Nora's 2nd Birthday

This December our little Nora turned two years old (though if you ask her she'll tell you she's three just like her big sister). It always seems hard to believe how quickly the grow. When she's not yelling, "No I will not!" or staging her own Occupy Meijer protest we can almost remember the little bundle we brought home just before Christmas two years ago.

Nora really enjoyed her birthday. We started out with pancakes, Nora's was bigger than her plate.

Later we opened presents. Nora had a great time, Abby and I went to Toys R Us a few days before to pick out something. Abby did a great job thinking of something Nora would like.

Finally, we had a Winnie the Pooh cake which Nora requested and ice cream. It looked and tasted great and Nora enjoyed it.

She did not however enjoy being sung to, far too much attention I guess. Mom did manage to console her though.

She really did enjoy her birthday.

With a Spade of Snow

After much anticipation, and some angst (how will Santa's sleigh land on our roof without snow?!), we finally had our first real snow of the year today. And after much anticipation and some angst, we convinced the girls that it was worth putting on their snowsuits to go out and play.

We hit all the classic playing in the snow activities:

Riding on the sled:





Making snow angels:





Snowball fight (although we didn't get any photos of that one)

Playing on the swingset:





Building little snowmen:







(one on his head)





Letting the snowmen play on the swingset:





And building a big snowman:





Our snowy adventures were followed up with everyone's favorite snowy day treat - hot chocolate with whipped cream and marshmallows. (Yes, and. I made the mistake of asking the girls to choose one, and they chose both. Ah, well.) Unfortunately, it was warm enough today that by the time we were finished with our hot chocolate, all three snowmen's heads had fallen off, and our snow is pretty much gone now. But we enjoyed our first snow day of the year!

Fence Project

Our major home improvement this year was a fence. Like all of our projects it took much longer than expected, I think I started in June and and I finished wiring the last lights at the start of December. At least it looks nice in the snow with all of Kristin's Christmas decorations.

Originally, I had more pictures of the work in progress, but at some point I lost most of them. The first two pictures are of the house as it looked when we moved in (ripped from google maps) and of the house after lightning hit the big oak out front and we had to take it down respectively. From there on it's close to a timeline.

Christmas Season 2011

It seems that this year the family has been particularly enjoying the Christmas season. Abby got to help us put up the tree for the first time and both of our girls got to help place the ornaments. We've shown each of the girls which ornaments are from their first Christmas and they love to point them out. They also can't wait to come downstairs every morning to turn on the Christmas tree lights and move the advent calendar one day closer to Christmas.

We have a few pictures from our tree ceremony.

We've missed the last year or two so we decided it was time for another visit to Santa. Nora is very excited any time she sees a picture of Santa Claus. On Thanksgiving she watched most of the parade with Kristin and was ecstatic when the Santa float finally came. She kept grabbing hold of Kristin and yelling, "Santa! Santa! Santa!".

All in all we thought she would really enjoy seeing him, we were wrong.

We had fresh ginger bread cookies before we left.


Abby was reasonably excited to sit with Santa and tell him what she would like for Christmas.




Nora was slightly less excited to sit with Santa.




She calmed down eventually, but was pretty wiped out at the end.


Here she is hiding from Santa.

We did a little shopping afterwards and as we were walking to the van we went in the direction of Santa and Nora started saying, "No Santa! No Santa!". We'll work on it though, by next year I'm sure she'll have forgotten all about it and be excited to see him again.