Merry Christmas!

We had a wonderful Christmas, and we hope that you all did too. We kept it low key this year, and didn't take too many pictures, but we will share what we have.

This was after Clark's Christmas program at his pre-K. Clark did a very good job performing. You can see some of his reenactment at home with this link. In the picture above, we were trying to get a nice picture of all the kids, but they had different plans, of course. Why were we so eager for her to start walking?

We decided to step up our game with Christmas lights this year since there was a good sale at Lowe's on the mini lights. It was fun having all the lights up, but I don't know if it was worth all the work. I still need to take them down, too. 

This isn't a great picture, but we got to go see a free nutcracker performance (not the full ballet) at the snobby mall in Dallas. The crowds were crazy! Fortunately we got there early enough to snag a decent spot (yes we were viewing them from behind, which got really awkward with some of those ballerinos). The kids seemed to enjoy it quite a bit. 

We decided to have tamales on Christmas Eve. Tamales are a traditional Christmas food (I don't know why) and I love them. These were store bought, unfortunately. They were still good, but a homemade tamal is a truly wonderful thing. 

We opened gifts on Christmas Eve this year, and did stockings in the morning. Plus, Clark found a hot wheels track set and Sabrina found a new bike waiting for them Christmas morning. Sabrina thought the bike was too big for her until one of her friends came over and rode it around. I think seeing her younger friend ride her bike was more than Sabrina could stand, so she kept practicing until she got the hang of using the hand brakes and getting on and off the taller seat. Still working on shifting gears. 

Yummy Christmas morning fruit salad! Prepared in advance, of course. We had church at 9, so we needed to be a little quick in order to get there on time and fit in yummy breakfast and play time. I tell you one beautiful thing about opening gifts on Christmas eve is that the kids didn't wake us up really early. They got up around the normal time and played with their toys for a while. Then we got up and we all went and looked at stockings together. 

All the kids got a teddy bear for Christmas. Eliza loves cuddling with hers. She is really learning to show off for attention now-a-days. 

I got an origami beginner's guide for Christmas and I spent several days creating little origami things that have started piling up around the house. I think the duck and flamingo are my favorites. The elephant didn't turn out to great, but he was my first more difficult one that I tried. The purple seal looks alright, too. It is pretty fun to do origami; you should try it.

Random Stuff

Eliza pulled out some dress up clothes and started dressing up all by herself. We walked in and found her like this, happy as could be. 

We tried making our own gingerbread house last year and it was not an unqualified success, so we decided to go with a kit this year. We had fun putting it together, and the kids learned that you cannot have your gingerbread house and eat it, too. So they chose to eat it, though we did delay them so that they only ate a little of it each day for maybe a week.  

More Eliza silliness. Sabrina had a fondness for crawling in drawers and cabinets. Eliza doesn't do it as much as Sabrina did, but she does like to do it, as you can see.

Thanksgiving 2016

Okay I am trying something new for this post. My work phone has live photos which I tried to just piece together into a video with the highlights from our Thanksgiving trip to Ohio. I did not have pictures of significant events such as eating squirrels (yes this is serious), the Thanksgiving dinner, or visiting Santa Claus. Just use your imagination for those parts (you better be imagining a really awesome Thanksgiving dinner with world famous gravy).

P.S. The snow looked WAY cooler in person.

USMC Birthday and New Windows

We have been wanting to get new windows for a long time, since our house seemed to have the original windows from 1957. We finally did it with a local company that some friends had used. It is nice to finally have windows that you don't have to strain mightily to open. It is also nice to know our kids could actually open their bedrooms windows in case of an emergency.

 The before picture (I won't tell you who took a before picture of window replacement with a tree blocking one of the windows).

 The after picture. If you don't like them, keep it to yourself.

Yay I turned 241! Semper Fi!

A little person must have taken this picture -- you can see the ceiling behind us. We are tall, but not that tall.

Sabrina had the Turkey Trot at school which she always looks forward to. We didn't get any great action photos, but we wanted to include it anyway.

Late Harvest

We are still getting peppers and a few cherry tomatoes out of the garden. We get a late spring harvest then the plants estivate and then we get a smaller fall harvest. One of the bright spots is the watermelon plant. Sabrina's class sprouted watermelon seeds in May, and they got to take their sprouts home. So I planted the sprout in my garden where it was shaded so it could survive the summer. It produced three pretty good sized watermelons. One got eaten by critters and one split open after a big rain. The third one though we just harvested today. It is about 12 pounds and is a beauty. We will eat it tomorrow and give an update on how it turned out. I would have liked to wait a little longer to bring it in, but we are supposed to have a thunderstorm tonight and I didn't want to take a risk of it splitting.

5 Years Old!

Our little man turned 5 years old! He is about 46.5 inches tall, which is a little taller than Sabrina was when she turned 6. Still 10 months until he starts kindergarten too! He enjoyed all his gifts which included mathbox cars, transformers, magnetic building blocks, and a self inflating whoopee cushion. 

He asked for a lemon cake with blackberry frosting. I was a little sad when I saw the blackberry frosting was pink, but it was delicious. Poor Clark didn't finish all of his piece because he said his tummy hurt. He was excited to eat another piece for dessert the next night, though. 

Playing with his transformers and magnetic blocks. We had been planning on getting him a bike for his birthday, but we already bought one at a yard sale a couple months ago. He did get a brand new adult size helmet, so he can ride safely, though. He rides his bicycle sometimes, but he doesn't have a lot of patience for it yet.

We look forward to another wonderful year with our favorite little boy!

Happy Halloween

Pirate, Pumpkin and Gypsy. I know that is culturally insensitive and would probably be banned on Ivy League campus Halloween parties, but pumpkins are just so cute! Most people thought Sabrina was a pirate girl since they assumed she was matching with Clark. Or they hate gypsy cultural appropriation.

Posing with a sign in front of one of Clark's preschool teacher's house.

Not everybody enjoyed every moment of dressing up. 

She isn't walking on her own yet, though I think she could if she wanted to. She will stand there when you let go of her hand but she won't even try to take a step without us. On the plus side, she rarely hurts herself. 

Clark and Sabrina both helped carve pumpkins. Clark instructed me on how to design his and he actually helped carve a little. 

Sabrina did all the designing on her pumpkin and some of the carving by herself. She also separated out the pumpkin seeds so we could cook them. She decided she didn't like the way they tasted, though. More for her parents!

I did this one from a book of jack-o-lantern designs. It didn't look great  during the day, but I think it looks okay at night.

This was another one from the design book that I liked a lot. Unfortunately, I did it 9 days before Halloween and the Dallas fall heat shrivelled it up so that it was useless 7 days before Halloween. 

Sabrina's pumpkin.

Clark's pumpkin.

Happy Halloween everybody! 

As a bonus picture, this is Sabrina going to school on crazy hair day. What fun hair her momma styled for her.

Hot Springs

We had been planning a 4 day weekend trip to Charleston, South Carolina, but then a hurricane came and messed up our plans. Fortunately everything we had reserved was fully refundable so no problems. Yogurl still needed to get out of town, though, so we drove up to Hot Springs, Arkansas. We loved it! I think I will start looking for jobs there.

I have long wanted to see the Eiffel Tower in Paris, Texas. Since it was only a little out of the way, we went ahead and stopped off there and looked around. It wouldn't have been worth the trip by itself, but since it only added about 40 minutes to our trip, and there is a delicious bakery where we got breakfast there, it was well worth the time. 

This is in Hot Springs, near downtown. The downtown area is built up around bath houses that were set up to provide spa treatments using the hot natural spring water. This is a little pool of spring water behind us. It was hot! It felt a little hotter than if you filled your bath with nothing but hot water from your tap. No way you would just jump in there. 

This is in a visitor's center run by the national park service. It shows some of the machines they used to use for treating people at the bath houses. 

Probably our favorite part of the trip was visiting the crystal mine a little north of town. Look at all that crystal! 

Here we are headed over to the digging area. They blast in the the crystal mine and then dump heaps of dirt and rock up in this area. You get to actually go through and dig for crystals in the heaps! We found a few pretty nice ones. The kids were just so excited by every rock they found as they dug. 

Even Yogurl got in on the digging action! 

We also took a tour of the open crystal mine in an old 5-ton army truck. This is a crystal seam that we could see down in the mine. It was pretty cool. We also saw turtle eggs in a little pond down in the mine. 

This is the color the crystal is after they mine it and before they clean it with oxalic acid. 

We did lots of playing around in and hiking in nature. Dallas is such a wretched place that we were excited to be someplace so beautiful. 

This is Clark feeding a pygmy goat at a petting zoo and alligator farm. It was pretty lame overall. 

Trying to be brave and feed an emu. Managed to keep all my fingers, so mission accomplished. 

The kids both got to hold a baby alligator! They were very brave, even though I thought they would be scared.

This is one of the only bathhouses still in operation. Yogurl went and got a spa treatment done with the springs water while the rest of us wandered around downtown. 

So I had to include this because apparently Bill Clinton graduated from the high school here in 1965 and then went off to college. I also saw something that said the bathhouses started closing down in 1965 when fewer people started coming for treatment of their syphilis. Coincidence?

Rub a dub dub, three cute kids in a tub.