Christmas Preparations

Here we are decorating our tree. This year it was over 10 ft.

Liam loved the Superman ornament the most!

We went to visit Santa multiple times. Liam loves Santa! Brielle didn't want to go anywhere near him. She liked to wave at him, but that was it. 

Here we are at a Christmas parade. They were throwing candy canes on the street and Brielle got one. She was so happy! She had never had any candy before.

We got to have breakfast with Santa this year too!

 I love this picture. Liam is just taking it all in and carefully touching Santa's hand.

 We went to a special Christmas program. Brielle played in this chair for at least 15 minutes.

This is Liam getting ready for his preschool Christmas program. 

Here he is singing on stage. It was the cutest thing he has done yet. He did all kinds of dance moves and sang loudly.

My sister and niece came up to visit and they took Liam to make a reindeer at the mall. He loved it!

While my family was in town we had an early Christmas party at my parent's house. 

Everyone received great gifts!

We did our annual gingerbread houses.

I took on the task of making all the gingerbread myself this year. It was a lot of work, but they turned out great.

Liam had some friends over to make Christmas crafts and they did a gift exchange. 

We had our annual Christmas Party. It was the best one yet. We did a white elephant exchange this year and I ended up with a vintage light up Santa for the front porch. I love it!

We also took Liam ice skating. He did surprisingly well again this year. He thoroughly enjoyed it.

Thanksgiving

We had an amazing Thanksgiving! We were very thankful for getting to spend it with our parents and some of our best friends. The Moss Family came up and spent the week with us. Dinner turned out great and we had a lot of leftovers. It was the best turkey yet!

That night Megan and I hit the stores for Black Friday shopping. Our first haul was from 8 PM - 2 AM. Then we got back up at 7 am and kept shopping until noon. We got a lot of great deals and had a lot of fun!

Saturday we got our Christmas tree. We set a new record this year: it only took us 30 minutes to pick it out. Unlike last year it took us 2 hours!

 That night we went to dinner with the Moss Family at Olive Garden. One of Megan and my favorite restaurants.

The next morning the kids exchanged gifts. We had such a great time with them. We wish they still lived here!

Halloween

On Halloween I threw a party for Liam and some of his friends. The kids came over dressed up and we decorated pumpkins and went trick or treating to the neighbor's houses.

This is one of Liam's friends from preschool.

We had a lot of kids this year! Everyone had a lot of fun.

That night for Halloween our parents came over for dinner. My mother the "cat" stayed and passed out candy while we went trick or treating.

Brielle and I were dressed up as Tinker Bell.

We are very lucky to have both sets of grandparents close to our kids.

Liam and daddy were Superman. He is such a good dad to dress up like his son and walk around the neighborhood.!

They had a great time being dressed up together.

We couldn't believe how into Trick or Treating Brielle was. She followed Liam to every house and went to the door and held out her candy bucket. She would then look down at the candy and proceed to the next house.

Liam was very happy with the amount of candy he got. We were too!

We gave Brielle a bag of fruit loops to enjoy, since she is too small for candy.

The kids then really enjoyed passing out candy to trick or treaters. Liam would answer the door and say "Hold on guys, I have to get you some treats." He would then reach over to the bowl and give each kid 2 treats. It was very cute. Even Brielle put candy in their bags.

Pumpkin Patches

This year we visited every pumpkin patch in the area. Here are a few of the pictures from those trips. You will see a variety of costumes on the kids. Basically I buy them a lot of costumes from thrift stores so they can have fun dressing up all month long.

We got the kids matching glow in the dark skeleton outfits. They wear them all the time.

We cut off Liam's summer blonde hair. You can see his hair is a lot shorter here.

We went on a lot of horse rides. Liam loves it! Brielle wouldn't even sit on the horse. Maybe next year.

We went to a lot of Halloween parties. Here we are feeding a snake at a kid museum party.

Liam's favorite part of the whole party was the moster mash dance room. He danced for 1/2 hour. Graham and I couldn't believe some of his moves. At one point he was on the floor doing some brake dancing moves. We don't know where he learned it, but it was really cute. We are really happy he is so confident with his dancing.

We carved pumpkins out in our garden this year. We ended up carving 6 pumpkins.

Liam wanted a scary pumpkin.

Here they are dressed up to go trunk or treating with our friends. Liam is a skeleton dog and Brielle is a kitty cat.

We had so much hay in our clothes and shoes after this. They had a great time sliding down it though.