Titi's Birthday and Random Christmas Schinnanigans

This year for Titi's birthday she rented a party bus and took everyone to the ice skating rink and then to view the lights in the Fab 40s. The rink was closed for a private party, so we didn't get to partake in that, but Evan enjoyed the lights and the party bus.

Our annual Titi's birthday photo.

Graham and Alysha

The beautiful tree we picked out!

Operation...this game has changed a lot since we were kids.

It was past bed time, can you tell?

He loved his first ride in a vehicle without a car seat.

So much, that he got up and danced with Titi when her favorite Christmas song played on the radio.

He loved the lights...

...but he loved seeing Santa on a motorcycle even more. Not to mention he got his second candy cane of the night.

Joe was making this piano playing Santa about as creepy as possible.

My outfit for our Holiday Extravaganza at school

Evan did not want to be left out.

Go Julie!

Kerry did really well for her first year.

2nd grade team showing their glam.

I love our staff!

And my 4/5 team.

Christmas Prep

When we found out that we weren't moving before Christmas, we pulled out the fake tree. We didn't have another visit to the Christmas tree farm in us.

Evan enjoyed decorating the tree, over and over again, and again.

 The lower half of the tree was well decorated and dense with ornaments.

 Pure joy! This one makes me smile every time.

 Now on to the tree for his room. This used to be Ben's grandma's. Evan loves to use it as his nightlight for the month.

 It is finished!

 Oh wait, the star!

 Now it is finished!

 Our beautiful wreath.

 New location for the tree.

 Stockings, minus Evan's.

 Our new holiday flags from Sue.

 Frisbee, the newest addition to the family. Each night he reports back to Santa and we have to find him the next morning. So much fun!

 A little hot chocolate and yummy gingerbread cookies from Susan.

 Sisters making a silly gift for Grandpa Bob.

 Hot chocolate mouth.

 Gingerbread man

 Now the stockings are complete, thank you Gina!

Getting our Christmas Tree

The day after Thanksgiving we got a phone call that our house had sold and we had two weeks to move out! So, the plan was to move in with Titi until we found a new house. This meant when we went with her to get her tree, it would be our tree too! And the only requirement was that it must not hurt us like last year's tree.

Can't go get a tree without hot chocolate first!

 After looking and looking, we found it!

 Evan is not so sure about this.

 Ben was determined to cut it down himself.

 So we took this opportunity to take some photos in front of the tree.

 We finally got someone with a chainsaw to come help us out.

After he left, we found this.

 Looks like Evan's intuition was right, not the tree for us!

After many, many, many more rows, we found this one on the last row!

 We like it!

 Daddy's not so sure...

 This one was even harder to cut, so we called in the big guns, papa!

 Where is the guy with the chainsaw now?

 Evan was pretty sure he could help. All in all it was a beautiful tree, but turned out to not be ours. After I spent three days packing up our house and moving it to Alysha's garage, we got the phone call that the deal had fallen through!