Elliott turns 6!

Happy Birthday, Elliott!

Elliott's 6th birthday was 2 weeks ago already. He had a great birthday. I can't believe he's 6 years old. My baby's growing up. He has a sweet personality, is amazingly smart, and is a great big brother. We all love you, Elliott!

The day of. Daddy decided to have Elliott open presents before school. It was a great way to start off the day. We went to Denny's for dinner that night. We can always win with pancakes.



I decided it was finally time to throw Elliott a birthday party. It was crazy and I'm sure I won't start doing them every year. I was so stressed about it. I had no idea what I was doing, but it turned out just fine as I knew it would. I did a western theme with horseshoe invitations. All the kids got bandanas and sherrifs badges. We played pin the tail on the donkey, "lasso" with Twister hopscotch hoops and water bottles, herd the cattle (get the balloons through the chairs using only your feet), sidewinder jump (don't get bit by the "rattlesnake"), and hot potato with a snake. The kids all had a lot of fun. There were 11 kids there at times. I'm glad I limited the invite list to just the kids who live around us and some cousins. It was crazy but fun. Elliott shed some tears, but hey, what's a party without tears. Elliott is wearing his coat in the bottom pictures because it was FREEZING in the building. We had the party in the basement of one of the buildings here and there was no heat. I was very relieved when the party was over.

While not an official birthday celebration this year, we still made it to Chuck E. Cheese. Elliott got a coupon for 20 free tokens, so it was perfect to spend an hour or so there for free. I had a few tokens left over from last year as well, so we all got to have a little bit of fun. Derek was getting into it too. It is so nice that Derek is finally walking so he could wander around and I didn't have to hold him the whole time.

Coloring Contest Winner!

This should have been posted a LONG time ago, but here it is - the winner of the Wymount Halloween coloring contest! Elliott was really excited to win. He always loves to enter and he always thinks he'll win. I always encourage him to enter, while making sure he realizes there are lots of people who enter and not everyone can win. So, it was really fun to actually win! Nice work, Elliott!

Christmas Break

BOWLING
We all went bowling together and had a great time. Derek still doesn't appreciate it so much, but he did pretty well putting up with the rest of us having fun. He brought along his trucks to keep himself occupied. He took those trucks everywhere with him for a few weeks.



SOCK HANDS
This was the first (and probably only) time I put socks on Derek's hands. He thought it was really funny. Of course Elliott had to join in the fun. They are my little goofballs.

ERECTOR SET
We spent several days putting together this dune buggy from Elliott's new Erector set. It was quite a challenge to put together. Elliott was great at finding all the right pieces, but I pretty much had to take care of the assembly. It's a lot of tiny nuts and bolts. It was a tricky, time consuming project. I guess I need to get up the urge to disassemble the buggy so we can move on to the next project. Only 19 more projects to try out. How long do you think that will take??? It was fun to see it actually work after putting it together ourselves (it has a motor attached).

SLEDDING
My cousin Gina invited us to go sledding with her and her husband, Chris, as well as her brother Sam and his family, and her cousin Jesse and his family. It hadn't snowed much for a while, but Gina found this great hill next to the school she works at. It was perfect. Elliott had a blast going down the hills. There was one little hill that was pure ice from being used so much. There was a bump at the bottom. The kids had fun sliding down it without sleds (the bottom left picture shows Elliott going down it head first). Derek didn't much appreciate the sport (top left picture). Afterwards, we all went to Gina's house for a delicious lunch. It was so fun to spend time with my cousins, who I don't see often enough. Hopefully we can do it again soon.

We had an enjoyable Christmas break. I think the second week was better than the first. The lead up to Christmas was a little crazy, but we had lots of fun afterwards. We spent lots of evenings playing games with friends too. It was sad to see all the fun come to an end, but it was nice to see school start again. Only 3 more months of school for Brent! Time is flying.

Halloween in December?

One afternoon Derek woke up from his nap and was pointing up in his closet. I held him up to see what he wanted. I guess he wanted to be a frog - it was nice and warm, so I didn't have to put a coat on when we went out to the car. :) He kept it on for the afternoon. It was pretty funny. He still makes a cute frog.