Merry Christmas One and All!

We had a nice relaxing Christmas morning as a family, and it was really nice. David and I woke up at 5:30am and were planning on me feeding the babies and David making the breakfast, however, when we went out to the living room, Josiah was sitting on the couch and said, "Good morning, Momma!" I got a nice little question and answer session with him about the story of the baby Jesus too on video, which was fun. I tried to put it on the end of this post, but it wasn't working, so perhaps I will try again another time. Here is a picture though of sweet Josiah with his Handy Manny tool bench/truck toy. I asked him at the end of the day what was his favorite new toy and he said, "The Handy Manny one. I've never seen that toy before." He had a blast "fixing" the things on the tool bench portion of the toy. There are 4 items that can be fixed there and a few more in the engine of the car as well, and he was thoroughly enjoying figuring out which tools to use to fix the various things. At one point he said, "I'm whitey tighty Momma!" too which I looked at him rather confused, until I realized he was repeating back to me what I was telling him about using the screwdriver "Righty Tighty....Leftly Loose-y." Hee hee! He kept saying all day, "Let's fix things, Momma." There is also a little phone that "calls" and tells the "Fix-It Man" what to fix. He and I had a funny coversation that went something like this:

Josiah: This is my Handy Manny phone.

Me: Who are you gonna call?

Josiah: Grandpa

Me: OK...you do that!

Josiah: (putting the phone to his ear and talking in a nice phone voice) Hello Grandpa....(pause)...Ohhh (he heaved a sad sigh and put down the phone). Grandpa's dishwasher is broken.

Me: Should we go fix it?

Josiah: Yeah, let's go. I will drive the truck to Grandpa's house.

This is my favorite picture of the twins this Christmas playing with the balls that were from Grandpa and Grandma Carpenter. They really liked them. They are made of this strong plastic and they can chew on them or squash them and they remain in tact. This is good for teething babies who like to put all things in their mouth! They had a good tug of war over the balls for a while too, which was fun. There are many more pictures of the twins individually and of Josiah as well. I will post many of them on Facebook and have a link to all of them via Snapfish if any of you want a link to that, just let me know. Later on, Grandpa and Grandma Walker came by to have lunch with us and watch the boys play with all their new toys. One highlight of the day for me was finding a stocking stuffer that got my hubby to smile bigger than I have ever seen. I can't really share what the gift was, as it is an inside joke that is personal, but let's just say that the "I always know what I am getting" guy was stumped on this one and laughed really hard! For me it is FUN to find something that he can't guess he is getting. Wahoo...score!

Christmas at the Grandparent's House

Here is my Mom with Josiah and Daniel before we opened the gifts. Josiah found this paper airplane ornament that he claimed as his own to play with, as seen pictured here.

We had a real treat in that my Grandma Walker from Eastern WA came over to my parents house to visit and join in the Christmas fun. We don't get to see her very often and she really enjoyed watching the boys play, crawl, and interact. Caleb and Daniel were doing their usual antics of fighting over an ornament. Daniel found it first and was looking at it and Caleb grabbed in and they had a bit of a tug of war. Then as usual, Daniel got tired of the fight and went for another toy, which was promptly swiped again by his very determined twin. Ahhh...and so the fun begins! Here Great Grandma Walker is holding said determined twin, Caleb.

We always have an early Christmas gift exchange with my parents and this year we went to their place to do that. We planned it just right so that we would miss the big storm coming in on the way back, which is supposed to be a real dozey! It is predicted to be even worse than the most recent one that we had here. David has been following it closely due to the nature of his job, so I am thankful for that. Anyway, Josiah got two special gifts that he loved. The Dinoco helicopter from the movie "Cars" and the Screamin' Banshee, which is a character from an animated short on the same "Cars" DVD called "Mater and the Ghost Light." Josiah hasn't been feeling the greatest the last couple of days, but this morning he was in better sprits. He has some sort of cold like his younger brothers do as well.

And of course the twins, were most interested in the wrapping paper as is appropriate for their age, and Daniel found his gift to be a great place to pull up as well! They both like to pull up on anything that is nearish to their height and do so quite frequently. Even as a little sick boy (Daniel has his now 2nd cold of the season), he gives a nice big smile for the camera. He got this "Little People" farm that of course will be shared with Caleb and Josiah as well.

Here is our very serious Caleb boy with his gift, the "Little People" Noah's Ark. It is hard to get a shot of him smiling these days as he doesn't smile quite as often. In this shot though, I will give him some slack because he didn't have any sort of nap really to speak of before he came to Grandpa and Grandma's house, so he was pretty beat! You might notice the little scrape on his nose and head? Yeah...he fell off Josiah's bed the other day...long story, but needless to say, he is OK and has some battle wounds to show for it. He too is sick right now with a runny nose and he is losing his voice, so hopefully they will all get better soon. We could certainly use yours prayers this winter as we seem to get a lot of illnesses during this season.

More Snow Fun!!!!

We have quite the amount of snow here for this area now (around 2 1/2-3 inches) and it is actually sticking around for a bit! The schools have been closed for 3 days now due to the icy, snowy roads and it took David 2 1/2 hours to get to Seattle yesterday (usually only a 40 minute trip). Thankfully today, he was able to work from home, which is a wonderful thing in weather like this! Josiah has been loving the snow, however, as pictured above he still isn't fond of posing for pictures. He is there with Sharel & Laura (the gals who babysit for us). They stayed over last night due to the fact that it was probably not safe for me to take them home or for their mom to come get them and it was too cold to walk. They were loving the snow too and since they liked to be out in it so much, they took Josiah all bundled up out there too!

He wanted to ride his tricycle for some odd reason, so here he is trying to ride it in the snow. He doesn't do the pedals yet, we have tried to teach him, but he prefers to use his feet to make it go instead. The tricycle riding was short lived in this snow, but at least I got a cute picture to show for it!

Here they are with the little snowman that they made. It would have been bigger, but the snow was the powdery type and wouldn't stick together very well.

Snow, Snow, Just look at the Snow!

The last two days we have been getting some snow here, which is fun because we don't get too much snow in Western Washington usually. I dressed Josiah up in the warmest and most snow-worthy clothes he had, since we don't have a snow suit for him and he tromped around in the backyard a bit. As he went down the hill in our yard, he said, "I'm climbing down the mountain, Momma!" And he was very excited to see the tracks that he was leaving in the snow as well! I tried to throw a snowball at him, but the snow is too powdery and was hard to compact into a ball, so he just got snowed on a bit more by me throwing my half-made ball at him.

Here he is again wearing my hat. I thought he looked so funny wearing it! Another funny story was that today he took his spoon and put it on the side of his head and said, "Momma, I'm 'tending (pretending) to be a mailbox!" And apparently, there was mail in the box as demonstrated by the spoon being UP! Here is yet another little conversation I had with him the other day.

Josiah: Let's play "Crunch," Momma.

Me: How do you play that?

Josiah: You get a cookie, then you get a ticket, then a flower pencil, then run around the table, make a car from Legos...a BIG car...LOTS of Legos.

Me: Do you eat the cookie?

Josiah: No...you just put it down on the table so Echo (our dog) won't eat it!!

Me: Can we play "Crunch" right now?

Josiah: We don't have "Crunch" right now.

Making a Gingerbread House

David and I thought it would be a good year to start a gingerbread house making tradition, and so we got one of those kits at Costco. You would think it would be super easy then to make it since all the pieces are there and ready to go. Then....da, da, DUH....enter the frosting. UGH! This picture pretty much sums up our experience. Josiah holding onto the candy (wanting to eat it all and lick the frosting) and me working feverishly with this stupid frosting. It came with a bag and early on into this, somehow I applied too much pressure and it popped. Yeah...did I mention I made quite a huge frosting mess throughout this project? So instead of nice "piping" around the house, I had big gloppy gobs of white frosting making impromtu icicles off the sides of the roof. Ahem...I meant to do that I mean...yeah, they're icicles, look how creative I am!

Oh another fun note was that I didn't wait for the frosting to dry enough after the initial "put-together" stage and then brilliantly put in some of the trees right in the way of where I would decorate the house. I tried to get to the windows to frost them and upon tipping the tray a bit too much apparently the roof started slipping off. Hence all the cracked, dried frosting on top of the mints that took a dive INTO the house at one point. I got kind of frustrated about then and said, "Honey...help...this is not working," to which he replied, "It's OK, it is just your first time making it and it doesn't have to be perfect." Later, I told him to remind me someday that I should never decide to be a cake decorator at a future date. Me and frosting decor don't seem to jive. Now eating frosting, well that is another story! :) Anyway, I ran out of frosting towards the end of my creative attempt at gingerbread construction and David got me some more white frosting the next day to finish off the monstrousity of candy goodness. Josiah had fun helping from time to time and more fun begging for frosting and gumdrops. I tried to get him to pose with a smile here, but as you can see...no luck on that count. Our kitchen now has the alluring smell of frosting as you walk through. Echo the dog takes a few extra sniffs as she passes by. :) Oh and another funny moment for this one. Do you notice that lovely green window on the left? Yeah, at one point Josiah said, "Mommy, why did you make a pretzel?" At first, I didn't know what he meant, but sure enough if you look at my green window there it resembles a pretzel! Umm...yeah, did I mention I am not so good at the piping? Oh and I would like to point out though that they didn't provide a "drawing" tip for the windows, but rather had the star like shaped one instead. Yet, the picture had the single line outline. So, there was quite a learning curve on the gingerbread house creation this year, but next year....LOOK OUT!!

Birthday Fun!!

Here is one of the only pictures we have of all of us as a family. As you can see, it is rather hard to get Josiah to "pose" for us. He was enticed with a cupcake on this occasion, but we still didn't get much of a smile. It was my birthday today and we had my Mom and Dad over to do a "photo op" cupcake/opening presents moment with the twins for their 1st birthday. We had cake for me later after we went to dinner.


Here is a fun shot of the boys eating their birthday cupcakes. They had a lot of fun eating the frosting! We thought they looked like clowns afterward! So funny!


Caleb boy looked like "The Hulk" after he was done eating and it took lots of washing up with scrubbing and soap to get the green off!



Here is Daniel boy with a nice red hand. After he was finished he looked like he had been bleeding! And again we did lots of scrubbing and cleaning of his face, head, and arms afterward!

Here is Josiah at the restaurant giving me his "I hate pictures" look. We ended up going to the "Thai Bistro" which is a place I really love. We tried going to a more kid-friendly place, but it was packed, so we went to my favorite instead. Josiah didn't care for the fare (as I suspected he wouldn't) and so Mom took him to McDonalds (which was nearby) to get him his dinner afterward.




This one is earlier in the day of our Josiah boy, when he was proud of his "Tall Horsie" he made with the Duplo Legos. And ummm....not sure it resembles a horse, but hey, he is being creative, so it's all good! I think it looks more like a tall tower with a tree on the top! He asked me after he made it if we could "take it to the fair." He is so excited about entering a Lego creation at the Puyallup fair. I told him we would practice a bit more and maybe take one to the fair next year. :)

Meal Times

David got me a new camera for my birthday/Christmas present and so I have been fooling around with the settings and I think I have finally hit the jackpot with these two shots. I tried to get a good one of Josiah too, but he refuses to be photographed at the moment, so I will put some up of him another time. Speaking of which, he is sitting behind me in my chair bothering me, wanting me to come play with him, so this will be cut short. Here above is sweet Caleb boy after a yummy meal.
And here is sweet Daniel boy after his meal.