Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We spent our Thanksgiving evening with B&P and Terry, Karla, Katie and Nathan at our house. We ate the traditional Thanksgiving meal of turkey and potatoes with lots and lots of side dishes. The Miller family in Iowa always has graham cracker fluff that Tony's Aunt Margaret makes. She sent me her recipe and I gave it a try. I think it turned out pretty good. There wasn't any left and Katie even asked me for the recipe. : ) Karla said she is quite the baker in the kitchen already. We browsed through the store ads over and over but I just couldn't quite find a reason to have to get up early in the morning and fight any crowds. I tried to find something I needed to go shopping for but... just didn't feel the need again this year. Phase 10 was the card game of choice this year. My competitive daughter has been on crutches for 6 weeks and she was bound and determined to win that game, which she did. I was actually kind of relieved for her to get to compete and win at something! : ) Coffee, pumpkin or chocolate pie rounded out our evening. A good time was had by all.

I'm so thankful for my family and friends! All day my mind kept returning to where we were 1 year ago. We still miss Michelle so much but that excruciating heart ache is much less. Madison and I laughed during the card game and said we wished Aunt Michelle was here to help us razz Beppe about her crazy card playing skills. We feel the smiles this year that last year we just tried to put on and I'm really, really, really thankful for that. So thankful to put a very difficult year behind us and looking forward to the year ahead.

New Year's Eve

Last night we spent our evening at Matt & Lisa's house. There were 8 families there and it was a lot of fun! There were 2 tables going of Eucre and the ladies played Skip-Bo and then partner-style Dutch Blitz. That was fast, furious and fun! The kids entertained themselves with the new Wii game system, played basketball and games as well. We saw them again around mid-night to watch the ball drop. Probably the most memorable part of the evening was the SNOW that we got during the time we were there! We got 9 inches from about 8pm-1am. It was a tough, slow drive home, only about 3 miles away. We about got stuck twice and then we couldn't even get into our garage... there was just too much snow under the belly of the van. Overall we got 13 inches! It looks beautiful this morning!

Have you made any New Year's resolutions? I quit making them years ago because I can never keep them!

Christmas Day

Merry Christmas!!!!

Christmas morning the kids opened their stockings and then Amy's family opened up their presents from under the tree. Our family played a game of Disney Scene It upstairs (at my insistance, not their's!) and then Tony and the kids went out on the 4-wheeler and rode down by the dam and across the river. We had a beautiful white Chrismas with sunshine today. It was a perfect winter day!

We went out to my mom and dad's (30 minutes away) for our traditional Christmas breakfast of eggs, bacon, fried potatoes, cinnamon rolls, and fruit. After breakfast it was 12:30 already! We all went down to see my grandma at her assisted-living location and visited with her for an hour and a half or so. It was good to see her. She passed out Christmas cards to the great grand-kids with five $1 bills in them. They were excited about that. We sang Christmas carols for her and got a little rowdy by the end. I think the rest of the residents were ready for the 11 of us to go! ha! Noise and chaos have never bother my grandma though so she enjoyed it.

Finally it was time for the grandkids to open up their presents at G&G's house (or 6&6 as Madison calls them because G'ma's written G's... look like 6'es...). Madison's favorite gift was this flower (see lower left corner picture) that she can hook her ipod up to and it dances with the beat. Quinn's favorite gifts were the inflatable Iowa goal post from Amy & Jeff and the Deal or No Deal game from G&G. I ended up forgetting Uncle Doug's and Aunt Jen's gifts under our tree at home so they have those to look forward to yet.

We stayed at my parent's house until 8:30-9 I think and then drove back to Amy & Jeff's. It was a really nice Christmas. We played phone tag with a few of you, missed some of you by just a few minutes, but thought about each one of our precious family members today. The only way this day could have been better was to have seen and hugged each one of you today. So... special greetings to our immediate families... those of you in Iowa, Indiana, Minnesota, Kansas, and Arizona that we didn't get to see today, we hope you had a very Merry Christmas and will pray for special blessings for you through the New Year!

Joy to the World!
Leah

It was a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend and I'm sad that it's over so fast. I hope you feel as blessed as we are and that your weekend was a celebration of these blessings.

I count each of you dear family and friends among my richest blessings!

Love to all, Leah

Visit to Santa

On Saturday we went to cut down our Christmas tree
and also to see Santa. We've seen Santa Claus at the tree
farm for years now. Quinn asked for a new football (like he needs one more!) and Madison asked for an iAlarm (an alarm clock that she can dock her iPod into).

The Great Tree Hunt

One of our family traditions is to go to a Christmas Tree Farm and cut down our own tree. This year it was fun to take Amy's family with us. (Mom and Dad left this morning for Iowa) Nate came along too. We've been out there in all sorts of weather. This year it was pretty cold (30's) but dry. The picture in the lower right corner is Tony as he gets the tree measured. It was 7 feet tall. Madison, Quinn and Nate actually worked and worked at it and this was the first year that they actually got it cut down all by themselves. All 3 of them were under the tree at the end, trying to get a good push/pull action on the saw. TIMBER!

Christmas Cookies

And as if the adults hadn't had enough commotion for one day, we decided to make Christmas cut-out cookies Saturday night. The cousins (+Nate) had great fun rolling, cutting, frosting and eating. Amy and I use the sugar cookie recipe that my mom used with us when we were growing up.

Jenna and her snowman. She collects penguins and so was disappointed we didn't have a penguin cookie cutter... do they even make a penguin cookie cutter???


Mikayla shows off a creation. The more frosting and sprinkles the better. She took it easy on this cookie for us.


Haley and her masterpieces. She enjoyed layering the frosting on her cookies with different colors. There was a lot of finger-licking going on in that corner... in spite of Mikayla's reprimands to stop licking! It's just about impossible for a 4 year old isn't it??

Black Friday

We woke to a dusting of snow on Friday morning. Amy took these pictures of our house because she thought the yellow leaves mixed with the snow looked so pretty. The pictures don't show how pretty it really was. Our trees have been holding onto their leaves for a long time this fall.

Mom, Amy and I took the 4 girls shopping for a few hours today. We aren't the 6am type to save a buck. We are the sleep-in-on-the-one-day-you-can type and left around 10:30. Ha! Tony worked but Grandpa, Jeff and Quinn went shopping to Menards. We brought the girls home in the afternoon and then Mom, Amy and I went back out for a few more hours. It was a lot of fun. Amy got almost all her Christmas shopping done and mine is started.

We went out for pizza to Milanos in the evening and then we went home and watched Christmas with the Kranks.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! It was great to have Mom, Dad, Amy, Jeff, Jenna, Mikayla and Haley here this year! We missed you Doug, Jen, Amanda and Jay... but thanks for calling! A few explanations about the pictures...Madison made the place cards. That's her little tradition. We played games with the kids such as Family Feud (a lot of Family Feud). Grandma is the endless game player and the kids take advantage of her graciousness to play game after game of their choice with them. Jenna & Madison combed the store ads to make out their Christmas lists.

Our menu:

turkey

mashed potatoes

sweet potato casserole

dressing

green bean casserole

cranberry/apple salad

broccoli salad

relish tray

butterhorn rolls

pumpkin pie

peach pie

blueberry pie

strawberry/rhubarb pie

It was all delicious! We ate about 1:30. We went to the evening showing of Fred Claus which is a cute Christmas movie. When we came out of the theatre it started snowing. It was the perfect transition from Thanksgiving to Christmas. : )

Carving "Humpkins"

This evening Jade, Michelle, and B&P came over and we carved "humpkins" as Jade called it tonight. Isn't that so cute? She's just so cute and sweet and everything that comes out of her mouth is so funny! Tony helped her take off her jacket and she said, "Thank you Mommy!" to him. Ha!


Here is Jade decorating her humpkin... with markers. This is the toddler version of carving humpkins. A good idea I think!


Here is Madison enjoying the guts of Quinn's HUGE 40# pumpkin! He wimps out on the cleaning part. Madison enjoys it... future surgeon some day?


And here is Quinn... complete with rubber gloves on his hands because he can't stand the slime, and the traditional clothes pin on his nose because the smell makes him gag. I don't even know why he "likes" to carve pumpkins. He can barely get through it because he gets too grossed out.



The final products on the porch. Madison's is the cat on the left. Quinn's is the bat on the right. Ok, Ok, Ok... Quinn's is much darker because his 40# pumpkin could have used some more cleaning and whittling from the inside but I was tired of this 40# pumpkin myself by now so this is as good as it gets!

Madison tried to inspire some sympathy tonight... "can you believe that we have to go to school on Halloween??... a holiday?" Boy, life is hard around here!

Earlier tonight we went to Madison's basketball game at 4pm. We played South Side and won 28-8. Madison made a couple of baskets, a good steal and I captured them on our new video camera! Now... if I can just figure out how to download the darn thing!

Labor Day

Well the Silverwood softball guys lost this morning. According to Tony they "self-destructed" this weekend. That's really too bad because usually they are a pretty good team! They lost 5 out of the 6 games they played. I guess it wasn't their year... He was home by 12:30 today so that was good.

Madison spent the afternoon with Peyton and then went to soccer practice from there. Her Flames team was supposed to have a tournament this weekend but it was cancelled due to not enough teams signing up. Bummer. We (Tony, Quinn, Nate and I) went to B&P's tonight with the plan of ordering pizza with them and Terry & Tine. Wouldn't you know it... I called like 10 pizza places and none of them were open!! Who would have thought that most of the eating places close down on Labor Day. OK, OK, OK... so the majority of the county was probably at home grilling out. We had already done that this weekend so we were ready for pizza. We ended up going to Texas Roadhouse after like 1 hour of trying to figure out what was open! Live and learn. We'll be grilling at home next year! Madison and her soccer team were supposed to have pizza at the field tonight after practice. Apparently Pizza Hut was so overwhelmed with phone calls that her coach never could get through the phone line so that was a bust. She was quite disappointed. Not to mention the dozen parents that picked girls up, expecting that they had been fed, only to realize that they were all starving! What is the life skill we are supposed to be practicing here?... oh ya, the life skill of flexibility. Tonya whisked the girls through Arby's because the rest of them had already eaten. Oh boy.

Well, that was pretty much our day. I do have to post this picture of Quinn and Nate playing Life this afternoon at our house. It was so funny to listen to them talking about their "grown-up" lives and hear them giggle about getting married... and then having babies and adding them to their cars. You had to be there... They giggled all night long about something or other. They get along so well. It's actually easier to take Nate with us, it gives Quinn someone to constantly talk to. We all know that Quinn is the talker of our family!

Hope you all have a good week. The rest of ours is going to be busy so I've decided to take just one day at a time. I feel really thankful for a long weekend though. Tomorrow will feel like a Monday but it will be a Tuesday already. Yippee!

Love, Leah

Happy Easter!

Happy Easter! The Lord is risen! The Lord is risen indeed!

We had a strange start to our Easter morning. Our electricity went out around 3am today and was off for 6 hours. We don't know why... ?? So, because we sleep with a fan, we woke up frequently after that, not used to the silence. We went to church and then to Beppe and Pakka's for lunch. She can be gone for a whole week too (to Kansas) and get back at 10pm last night and still throw together a big Easter meal. It's a gift... and we're so happy we benefit from it! We came home this afternoon and just tried to relax and recuperate from last week. Nate's family got home from Florida this evening around 6 and I think he arrived here around 6:15. He and Quinn were so glad to see each other!

There have been 3 special birthdays within the last week or so. Today is Karla's birthday... a big Happy Birthday to you Karla!! My mom and dad both had birthdays too; Mom's was March 29 and Dad's was April 6. Mom had a "milestone" birthday but if you want to know exactly which one, you'll have to ask her (or me in person!). Happy birthday to both of you too!

Tony has a very BIG week this week at work. I'll post more details tomorrow night. If you can just remember him in prayer that would be great. All of the past 4 month's of extreme busyness should get some better after this week. He's already said not to expect to see much of him this week. He's not even going to the practices that he coaches (softball)! So, more details coming but if you could pray for endurance and relief of headaches/neck pain we would appreciate the prayer coverage.

I uploaded some vacation pictures from Smoky Mountains, Day 1 through Day 5. My dear sister-in-law, Michelle, accidentally "stole" some of my pictures from my camera's SD card when she was attempting to copy/paste and instead "moved" them to her laptop. I'll have to get those back from her and then update the rest with pictures.

That's all tonight. I hope you each have a good week. I'm going to be quoting over and over... "just be glad you had a vacation, not sad that it's over"...all day long tomorrow I think. Usually there is a price to be paid at work when you return. Romans 8:31 says that God is on my side though... so who in the world can be against me?

Love to all, Leah