ava's ((christmas)) program

Riding along in my... old fashioned firetruck

ava's preschool got to ride on an old fashioned firetruck today for donating a new toy to toys for tots.  as you can imagine, this was definitely the highlight of ava's day!


and.. ava has been carrying around baby Jesus from her new nativity set.  She took him to preschool for show and tell and ran up to her teacher and exclaimed "BABY JESUS IS IN MY BACKPACK!"  haha, never a dull moment with this one. 

christmas time! christmas time!

quick story about this train ^

i had been planning for months to get james a train for christmas that goes around the tree.  well, last saturday, i had finally saved and stashed enough money to order it, so i did just that.  it was to be delivered tuesday. 

well, monday night he comes home from work grinning from ear to ear that there's a huge package on our front porch.  i ran outside.. to find the train sitting there, completely undisguised.  to make matters worse, i went back inside for james to tell me he didn't know what it was.  behind his smile, i could clearly see that he was fibbing, so after i got done crying.. we opened the train and have spent every evening since playing with it.  the kids love it and so does james.  it's the polar express o-gauge electric train and it's pretty freaking awesome.

ups is apparently working 7-days-a-week, so it made it from PA to KS from saturday afternoon to monday evening. (just fyi!)

my husband is the greatest!  way to go babe, thank you for hanging our lights!

bronco weekend

we are thankful.

hello, fall :)

 aiden has started doing this thing.. and we call it "turtle face"

pretty self-explanatory...

random catching up!

 father-son bonding

 the kids showing off their ^carrots^

 once upon a time, i bought ava a blazer.  i took her outside to snap a few good pictures and she was a total brat sourpuss and would not cooperate.  then we tried to take a family picture and trying to get 4 people to look at the camera at the same time was impossible.  the end.