Latest Obsession

Thanks go out to Amber and Pop pop for Alden's latest obsession. It seems that while Matt and I were doing the Reindeer Romp 5K on the 5th (click here to see our photo) , they were watching Twister on TV...you know, the one with the tornado chasers...the one where the little girl's dad gets sucked up?? Amber drew a little picture of one on a scrap of cardboard, and Alden has been carrying around that, and the VHS tape for the past week. Last Thursday, she even took the cardboard drawing as her show-and-tell. Really. She even told Jessica the other day that she wanted a tornado for Christmas. At first she couldn't remember what it was called and just said, "You know, those things that suck stuff up?"

And we continue to expose our 3 year old to scary movies by letting her watch part of Harry Potter. She calls it "Harry Paw-Bo".

We celebrated Amber's birthday/our anniversary on the 9th with dinner at Bebe and Pop pop's house. We helped decorate their Christmas tree. Alden and Hudson liked the beads a lot. I don't know if they ever were untangled. We had a yummy candy cane ice cream cake from Coldstone, and then everyone came back to our house to watch the new HP movie so that the kids could go to sleep...in theory.

On the 3rd, the Y had a little Jingle and Mingle thing, so we went over after dinner. They had crafts set up for the kids, and Santa was even there. The kids liked seeing Santa, but were not too keen on being close enough to him for a picture, much less to sit on his lap. View the fruit of our effort here - we are photo #'s 65 & 66. We did write letters to him; Alden asked for a princess tea set, and a dinosaur, and said that Hudson would like a reindeer. Matt was playing volleyball that night, so we watched some of his game. Hudson loved watching them play, because he is always interested if there are balls involved, and Alden was a great cheerleader, saying "Go, Daddy!"
What else, what else? We got our tree weekend before last, and it is HUGE. I think Matt thought it looked a little smaller at Ace Hardware. Alden stayed up on Saturday night and helped us/pulled all the ornaments out of the boxes and played with them. She did hang a few on the tree, however, they all seemed to be clustered on the same branch.

Hudson was so excited when he got up on Sunday and saw the tree. He has been a little nervous about the ones around the YMCA. He loves pointing to the ornaments and watching the train going around.

Speaking of the train, last Monday, we had Mom, Dad, and Amber over for dinner. Matt and Dad spent most of the time that they weren't eating dissecting Matt's childhood Lionel train engine and repairing it. Who knew that my dad's first job was at a train store? Who knew that the light on the front of the train ever worked? When my dad heard Matt say that he had two more train sets under the house, you should have seen his face light up at the possibility of more toy train projects.

This past weekend Matt got to teach our couples Sunday school class. We are beginning a study on the Gospel of Mark and Matt was given the task of introducing the book and leading a discussion of the first chapter. I slept through the whole thing, so unfortunately, I missed his debut...not because I was bored, I was home since I had worked the night before, but I heard through the grapevine that he did a great job, and he said that it went really well.

Alden's preschool class talked about reindeer last week. Here she is modeling her antlers.