Gingerbread Creation 2011

Today was the day of the annual Kuperus family gingerbread building decorating event.  This year it was Miriam's turn to choose, and she chose to build a church.  This was a repeat of a previous year, but we let it go.  Casey baked the gingerbread and built the church last week, so today we just had to decorate.

First step, get out supplies.  Sample a few for quality control:

Second, add the roof and steeple made of graham crackers:

Finally, decorate with as much candy as possible.  Continue sampling throughout the process.  Here is the finished product:

To see the past 5 years' creations, click here!

Miriam's Birthday Outing

Today was a busy, but fun day.  Casey and Esther participated in a parade with Casey's co-workers, while  Peter and Miriam played with Ty and Cassie and I was at a brunch at church.  After lunch Peter and Esther had rehearsal for their Christmas program, which will take place tomorrow night.

Then it was time to celebrate Miriam!  Since her birthday is Wednesday and the other kids have school and we have to work, we told her she could choose a special outing or activity to do today.  She chose to go to the Children's Museum, and we had a great time!

Miriam chose Steak 'n Shake for dinner.  Yum!  The added bonus was that we found out that kids eat free on the weekends!  We had a fun time celebrating our special almost-4-year-old today.  She is VERY excited about her real birthday on Wednesday!

Peter's Tree

Peter had a homework assignment to decorate a family Christmas tree.  Here is his finished product... he was very proud of his work!

Side note:  When the 5-year-old spends a long time tediously stringing beads to decorate his tree, do not lay the string of beads on the table where it's possible that the 3-year-old just might pick up the string.  This will result in all the tediously strung beads falling off the string.  This will result in mom restringing the beads because there is no way that the 5-year-old will have the patience to do it all over again. 

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!