Voila - Living Room!

Those of you that have been to our house know that we don't have a lot of seating in the living room. We gave away our living room furniture before moving to Utah since that house didn't have a formal front room. However, we had two couches in the basement, one futon and one perfectly good, comfortable couch that happens to be upholstered in a blue & white plaid that I don't care for anymore. In fact, the blue & white plaid couch has been in Mom & Dad's basement since our Halifax house (three houses ago). Anyways, this week, I set about working on the living room. I found a great sage green slipcover and some cute throw pillows for the couch. It only took Andrew & me three tries to get the couch up the basement steps at the proper angle to fit through the door. I dug some candles out of our "decor" rubber tub in the basement for the wall & found a little side table for the big squishy armchair at AFW...voila, living room! (And there's still room for the train tracks - the most important part really.)

Snowy Week

Here we are enjoying our second dumping of snow this week; we got about 7 inches Tuesday & another 7 or so Thursday. Love it! Ahhh, powder so light you can sweep it off the porch!

Merry Christmas!

We had a lovely Christmas yesterday - a very white Christmas. The weather was forecasted to be "maybe a few light showers throughout the day, but it may miss the metro area all together." I think we ended up with 8 inches of snow! But it was a beautiful day & thankfully the friends and family that were planning on coming to our house still braved the roads and made it to and fro safely. One of our guests was Lloyd, and, heck, he'd gladly drive through 12 inches of snow just to help us change a lightbulb!

This year was the first year Max really got the idea of Santa Claus & he has been so excited this last week, planning out where to leave Santa's snack and a little treat for the reindeer too.

The boys opening the first round of gifts Christmas morning:
Men at work: The table is set and Max is ready:Playing with the "laptop" from Aunt Whitney and Uncle Jody. He's already passing me technologically. Their new puppets elicit the biggest belly-laughs from Ben:Enjoying the hand-made candy Grandma Jill & Grandpa Jim gave them (thanks for the pics, Whit):

What the heck?!?!?!

Did you see that Britney Spears' 16-year-old sister is 12 weeks pregnant?!?!?!?!

Breckenridge!

Here are some pics from our trip to Breckenridge. We rented a condo & enjoyed 3 nights & 2 full days of awesome fun! Andrew skied 2 days, Max did ski school for 2 days, I skied one day (I felt like my legs would be good for about 5 runs the second day & just couldn't bring myself to spring for a lift ticket for so few runs), and Ben did great in the nursery for one day (he spent the 2nd day w/me). Andrew said the second day skiing was as cold as he's ever skied in; the thermostat in the truck read negative 8 when I dropped him off in the morning, plus he said it was really windy at the top. According to the TV, wind chills were -25 that day up top. Brrr!!!!

And that cliche about "when it's your kid..." is so true. I was just bursting with this giant bubble of excitement and pride and a big goofy grin watching Max at ski school. I am far more excited watching him learn to ski than I ever was when I learned to ski. Maybe it's just that way when you have kids. When you're a kid yourself, you never really think about learning new things, you just take it for granted and plug on through childhood. But when you're a parent, you watch these little people that you just love so much learn new things - whether it's a first step, a new word, or keeping skis in a wedge - and it's just so much fun it's ridiculous. And while I realize they're not doing anything that millions of people haven't already done, as they say, "when it's your kid..." Riding the magic carpet. This is an incredible innovation from when I learned to ski. It's like those people-movers at the airport; they just ski right on and up they go! Eating snow. A favorite past-time. Mama and Ben.

Bye-Bye Crib

Over the last week, several things have happened to spur us onto getting Ben a big-boy bed. Last week, Andrew, aka The Guy With a Truck, helped a friend move a couple of beds. For whatever reason, his friend had an extra brand new Sealy twin mattress & box springs that he gave to Andrew. Then, Ben learned how to get into his crib via a combination of climbing and somersaulting. He kept getting stuck and having to be rescued throughout the day, but we figured it wouldn't be long before he tried to reverse the process and possibly hurt himself getting out. So we started looking for a racecar bed for him just like Max's bed. The bed was so perfect for Max to transition into a big boy bed because we used it for about a year without box springs and the walls of the car kept him from falling out of bed, so we went the same route with Ben. Needless to say, Ben loves his racecar bed, and he slept his first night in it without incident.

Weekend Fun

Saturday night, Andrew & I rode the light-rail downtown & went to the Nuggets game. It was "I Love the 80's Night." Legwarmers, neon socks, pegged jeans were in the house. And the half-time show - can we just say Tone Loc. Yes, the real 80's rapper Tone Loc, doing some Funky Cold Medina and the Wild Thing. The boys went to Mom & Dad's. This is one of the reasons I am so glad to be close to family again - not just for the free babysitting, but so that the boys and their grandparents can have a relationship. I hope that when the boys are older, they will have many memories of time with Grandma and Grandpa (and aunts and uncles and cousins too). Ben, who is not always the warmest kid to, well, anyone besides Mom, is even warming up to them. He's always been a Grandpa's boy (even with grandpas that aren't his), but Mom said "and Ben's been so friendly - he even gave me a big smooch!" Cracks me up that it's a notable event when our 2-year old is affectionate to his grandma. And then Sunday was my mama's b-day, so we had a fun afternoon playing pinochle and just hanging out.

Santa Express

Here are some pics from our trip to the Colorado Railroad Museum (cool, I just wanted to see if I could do a link or not!) in Golden this weekend. It was their special Santa Express weekend, where we got to take a little train ride & could've seen Santa in a red caboose had we waited in a long line. Even without seeing Santa, the boys had a blast! Their favorite part was this gigantic set-up with model trains running around. We also got to climb in a bunch of engines & cars. Here are Max & Andrew operating all the little controls. Lots of stuff to see there; we only got a small sample in the couple hours we were there.