Making Christmas Magical, Part 2

I tried to take advantage of my time at home with the boys this season and do lots of activities with them...

 

I think my favorite project was the gingerbread house. I bought a kit on clearance last year after Christmas knowing that we would never eat it anyways and stored it until this year. Jaxson took a nap one afternoon and Bradley and I got creative, it was so much fun.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Bradley and I also spent A LOT of time working on his Christmas List. He had originally cut out pictures and glued them on a piece of paper, then I told him he had to write a letter to Santa. So we wrote one letter, but then he was afraid it was too sloppy so we printed out some wide lined paper and rewrote the letter as a neat sheet. This teacher momma was on cloud nine, he was all over that writing process! He did a pretty good job saying words slowly and listening for sounds, I also gave him an ABC chart.

 

 

We also went to a small town in Illinois to see Santa on the CN Santa Train. It was pretty cool. The big engine rolled into town decorated with Christmas lights and stopped, then the long line of kids and their parents waited to get on the train to see the man in the big red suit. Really hoping we get to do this next year too!

 

(Bradley is covering his ears because the sound of the train horn was just too loud for him.)

 

 

(There was lots of neat stuff to look at on the train, but my camera was acting up and I had difficulty getting pictures. There was a really neat model train set up.The boys also got to go up on the engine and blow the horn.)

 

Hopefully I will remember to post the pictures of the boys with Santa once they are posted on the CN Santa Train Site.

 

 

 

We also did LOTS of crafts!

 

We painted puzzle pieces and put them together to make Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

 



 

We also painted popsicle sticks green and glued them together and decorated them to look like Christmas trees.



 



 

On another day, I painted the kids hands and we put a handprint on an ornament. I thought it made a neat keepsake and it was so simple.

 

 





 

I also bought some canvases. Then I used adhesive vinyl to cut-out the letters of our last name and the last names of the kids that I watch. Next, I stuck them onto the canvas and gave the kids some paint and let them paint. Jaxson was so excited, he kept saying "I paint! I paint!" Then when the paint dried, I peeled off the adhesive vinyl. I used painter's tape on some of the canvases, before I remembered that I had the vinyl. I thought they turned out really neat and made for some original gifts! I also painted the kid's hands and put their hand prints on them.



 

 

 

Jax loves having this hanging up in the house, every time he looks at it, he looks at me and says, "I paint!"

 

 

We also made and decorated cookies.

 

 

 

Making Santa's Cookies...

 

Whew! That is most of it! No wonder I am exhausted everynight, but it is all about the memories.

 

 

 

 



Making Christmas Magical, Part 1

I have been having so much fun being home with the boys.

I have tried to come up with lots of interactive activities for them to do and Bradley loves to do crafts and he came up with some more on his own. I also have a few extra kids in the house on most days so it was great for them too.
 

We started the season as soon as Thanksgiving was over by decorating three large trees and one medium sized tree in the house.

There was the tree downstairs in the living room where Santa will leave his gifts.

 

Then there was the red tree that was set-up downstairs in the toy room.

 

 

Also I set up a tree upstairs in the landing to all the kid's hallmark ornaments on and the handmade ornaments. This one is more similar to the tree that I remember from my childhood.

 

There was also another medium sized tree in the kitchen with kid oriented ornaments.

 

 

Nugget the Elf also arrived the day after Thanksgiving and returned to some funny places after reporting home to the North Pole each night. I am kind of sad that I forgot to take pictures after the night that she came back and toilet papered the tree and didn't clean up her mess before she flew back to the North Pole the next night.

 

   

 

ALL the Christmas Crafts that we have done to come in Part 2...

 

 

 

 





Dan Turns 32!

On Pearl Harbor Day, Dan turned thirty-two years old.

We celebrated by going over to his moms house to have Pizza King for dinner. I had a house full of kids all day on that Friday, so me not cooking was a great plan!

During the day, Dan was gone and this arrived on the front porch!

 

 

Bradley was so excited, but I explained it was Daddy's birthday present and he had to wait until daddy got home to open it. I think he asked me a million times how much longer until Daddy was going to be home. Daddy finally got home and guess what was inside...

 

 

Too bad his eyes look weird in the picture, but he got this as a gift from his mother-in-law. He opened it and said, "Awesome, a helicopter!" Just like a little boy on Christmas! He and the boys have taken it out to fly and he already needs replacement parts for the darn thing! Bradley has little helicopter, but Daddy's big one is way more exciting.

For his birthday, I got him tickets to go see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra. He has been talking about wanting to see these guys for a while now and I got an email back in September that they were going to be in Indy in December. So I got the tickets and planned to surprise him. So much for that idea, I was talking to friend on facebook about not being about to attend her event on the day of the concert and Dan saw the message. Oops!

Anyways, it was an awesome show! I had no idea what I had bought tickets to see. There was a storyline to part of the concert, laser lights and pyrotechnics throughout. The Christmas songs were heavy metal style! If you have never heard of them I definitely recommend looking them up on YouTube.

Here are a few pictures of the spectacular show.

 

 

 

 

I think he had a nice birthday!

 

 



Thanksgiving 2012 + No Vacancy (Not really, I would always make room for more.)

We hosted two Thanksgiving meals at our house and had several overnight guests over a short period of time.

On Thanksgiving Day, we hosted my extended family. My Grandpa Felix and his wife Dorothy, two sets of Aunts and Uncles, my cousin, my parents and my brother. It was so wonderful to have a house full of family, I really did enjoy every moment of it.

Mom and Anthony arrived on Thanksgiving Eve before Bradley went to bed. He had been counting down the hours all day until their arrival and had called them multiple times to ask how much longer. They would stay with us through Sunday. Then Uncle Bill and Aunt Diane arrived Thanksgiving Day and they would stay with us that night.

Mom and I left after Thanksgiving supper to begin our Black Friday Shopping Extravaganza. Anthony went with us and we shopped all night long. Therefore, mom was able to give up the guest bed for Bill and Diane to use. Bradley was in our room on an air mattress, since Anthony had taken over his room. It was funny though, because Bradley was so excited to sleep in our room, he thought the air mattress was the coolest thing! Then Dad stayed the night too so he could take care of the boys while we were out shopping all night and Dan was working all night. So Dad slept on an air mattress in Jaxson's room, while Jax slept in the pack'n play in our room for a night. We seemed to have a full house and Dan and I weren't even home!

We all had a nice time sitting down to eat a huge meal together for supper with Turkey, Hawg Wings and the trimmings. Then the crazy shoppers (Mom, I and Anthony) arrived home as everyone was sitting down to eat breakfast.

 

 

Aunt Deb brought supplies for the adults to make Apple Pie in the Sky and supplies for Bradley to make turkeys with oreos and candy. It looked like lots of fun!

 

Bradley has a new obsession with Legos so pretty much from the time he woke up (hence the pajamas) until he went to bed, he and Anthony were "busy."

 

Then on Saturday, we hosted Dan's Family. Bradley, Jaxson, Reid and Graham had lots of fun playing together. Lorna and I had fun cleaning up the toy room afterwards and Dan and Jon must have been watching TV or something.

 

The boys also did their Christmas with Grama T and Uncle A on that Saturday.They are unable to come back for Christmas and their houses are still in the reconstruction process from Hurricane Isaac so there isn't really anywhere for us to stay in Louisiana if we were able to head south.

 

 

Bradley got his own Ipad and some remote control helicopters. (He just loves these helicopters, but they seem to have a short lifespan. Hopefully Santa will bring him more!) Jaxson opened some Mega Blocks and a remote control Thomas the train that makes steam!

 

We have a sleeper sofa on order to allow for one more bed in the upstairs landing area for next year. We have also been brainstorming ideas to finish the basement and include another bedroom/sewing and craftroom along with our home movie theater and a full bathroom. Thinking finishing the basement may not be finished before 2013 Thanksgiving, but eventually I would love to be able to accommodate everyone and have an actual bed for them instead of an air mattress.

 

Dozer the Dog

Our family didn't make it long as a one dog family, about a week later we had decided that we were not a one dog family and we wanted another mutt in our lives.

We started looking in shelters for a dog to rescue. Dan and I had an older dog in mind that might have already gone through most of its puppy stage. We looked a few shelters and did not really find any dogs that fit for the whole family. Then we had to go to Porter County to go furniture shopping and I had looked at their shelter online and there was a dog there that looked like Dakota. She was two and a bit smaller, so I wanted to stop and check her out. We stopped and took her out to play with her and she was very intimidated by the boys and kind of freaked out so we knew she wouldn't work. We looked at a few of the other dogs and they didn't seem to fit either. Then we were getting ready to leave and stopped to talk to the workers at the shelter and they asked us if we were interested in a puppy. They explained a puppy might work better with kids and would be able to bond better with our family.

So the lady went in the back, and brought out a puppy that had very similar markings to Dakota. I immediately fell in love with him. We ended up adopting him. He slept in Bradley's lap all the way home.

 

 

 

 

 

I don't think he will be as big as Dakota, he only weighed 4.8 lbs. when I took him to his first vet check-up, but has grown since.

 

A few more pictures...

 



A Tribute to My Best Dog

I have been putting this post off, because I knew it wouldn't be easy, therefore the entire blog has been in a holding pattern...

On November 1st, I said good-bye to Dakota. She was in so much pain and was having lots of difficulty doing normal old dog activities, like going to the bathroom. Yeah, yeah I know she was just a dog, but she was most definitely a family member.

I have never had to make a decision like that and I don't want to ever have to do it again. We found out back in March that she had cancer and they gave her less than a month and she was doing very well until the last month or so.

I found Dakota almost twelve years ago eating out of the dumpster at O'rears Pastry Shop, where I was working at the time. I was a freshman at Purdue and living in an apartment on the south side, where we were not supposed to have pets. I kept her anyways all the while my mom telling me that I needed to find her a home, when I moved home to my parents house that summer she went with me, my home was her home. 

I moved into the sorority that fall and she stayed with my parents. While settling in to Mom and Dad's house she went through her teething stage and ate a couch, yes she chewed up all the cushions on the couch in the upstairs great room. She endured an ACL surgery on one of her rear legs, ripped open her side on a barbed wire fence and had to have stitches and I am pretty sure my mom ran over her because we had to take her to the ER for another open wound and stitches.

I held onto her through all of that and she stood by my side through my extremely emotional senior year at Purdue. She was the best pal a girl could ask for and was very loyal. As I have moved around through the last twelve years she has always been very protective of me and served as a great sense of security for me.

(Doing what she did best, taking up her space on the couch. This was the loveseat that matched the couch she destroyed.)

 

It was so hard to say good-bye and I miss hearing her tail thumping the floor when I wake up in the morning and her "talking" and telling me when it was time for her to eat or that she needed to go outside. I found some old videos of her today and it was so good to see her so full of all the energy that she once had. I know that she is barking at squirrels and the wind up in pet heaven.

We were able to bury her with Truck on the edge of our yard where I am planning to create a flower garden and place the stepping stones that Bradley and I made.

 

 

(The picture at the top was taken in 2003, these two were taken within the last few months. I think the boys made her
gray.)

 

Dick (our Boston Terrier) also misses Dakota terribly, they had become each others doggy soul mates over the last nine years.

 

 



Our Horrible Halloween

This year's Halloween is one that I never want to relive.

The night before Halloween, mom was in town and we had been  down to Lafayette to go shopping and when we arrived home we found Truck (our yellow lab puppy) with large swollen spot on the left side of his face under his ear. So I called our vet at home and told her what was going on and she said to give him and aspirin and as long as he continued to breathe okay we could bring him in first thing in the morning Halloween day, Wednesday.

 Dan took him in Wednesday morning and the vet said that he had all of the signs of puppy strangles, a rare puppy autoimmune disease, or he had some sort of an abscess that had become severely infected. She wanted to keep him for 24 hours and observe him and give him antibiotics. I called at 2pm that day and he was still doing the same and still hadn't eaten anything.

Dan was on second shift that night and had left for work. So at 4:00pm, I started getting the boys ready in their costumes and we snapped some pictures on the porch before we left.

 

 

Our first stop was "Aunt" Cathy's house at around 4:45 and as I was walking the boys into her house my phone rang. It was the vet and she had horrible news, she said she had just gone back to check on Truck and there was blood coming from his mouth and nose. She said I could come get him and take him home and probably wouldn't make it or transport him to Purdue Emergency Vet Clinic where he could be in the ICU.

So much for trick or treating, I went to get Truck, took him to Lafayette and my dad met me there with dinner for the boys.

I got Truck admitted and they wanted to sedate him and do a complete oral exam and see if they could figure out what was going on. The vet said it might take a bit so I loaded the boys back up and tried to squeeze in a few trick or treat stops for the boys so their Halloween wasn't completely ruined.

We got to my Grandpa's in West Lafayette and the vet called and said that I had some decisions to make. He could continue with a full surgery and something needed to be done quickly because Truck wasn't breathing well and we would be looking at spending around $3000 just for the surgery and it may not be something they could fix or treat so we might still loose Truck or our other option was euthanasia. I called Dan and we chose the second choice.

My Dad went to the clinic and took care of the details, the boys and I went to my Aunt and Uncle's. Dad followed us home and brought Truck home to be buried.

It was absolutely horrible and the thing that made it more awful was that had an appointment the following day to have Dakota euthanized asher cancer had progressed and she was in a lot of pain and not walking unless she had help.

I was at peace with what needed to be done for her and I didn't think it was humane to allow her to continue living the in the condition she was in.

Loosing two fury family members within 24 hours was unfathomable. Thank God for my Dad and all of his help and Dan for comforting me while I was on an emotional roller coaster.

 

 

This picture was was probably taken a couple months ago, but was a great one with both of them.