We're back and in action!

For Thanksgiving the boys and I flew out to Washington to visit my brother. Poor Aaron got to stay home and work every single day we were gone, including Thanksgiving day. Fortunately, some of our friends invited him over for Thanksgiving dinner, which they scheduled for noon, just so that he would have time to eat before work. They were so sweet.

While we were in Washington we stayed with my brother, his wife and their four kids. Search and Destroy had a blast terrorizing their house and playing day in and day out with their cousins. My parents, other brother and family, Grandparents, Great Uncle, Dad's cousin and wife and my cousin and family all met us at Dave's house for Thanksgiving dinner. There were 24 of us total. We had an awesome dinner, thanks to Honey Baked Ham. It was delish!
The day after Thanksgiving everybody skipped the shopping and headed over to the Great Wolf Lodge, a ginormous indoor water park/hotel where we stayed for one night and played at the water park.

We watched Santa and five of his elves skydive to the hotel. Meet Santa. And elves.

We got to declare our greatest wishes to the fat guy. Somehow, I don't think this is the same Santa that jumped out of the airplane. Sorry, that sentence was not intended for younger eyes/ears.



Almost all the cousins on my side, minus Brett and Luke.

We hung out with aunts and uncles (my brother Dave),

and spent time with grandparents (my mom's mom). Isn't she darling? Sorry Dave, you're darling too.
We had so much fun on our trip but wished Daddy could have come. We have been late to preschool two out of three times this week because we are still on west coast time. The three hours make a huge difference! (like when Search woke up at 2:15 am for the day on the first night there. I thought it was a nightmare, but it was real.) Just when I finally got them used to the west coast time change, it was time to come home. Hopefully we'll be back to normal in a couple of days.


Yesterday we went and got our Christmas tree. Last year we had so much fun cutting our tree down that we decided to do it again. We went to a different place this year that had a train shop with race car tracks. The kids had a blast.

Here's me and baby Dodge. You're probably wondering why we call him baby Dodge. Well, we made a deal with the kids. They could name the child while in utero as long as Daddy and I could name the kid after it's born. The names they were choosing were more than a little odd. Like Dodge, but we thought it was appropriate because he'll be doing a lot of dodging once he gets the hang of it :)

A cute family pic!