Look Who's Two!

Today we celebrated Miriam's 2nd birthday!  There are so many reasons why we love her.  She is funny, laughs easily, loves to imitate and do everything her siblings do, is incredibly independent, but also goes with the flow of things.  We are so blessed to have her in our lives and love watching her learn new things every day. 

We had a fun day celebrating.  Grandma K. made a cute Dora cake and she got some really fun gifts.  Here are some pictures from our day:

Peter got to open a gift from our friends who can't come to his party next week. He is super excited to have his very own baseball glove and ball!

It Says SecurAlarm!

On Sunday, "Miss Gloria," our friend who works with Casey and also goes to our church, presented this to Peter:

She had asked Casey if he thought Peter would like it.  Judging by his reaction, I'd say it was a hit.  He first yelled, "It says SecurAlarm!" and then excitedly showed everyone he knew at church that he had a new jacket like Daddy's that says SecurAlarm on it.  He wore it for much of the day after we got home!

First Snow of the Season!

Today we got our first significant snowfall of the season, and it was very significant!  Esther had a snow day, which made mommy very excited, but caused Esther to be in tears.  Can you tell she loves school?  I probably won't get the same reaction in 5 years.

We took full advantage of the snow and spent several hours outside sledding down our tiny front yard hill, shoveling, catching snowflakes, making snow angels...

This was Miriam's first time really enjoying playing in the snow since she was too little to truly have fun in it last winter.  I'm excited to take her sledding down a real hill soon, because I know she's going to love it!

The Annual Gingerbread Creation

Today was the annual Gingerbread Building Day with Daddy and the kiddos.

This year we decided to build a fire station. It is complete with a pretzel rod roof, ice cream cone hose tower, and rice krispy treat fire engine.

We had some goopy icing issues and heavy candy issues, but all in all....a great time was had by all.

Probably the most challenging part of the project was keeping Mommy from eating all of our building materials.

Here are the links to the previous years' creations.

2008
2007
2006

Thankfulness

During the last few weeks, we have been working on a thankfulness poster after dinner.  We each say something that we're thankful for, and Esther writes it on the poster.  She also did the drawing of course.  It was fun to see what everyone came up with each night, since the rule was that we could not repeat things.  Here is the list in random order.  For many of these, you can probably guess which ones belong to which family member!

God's love
our family
trucks
the sun
kids
milk
rain
dolls
the zoo
cars
alphabet soup
milk
our house
food
the park
work
songs
funny daddy
food
crazy Miriam
mickey mouse pancakes
Saturdays
flowers
bike rides
funny pictures
Jesus' love
Alexis
coffee
school
books
miracles
at&t
Grandpa and Grandma
my bus
clothes
playing outside
quiet days
moon, stars, sun
vacation

Introducing Thomas the Tiger

Today was a momentous day in Peter's life--his first trip to Build-a-Bear!  Several years ago, Grandma K. took Esther for her birthday, and this year she decided that would be a good gift for Peter.  It's a little early, but we figured we'd go before the holiday rush.

A couple weeks ago, I told Peter what we were going to do, and he said, "I don't want to do that."  Then Esther proceeded to explain the entire process to him in a very excited voice, and he realized how cool it sounded.  He's been very excited about it ever since!

He'd been talking about wanting to get an elephant or giraffe, but neither of those were an option.  He first chose a turkey, but we managed to talk him out of that since none of the fun outfits would really fit on the turkey.  After some more deliberation, he ended up choosing a tiger.  When the girl who stuffed the tiger told him he needed to think of a name, he said, "I already picked a name.  It's Thomas.  Just like Thomas the Train!"

After adding a "roar" sound, stuffing, and giving Thomas a bath, it was off to pick out an outfit.  First he picked jeans with a racecar shirt, but then we went found another rack that we hadn't seen, and there was a NASCAR outfit.  He pretty quickly decided that he wanted that outfit.  After finding some cool Sketchers shoes and a pair of racing sunglasses, Thomas the Tiger was all set.  I think Peter will be pretty surprised and excited about the firefighter outfit that Grandma also purchased to give him later!

We went out for lunch to McDonald's (Peter's choice of course) and then picked up Miriam from my parents' house.  When we got home, Peter had to show Thomas around the house and show him his fire truck bed where he would sleep.  He also introduced him to Puppy, his other favorite snuggly friend.  When I put Peter to bed tonight, he told me that Puppy didn't like Thomas and that he was scared that he was going to bite.  Peter assured Puppy that Thomas would not do that, so hopefully they'll get along fine.  Hopefully Peter won't accidentally bump Thomas's arm where the "roar" button is either during the night!

Thanks, Grandma, for a fun morning!

Post Family Farm

We took advantage of a beautiful, sunny fall Saturday (finally!) and visited the Post Family Farm.  We enjoyed some delicious donuts, racing through a maze, looking at the animals, climbing and jumping on straw piles, the swings and zipline, the pumpkin train and a hayride.  It was a great family morning!

Cousins

Cassie and Peter...look how happy she is to be snuggling with her big cousin!

Frog Sisters

Miriam and Esther have pajamas with matching frog patterns.  Miriam would wear these pj's every night if she could, and she also wants Esther to wear hers so they can match.  Whenever she opens her drawer and sees that they are clean, she excitedly says, "Frog!  Frog!" immediately followed by, "Etta (Esther) frog?"  Her frog ribbet noise accompanied by jumping is pretty cute too.  :)

Halloween

We visited both sets of grandparents, went through a couple apartment buildings at Calvin College's Light in the Night festivities, and stopped to see a few of our neighbors. These 3 cuties had lots of fun!