle sledding, and Brooke even pulled Winry for a loop or two!  There were a few snow angels as well, and Jelly even escaped outside!  She wouldn't go in the snow though, and was trying to avoid me and Monica catching her, so she kept running back and forth next to the house.  We got her though.

On Saturday morning, we headed to the theater to watch Frozen 2!  It was both Brooke and Winry's first movie in a theater, and they both loved it!  All of the kids did!  Here's everyone dressed up as either Anna or Elsa before we headed in.

Winry was maybe a little small for her seat, but she didn't really seem to mind being folded in half that much and sat in her seat for at least half of the movie.  That was also the half of the movie she had snacks to eat.

After the movie, everyone came over to our house for presents, sang happy birthday and then had cupcakes as was shown in the first picture.  Look at that!  Getting happy birthday and cake a full 6 days apart!  What a lucky little girl.

And on Saturday night Monica and I went to see GENTRI at the PACE center, which is the local theater here in Parker.  The show was great, and it was Christmas music.  They were starting off their Christmas tour in Parker this year.  We had a great time, and Winry slept in until close to 7 this morning, so it was even OK that we were out late! (You may not think this is much of a miracle, but for the last few weeks, she has been waking up before 5 almost every day!!)

That's everything for this week.  Have a wonderful week ahead, and a Happy Thanksgiving!