Potty talk

While I will save the pics for our family letters I wanted a write up about Caleb's latest milestone accomplishment.... the boy is potty trained! Not training - no pull ups, rare accidents, tells us when he needs to go... the boy is trained. He was by far the easiest of the 4 - it took two days :) Matt had gotten a couple of superhero T-shirts (Captain America and Superman) for Christmas and Caleb was one jealous boy. So I thought I would check and see if there were any little man ones in the Christmas sales. Sure enough.... so he now had Green Lantern, Batman, Superman.... these were all matching shirts and underwear. Since I had them I thought we would go ahead and give it a try. At first he treated them like costumes and kept changing from one to another. I didn't really think we would be successful so by the end of the first day I was close to giving up. Then that evening, he figured it out. He started running to the potty everytime - granted he was peeing right through his underwear but he was making it to the potty so I left it alone that night. The next day he was still doing awesome and starting to pull his underwear down :) I think he had one accident that day and only an occasional rare one since. That was about 10 days ago. He got really sick on the 3rd day but still kept up going on the potty. We are pretty proud of the little guy. This is our first time with (almost - he still wears them at night) no diapers in about 9 years!!

More sledding

This sledding spot is right between our house and the neighbors. It was the perfect spot for Caleb. He figured out that if he carried the sled on his head then he could do the whole thing on his own. He kept going for over an hour.

However, this particular sweet spot comes with one hard and fast rule - no sledding there without an adult.... See the road down there behind Matt? that is exactly where the kids go when they don't know to stop first. Matt is there standing guard and stopping any wayward kiddos. Like Hailey and Caleb.....

Igloo

 

The kids spent a long time helping me build an igloo around the picnic table after our "big" storm :)

Sledding

This is not what is looks like around our house right now.... this is all the snow from around Christmas. It has since completely melted..... We have a little hill in our backyard that the kids play on a lot but we thought we would go somewhere with a little more thrill for the bigger kids :) We just went to the kids school. It has some nice hills for thrills without being so big the kids (more so me)  whine about climbing back up it. Caleb absolutely loved it (he has some thrill seeker genes I think) but since we headed out just before nap time he didn't last long. He took refuge in the car with a movie and a juice box while the rest kept going.

Jackson was pretty excited that there was jump - jumps draw this boy like a magnet. Lucky boy to have a Dad that thinks said jump should be even bigger. I always tease Matt about being such a big brother :) Of course being the engineer he is he also outfitted the jump with a landing pad to soften the blow. It was a lot of fun. Made me miss the terraces we had for sledding when I was growing up.

Christmas letter 2012

 

Here is our Christmas card and letter for 2012 that I mailed out. If you didn't get one.... I'm sorry! Email me your address and I will put you on the list for next year..... as long as you promise to send me one in return.
I love getting Christmas cards!
We just went to the kids school and took pics with our tripod. I had planned on something grander but was pretty proud of myself for getting something out on time :) There's always next year. The kids enjoyed it for the most part - well, they enjoyed the goofing around between attempts anyway.  When we got home I tried to take a few more with a picture frame. The older ones thought that was pretty funny - Caleb on the other hand would have nothing to do with it. We tried to get him in one by holding him there..... that pic didn't turn out very well :)

Tree Cake decorating

One year Matt found this awesome tree cake at a local grocery store (I probably blogged about this in previous years) so we have added it into our Christmas traditions. It comes in a circle with 8 trees. So we each cut a tree slice to decorate. This year (it's out third year doing this cake I think) we decided that we would just go ahead and buy the cake pan to make our own since we plan on keeping it as a tradition. So the cake in these pics is homemade :) I didn't take a pic before we cut into it - oops. It turned out really well. The kids love to decorate and eat their trees.

Christmas Day 2012

Everyone was pretty excited about their presents :) They do a gift shop at school here called "Santa's Secret Shop" that the kids can buy Christmas presents at. So I give them some money to get presents for each person in the family. It's always pretty entertaining to see what they get and to see how excited they are for that person to open it. They do a really good job getting things they think the other person will like. Matt took Caleb to the $ store to get his family presents - that didn't go over so well :) We almost didn't do it since we didn't think he would even realize he was left out of that loop - guess we should have gone with that initial hesitation. He wanted EVERYTHING for himself :)

Hailey has been asking for play make up for months so we got the girls a little for Christmas. They were very excited and so proud of themselves. This is not a battle I feel prepared for. I have NO idea how to decide an appropriate age to wear what kind of make up in public...... guess we will tackle that as it comes.....
Once they played with presents for awhile it was back outside for more snow and sledding. We have really enjoyed the snow this year. It doesn't seem like we got all that much last year but maybe it's just that this snow came over a holiday when we all had a chance to play in it.

Christmas Eve

 

Here is the tree with all the presents (those are the Santa presents in the front). Every year I think I'm doing well by not getting too many presents..... then once it's all wrapped and in place I think - Wow, I need to buy less! Maggie even said it was more presents than she needed. She wanted Santa to leave her a present to give to someone that didn't have one. Kids are pretty awesome.
I didn't make all those cookies.... some of them were friendly neighborhood drop offs. Thanks to them for helping fill out the Santa plate :) Jackson thought we should have three cups of milk for a thirsty Santa (Matt, Jackson and I) but I said Santa could get cups and share if he wanted to. Jackson has been an elf helper since he asked about Santa in 1st grade!