January 10, 2010

I have not been too timely with pics lately but, here they are, better late than never:).

Here are some pictures of the boys that I took in front of our tree before Christmas.

Here are the boys, putting the icing on their Christmas cookies.

Playing in the kitchen sink is a fun way to pass the time on a cold winter day.
Here is a picture of the outside of our house with our Christmas lights up.
This was Christmas Eve at my brother's house at the farm. The boys were excited about the pistols that my sister and her family gave them for Christmas. B has reminded us several times that he also wants a rifle. Not sure where they get this, as we are not gun owners. I guess they can't miss it though, since many of my relatives are hunters and we often talk about who got a deer and how big it was, during the hunting season.
Here are the boys, enjoying Christmas Eve lunch with Papa (my dad).
Here is our Christmas tree on Christmas morning. All that snow fell the evening/night before.
Our knight in shining armor:).
Our two knights in shining armor. Note, they have the breastplates on upside down:). These are the "armor of God". The breastplate says "righteousness" on it, the shield says "faith", the helmet says "truth", etc. It comes with a pamphlet with ideas of how parents can use it to teach them the word of God. We have not covered that yet but they really enjoy the armor, especially Ben, since he has been in to the whole David and Goliath thing for quite some time now. Now he pretends he is Goliath sometimes, since David did not wear armor when he fought Goliath. Since we have recently read Peter Pan, Ben now keeps talking about the bow and arrow he will get when he turns 8 years old (or 5 years old, depends on the conversation). He talks about it often:).
A friend of mine gave the boys these little Chia-pet things. One is an elf and the other is a raindeer. When watered, they grow grass as hair. It keeps getting longer and longer so the boys get to give them hair cuts:). They really enjoyed this.
I just hope it does not give them any ideas:).
This was our Happy Birthday Jesus cake. The kids enjoyed decorating the cake, singing happy birthday to Jesus and blowing out the candles....oh, and eating the cake of course:).
Fun in the snow. This was the day after Christmas and we still have a lot of this snow on the ground now. Very unusual for this part of the country. I am ready for it to be gone. We are expecting some much warmer weather early this week so we should start seeing the ground again.

Here is Nick in the sandbox.
This is our front yard and the street that goes by our house.
If you look closely at the boys wrists and feet, you can see the duct tape we used to hold their mittens on and to make the water proof "boots" to cover their good leather shoes:). I described this in a earlier post but am finally posting the pics.




I was working in the kitchen and overheard the boys playing. They were staging their own nativity scene, just under the mantle where we had our nativity scene displayed during Christmas. By the time I had gotten the camera, Nick had taken the "baby Jesus" (yes, that is a small monkey he is holding in the air - forgive us Lord) and was pretending He was going up into Heaven. I think he got a couple of the stories mixed up.
Ben was not happy about Nick's ending of the nativity story, since he still wanted to pretend the baby Jesus was in the manger, so he got another baby Jesus, which was a Winnie-the-Pooh in PJ's. Hmmm, we might need to invest in a toy nativity scene. We actually have three nativity scene's. The one that was on the mantle is one my husband got in Israel, when he visited there. The one we had in the library is one my mom gave us and it was the one we always put out when I was a child. The one we put in the foyer, at boy height, is one we received as a wedding gift and the pieces are not breakable so the boys can play with it.
Last night the boys and I built the structure below with the straws and connectors they got for Christmas. This toy is great (thanks for the tip CEP!) and I have more ideas of things I want to build when I have time:). I know this will be a popular toy for years to come. The only caveat is that we have to be very careful not to leave pieces out where the cats can get them. Our female cat loves to play with straws so this is heaven for her. If we accidentally leave some of these where she can get to them, she shows up on my side of the bed at odd hours during the night, playing with these on top of me while I am trying to sleep. I am a light sleeper, so this does not work well for me. One night she brought me three of them before giving up. I just kept taking them from her and putting them in my bedside drawer. She has brought me two already, as I have typed this post so I will need to search the house for them before going to bed.

Nick is pretending he is in jail. He is giving us his saddest "jail" look:).
Ben was pretty happy about his jail adventure.
Then we enlarged it so they could both easily fit. They had such fun with this and would turn it over and lay it down so they could play with it in different ways.
That's it for today:). Hope you all had a great weekend.