O Christmas Tree

Casey and I used to always cut live Christmas trees, but when Esther was a baby we bought an artificial Christmas tree and have used that ever since.  This year we decided that the kids were all old enough that it would be fun to go cut our own live tree again.  They've been very excited about it, and we had a beautiful, warm day for it today!

We headed up to Church's Tree Farm in Grant, Casey's old stomping grounds.  We picked out our perfect tree and played on the playground for a few minutes.  Then we toured around a bit to see the farm where Casey's family lived and a few other places like his school and church.

 We found our tree!

Next it was time for lunch at The Grant Depot.  We hadn't been there for a long time, and it was the first time the kids ate there.  We had fun looking at all the antiques and watching the train that circles the dining room.  The food was great as well!

We headed home and got the tree and house all decorated for Christmas.  We can now officially start listening to Christmas music!

The Big Parade

This morning we were watching (on TV) the Santa Claus Parade which takes place in downtown GR every year.  Peter was very excited about all the different floats, vehicles, and other things that he saw in the parade, so he decided to have his own parade.  Many of you know that Peter has a map of Grand Rapids stored in his brain, so he had his little parade all mapped out using downtown streets which were represented by different sides of the table.  He also wanted Christmas trees on some of the vehicles, so we dug some out of our Christmas village decorations and temporarily attached them to the vehicles with Play-doh.

The helicopter was going to fly over the parade route:

After we drove all the vehicles around the table, they ended up in this parking lot.  Apparently some of them were going to camp there for the night. 

I love Peter's creativity and imagination!  He never ceases to amaze me with his ideas.

First Snowfall!

We had weird weather all day... rain, snow, hail, sun... and finally late this afternoon some of the snow stuck!  Of course the kids wanted to go out and play in it...

I'll admit, it is kind of pretty...

Ok, I've had my snow fix.  Spring can come now!