Piper's Birthday Party

We had a great party for Piper's birthday and took advantage of having some extra space to invite the entire family this year. Unfortunately it's a little too much for Piper to have everyone over on her behalf at once, she was overwhelmed and tried to hide for most of her party. Next year we will have to keep it low key for her. Jason, Reagan and I had a great time though getting to see everyone. After the gifts and cake a bunch of us headed outdoors to do some sledding.

It looks like Vienna is trying to tell Grandma something.

Reagan and Aydan sharing Niki's lap.

Silly Reagan

Piper's new hat, it's so cute on her.

Brecken just keeps getting cuter and cuter.

I loved watching all the kids navigating the snowbanks.

Brecken didn't really enjoy being outside that day.

Holly had a turn trying on the new hat, actually we all did at one point.

I wish this one wasn't so blurry, Vienna's actually looking right into the camera.

Piper got a new workbook, after everyone went home she started trying out all her new gifts. She loves practicing all her new reading/writing and counting skills, these workbooks are great.

She got a new art table, the girls were pretty excited to try this one out.

Heather and Austin sledding.

Shawn and Liam.

Geof and Kaiden racing down the hill.

Christmas Day

Christmas Day! We were finally starting to feel more like our normal selves. We didn't get to have Grandma and Grandpa Kocina along with Claire and Clayton over for breakfast as our usual routine as they were trying to avoid all our flu germs before their Florida departure. We can't say we blamed them at all but it sure was quiet with just us four. This was our first Christmas in our new house and Santa must have found our change of address card as he made his appearance sometime that previous evening.

A new sled from Santa, now the girls each have their own. They still prefer to double up in one sled though.

New necklaces

New sheets

Another art project for Piper and a new jewelry box for Reagan from Piper

Jason thought of slot cars for Reagan - man I loved these myself as a kid.

We finally got to leave the house, Reagan thought she'd catch up on her People magazine reading during the drive...

Piper thought she'd catch up on her zzz's.The allusive picture of all 4 of the girls where no one is crying - it can be done, but can we ever get them all to look at the camera at the same time???? These were the closest we've come so far.

After a very delicious dinner (my first real meal since Wednesday) we got to open presents!

We had a surprise guest during present time.....

Santa showed up for a quick hello.After his quick hello and shocking the kids he ran back out the door but stopped to wave in the windows on his way to the next house.

The kids were not expecting a house call from Santa and weren't really sure what to think, they were kind of in shock.

Vienna went with the candy cane earing

to show her festive sideAfter opening all their presents the girls were tired out and decided it was time to hunker down with a movie.

Piper had been asking all summer for a scooter and one finally showed up from Uncle Bill and Aunt Niki for Christmas. Both girls got one and were so excited, Jason put them together for them the next day and went crazy on our wood floors. I had them put them into the garage for springtime and they weren't too happy with me.

They must have thought it was spring already the next day. Both girls took their scooters out into the driveway as soon as they saw sunshine. Reagan was highly upset that her wheels didn't spin in the snow. Piper understood that they only worked in the garage where there wasn't snow and tried in vain to explain that to Reagan. Unfortunately Reagan is going through a phase where you can not reason with her. She starts a meltdown and there is NO stopping her, you just have to walk away and wait it out.

Christmas!!!

We had a wonderful time having Christmas (a few days early at Mom's). Our week has been interesting, Wednesday at Mom's, Thursday is another story altogether which I'll save to the end of the post. We had such a tough time finding a date where we could all make it so a Wednesday evening it was. We had turkey a la king for dinner and then on to presents. We drew our adult gift inspiration from the letter "N" for Niki thinking the letter N would be easy inspiration for shopping on a limited budget. Not really! Mom got creative (which I ended up happily bringing home pj bottoms "nightwear" and both Bill and Jason picked up whatever they could find on the way to dinner. None of us really minded though, all of us but Niki were happy with our gifts. Poor Niki ended up with Jason's remote control helicopter, I don't remember how he translated that into "N", new toy??? Anyways, the kids had a blast playing together even though Brecken was a little on the cranky side for the first half of the evening and loved their new presents.

Camera hams

Always trying to get a shot of all 4 of them where someone is not crying or running away.

Ealier in the week Reagan and I stopped at my Mom's Club party, we walked in the room and Reagan shouted "hi Santa" with a great big wave. She has really started coming out of her shell. Well after getting our coats arranged we headed over to the big guy and up on his lap she went. It was cute, they had an entire conversation but every time she saw I had the camera in hand she turned to smile as if she were a professional model. Silly girl.
Brecken still has problems focussing on her own gifts, she was more interested in everyone else's. It's pretty cute to watch.

Piper's 1st Zhu Zhu pet, she has been asking and asking for these things. I haven't paid much attention but they are really cute little toys. Maybe I'll have to actually let the girls take me down the toy aisle from time to time to check some of these things out.

Grandma got her an art set with some sketch pads, which she spent hours using the next day.

Let's see how many girls can fit into a foot stool.

Ring around the rosie is one of Brecken's favorites and the girls are all too happy to help play a few rounds.

I was blown away by Grandma's gift, she made me a gorgeous quilt. I took it out and said "it's so pretty" to which Mom replied, that is exactly what you said when you saw the fabric at Grandma's last summer. I don't remember that but I guess Grandma did, lucky me!

Reagan and her Tangled doll, she is obsessed with anything from that movie right now.

We had a great time Wednesday and were all excited for our Friday and Saturday activities but come Thursday morning Jason woke up riddled with a terrible cold and spent most of his day in bed. Reagan and I were fine and ran some errands but Piper kept declining going outside, to the grocery store, to do just about anything. I didn't realize until around dinner time that she wasn't looking quite right, she was pale and developed a fever. We all sent her off to bed hoping she'd be fine by morning. Well the stomach flu hit her first, then Reagan, then myself all thourought the night. Jason was our superhero taking care of all of us while not getting more than 15 minutes of sleep at a time until around 8am the next morning when the girls and I all stabilized and camped out in our bed sending him off to get some much needed sleep. Needless to say we spent the entire day Friday in bed recouperating not even realizing that Mom was also stricken with the same bug at her house. We didn't get to do our traditional Christmas Eve with Jason's family going to church and enjoying our fondue dinner at his Aunt and Uncle's and Mom and Tim didn't get to enjoy their trip to see his parents in Omaha. Bummer! Saturday we started feeling a little more like ourselves but decided to skip our outing to his Grandparents in Glencoe so we didn't infect his entire family. We waited the 24 plus hours past the last symptoms and then finally headed to Dad's for dinner. That will be our next post. Christmas just isn't the same without all our traditional family get together's, we really missed seeing everyone!

Winter, yeah, I'm over it!

We knew we were going to have an adventure and there would be a learning curve to winter out here. Who knew our first winter here would start with a bang? The first snowfall we didn't have our snowblower. The second major snowfall was a doosey, dumping over a foot at once coupled with a raging wind and very cold temperatures. Luckily this one hit on Friday/Saturday because we were stuck! We tried to remove the snow as it came but the wind just blew it right back and by the next morning it was packed solid in knee to shoulder high drifts. Our township couldn't even get a regular plow threw our street up to our driveway, they had to find a guy with a thrower to come out. Luckily he did not work for the town and was willing to let us hire him to dig us out. He was our hero that weekend! Now, with the latest snow, my car refused to get up the driveway after only 2 fluffy inches of snow. I ended up getting it stuck pretty deep and plowing a good portion of the yard to get it loose only to end up sliding deeper in before using some not so pretty language and giving up to let Jason give it a try. He got it out only to get it stuck in another part of the driveway and I had him try to push me with his truck, well his truck is taller than my car and took out one of my tail lights. Now my 10 year old car with the non-matching gas cap cover has one head light missing and a tail light broken into pieces. It's starting to look more and more like an old clunker each day. I am cranky about the month of December and am hoping January will be milder.

A view looking up the driveway. The big drift on the right was just below my shoulder height.
From the top looking down, there were parts of our cement still showing after the big storm, the wind just kept making drifts in odd places.

Our hero. I really admired his snow equipment, it looked like a lot of fun!

Piper couldn't wait to get out into the fresh snow only to realize that she was going to keep falling through. Neither of the girls have braved sledding since this storm, trying to walk up the hill is too much work for them. I tried to clear them a path but only made it half way up the hill.

Jason standing in front of the snowpile he made while trying to dig his truck out.

Jason took his truck down the driveway during the snowfall only to reach a drift and come to a stop. After 15 minutes of being stuck you couldn't even see the tracks behind him, the drifts had filled in that quickly. We've just decided if we are expecting snow than one/both of us are parking near the bottom of our driveway as it's much easier to blow/shovel the lower portion out if we need to get out and about rather than being stranded another 1/4 mile up the road.