Instagram Holiday

I used instagram a little more than usual over the holidays and think I'd like to have these photos on the blog for if I ever get my act together and have it printed into a book.

This little deer head (from Target) was a new decoration I added this year. I'll probably leave him out year round, or at least for the fall/winter. He'd look cute with some valentine hearts strung across his antlers too.

Grant got even more mobile at the end of November and really started exploring the house. He hasn't stopped since. This was the first time I found him playing with the girls' play kitchen. He was pretty proud of himself and still likes to throw all of the food out of the cupboards almost every day.

A man from the maintenance office came to power-wash our fence. It took him a couple of days. Grant kept crawling over to the windows to check on him.

Grant climbed the stairs for the first time. This was December 6th. He is so proud of himself when we let him climb all the way to the top.

The girls play REALLY well together most of the time now that Paige is in school all day and they see less of each other. They make up elaborate scenarios and could play make-believe all day. In this picture Paige was pretending Claire was her grandmother and pushed her around in her "wheelchair". Claire also had a broken arm. The cast is a fabric "cutting board" that goes to the play kitchen. I love the voices they use and the things they say when they role play. They're hilarious.

We put out a snow-village this year. It was a little pitiful looking with only 3 buildings so Paige and I picked out another one online. I think we might make that a new yearly tradition. When I was putting out our new mill I knocked the newlyweds and their horse drawn carriage onto the floor, breaking it in 4 places. My aunt and uncle gave that to us the first Christmas Ben and I were married. Paige was very upset with me for being so careless. I was upset too, but it made me laugh when she scolded me so harshly. We got it put back together with some super glue and she has since forgiven me.

Claire has gotten to the age were she can't always fall asleep for her afternoon nap. I almost always insist that she try to take a nap and I'd say that she falls asleep 75% of the time. She was playing so happily one afternoon that I decided to pass on naptime. About 45 minutes later I found her like this. She passed out right in the middle of making me a gourmet meal.

Paige wrote some sweet cards to her teacher and teacher's aide to go along with the gingerbread houses we gave them. The wording is all Paige. I did spell some words out for her and tried to show her proper formatting. I love these sweet hand written notes. She makes them for me or Ben almost daily.

Santa came Christmas Eve. I love this picture.

We drove up to Michigan the day after Christmas to spend a week with Ben's side. Of course there had to be a crazy storm that day. The storm ran north-south from Louisville to Michigan and was exactly the route we were going.  Our 6 hour drive took 12 hours.

Here are all the Reed cousins at the end of December. They had a lot of fun playing together that week.

The End.

My Baby Turned One!

We went to Michigan the day after Christmas to spend a week visiting with Ben's side of the family. While there we had a little party for Grant's first birthday. Aunt Karie generously offered to make cupcakes, and the whole family surprised us with a lovely dinner and decorated tables too! I brought a birthday banner from home and we ended up having a sweet little celebration.

The birthday boy, chasing a basketball on the church gym floor

Aunt Karie's yummy cupcakes

mmmm, delicious!

Opening presents. Big sister Paige is a great helper.

I wish I had gotten some more/better pictures. Oh well. 

Grant has been such a fantastic baby. He's made the first year of having 3 kids as easy as possible: he consistently naps, sleeps well at night, can play on his own pretty well, and has been generally content to sit and observe what's going on around him. He's a happy guy who loves pretty much everyone!

Quite a few people have asked me if it's any different having a boy after having 2 girls and I've always said, "not really", but in the last couple of months I've started to notice some differences as he gets more mobile and more "boyish" than "babyish". This is when having 3 kids gets hard I think, at least for me.  It's really hard for me to believe that a whole year has gone by since he was born. I feel like I tried to enjoy every moment of him being a baby and I never wished for time to go quickly but it flew by anyway. Where did this wild little boy who loves to unravel toilet paper, get under the computer desk and pull at all the wires, make a made dash for the laundry room and bathrooms when the doors get left open, push whatever he can around the room as a walker, rip apart magazines with his teeth, smack my cheeks to hear the sound it makes, laugh hysterically at his sisters' antics, and screech loudly while playing "chase" come from? I'd swear he was just born yesterday. I think this second year of his life is going to be an interesting one.

Grant, I'm so lucky to be your momma!

Christmas

We stayed home on Christmas Eve and invited the missionaries, some soldiers, and people from our ward over for a traditional Christmas dinner. We had little smokies, ham, yummy potatoes, croissants and rolls, a cheese platter, olives and pickles, a green salad, raspberry jello salad, cheesecake, pumpkin pie, and chocolate cake. After dinner we all read the story of our Savior's birth from the Bible and then headed out to deliver little goodie bags and carol to the poor soldiers in Ben's unit who had to work the gate and CQ desks. We went home, our guests left, we opened one gift (pjs!), read Twas the Night Before Christmas, put out a treat for Santa and his reindeer, hung our stockings, said goodbye to our elf, Snowflake, and headed to bed to wait for Santa. The next morning was magical, as Christmas morning should be.

I made new stockings this year.

See you next year, Snowflake!

Santa came!

I love Christmas morning faces

So excited to do it all again next year :)

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

~Reeds 2012~

We're so excited for Santa!

Gingerbread Houses 2012

I went a little crazy this year and made enough dough for 16 large gingerbread houses. We'd planned on inviting some friends over to decorate with us but I was feeling overwhelmed so we decided to just do it as a family. I really prefer it that way and will need to remind myself of that in future years. I did decorate 2 extra houses for Paige to give as gifts to her kindergartener teacher and teacher's aide. And we assembled the rest of the houses and gave away kits complete with frosting and candy to some friends in our ward. That's something that I could see us doing again and is a great alternative to the chaos of having everyone making a huge mess at our house :)

Ben was the first to get started on his house and unfortunately he got the first bag of frosting which happened to be a bit soft and was taking a long time to set. That combined with the fact that he overloaded his roof resulted in a disaster.

The beginning of the roof collapse. 

Ben realized what was happening and decided to turn it into a foreclosure.

I

Claire's house. 

I obviously had no time to do hair that day, what with all the work baking gingerbread.

Cautious Paige was under no circumstances going to repeat her father's mistakes. Nothing touched that roof!

My house. 

I actually decorated it a day later, in the evening after the kids went to bed, while Ben and I listened to the BYU bowl game over the internet.

Mrs. Dile's and Mrs. Dahl's houses. 

They seemed really happy to get them, and Paige was SO excited to give them to them.

Happy Birthday Ben!

Ben turned 36 today. After church, where Ben substitute taught in Elder's quorum, we came home, the kids had naps and Ben played video games. I made "cafe rio" pork salad for dinner, and we had pumpkin pie for dessert (Ben's choice, of course). The girls gave him a card they colored, and stuck their fingers in his dessert to steal a taste. It was a lovely day with our little family. Happy Birthday, Sweetheart!

Meeting Santa

These posts will be back dated so they appear in chronological order.

At the beginning of December Fort Knox puts on a tree lighting ceremony complete with hot cocoa, military band, Christmas tree lot (where they give away free trees), and of course, Santa Clause. It was on December 6th this year, a Thursday night, so we headed out to the center of post right after dinner to see if we could meet Santa. We weren't as early as we thought we were and ended up waiting in line for quite awhile, but we had a good time anyway and it was a great way to kick off the Christmas season.