Tanyard Creek

Tanyard Creek July 2011

My pasty kids!
That is a waterfall! 7/2011

Now, for present day...after a year and a half of not blogging, I got the itch today! I will not even begin to update you on the last year, but will just go forward from today. The boys are growing all of the time. The next school year starts tomorrow so this past weekend we spent together as a family. We went hiking at Tanyard Creek. The weather was perfect. When we went last year, it was smokin' hot so this was a nice change! The boys are a perfect age for this type of thing.

"Surfing" on the rocks.

They climbed to the top and then showed me their muscles!

Zachary's favorite part of the hike is the suspended bridge.

The waterfall was a bit of a disappointment because of the drought we are in right now. It was a teeny tiny trickle. The boys were surprisingly good with that!

Jake helped Zachary get "in" the water!

Christmas travels

After we opened gifts at home, we drove to Springfield and had Christmas with my family. It was a lot of Christmas in one day, but we had so much fun.
Sweet Christmas toes.

Zachary sporting his new Lego headlamp!

My festive parents!

The next day we drove to Grove and had more Christmas fun!

Watching The Princess Bride with A. J.

Christmas Day

A little late, but whatever! The boys were pretty excited about Santa coming through for them. Aidan asked for a Superhero house and Zachary asked for a net and a candycane. Easy!

We don't usually get Domino anything, but this year we felt a little crazy. She was pretty excited about the frisbee!

Gloves! Easy to please, that kid is!

Christmas Eve

 We have a tradition of opening one gift on Christmas Eve.  The gift is always new PJs.  This is our Christmas PJ picture!

 We read a lot of Christmas book during the month of December.  One of our favorites is Santa Mouse.  The boys have to leave cheese out for Santa Mouse.  The cookies were from a recipe from Aunt Jo.  Santa thought they were delicious!

There is a little known tradition that you leave your gingerbread house out for Santa on Christmas Eve.  If Santa likes it enough, he takes it back to the North Pole with him.  The tricky thing is that he only takes the best of the best.  Aidan was lucky because Santa took his gingerbread house back to the North Pole with him!