Merry Christmas!

We had a fantastic Christmas day! We stayed in our pajamas, played with all our new toys and ate candy all day long.

Here's Maddie with the Christmas bounty before we started to open things.

The frenzy begins!

Maddie helped John open his presents. He understood that they contained toys for him, but he liked someone else to open it while he watched on.

Those cheeks are so full of chocolate that he can't even chew.

Little John is fully capable of walking, has never seen anyone walking with two canes, but intuitively knew that he could balance on them to walk. Note the large piece of chocolate hanging out of his mouth.

A wonderful friend gave us all her Thomas trains and John played with them all day.

I hope Christmas brought you all great joy and happiness. It was so much fun here I don't want to go to sleep. We let the kids stay up until after 11 PM. We are probably going to pay for it tomorrow, but today was absolutely perfect!

Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve was calm and bright at our house. We slept in, then went sledding with one of Maddie's friends from school.

We had a nice mellow afternoon and I even took a nap. We started our family evening tradition by reading Luke 2 and using the navitiy set to act it out. Somehow this is a tradition in Maddie's mind, but I didn't know we were supposed to do it that way. We sang carols, watched Merry Christmas Charlie Brown and had cookies and popcorn for dinner. The kids were in bed by 9:00 and we followed shortly after that.

Preparing to shop

Last night the kids and I were going to run to Costco to pick up a few last-minute things. I'd been working on their pajamas for a couple of days. Maddie was dying to wear hers, so we thought we might as well put John in his. They got quite a few cute comments while we were shopping.

What can fall in twelve hours...

When we went to bed around midnight, Jared had gone out to do a pre-shovel on the 2-3 inches of snow that had fallen. By the time we were up and about the storm had ended. We had between 18-23 inches of snow depending on where you measured. The wind was blowing like crazy and created drifts that increased the depth in places.

Here's what it looked like outside our garage. There is a white-branched tree and some bushes that mark the end of our driveway. It took us over two hours to shovel it with both Jared and I working the whole time. We even had to dig out a place for the mail-man to reach our mailbox.

Jared decided to take some of the weight off the porch and got out the ladder. Our porch is raised up off the ground by about two feet, then has a waist-high railing on top if that helps to gain perspective of the snow piles.

The average annual snowfall for our town is about 30 inches. We may have gotten it all in one storm!

A little bit...

What did you wake up to this morning? We discovered something between 18 and 24 inches of snow. I'll get the official tally when we can muster up enough energy to go and shovel our 50-foot-driveway. It's going to be a very long task.

Thanksgiving Feast

We had a great Thanksgiving. Jared's parents, brother and grandmother came to our home for the week. It was so nice to have time to relax and just enjoy the holiday! I enjoyed making the food because we were not on a strict timeline and we just enjoyed the day. I got to stay home and nap with John-John while the turkey cooked and the rest of the family went for a drive. Everyone pitched in and helped get the table ready. It was just such a nice pleasant day. I hope to repeat it for many Thanksgivings to come!

Bubba & Pa visit

My mom and dad came out to visit and were here for 8 days. We had a blast. We visited New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts while they were here. I LOVE some of the pictures we took during that week. They make my all time favorites list. I've got a new Shutterfly page, because I'm a cool party host in a couple of weeks, but you can check out this entire album there, or look at the photo book that I made at this link.
Little John just loves his grandpa. Every morning he would run to the door, go outside and give Pa a great big hug.
We had a great time in NYC. Here we are in front of Dave Letterman.
Little John was a bit of a hassle in New York, but the Ergo was a very good tool to have on hand.
Bubba & Maddie loved Central Park. Watching the carriages was a favorite part.
We celebrated Maddie's birthday at American Girl Place. She's been wanting a doll for ages! Once she found Rebecca, she wouldn't let go of the box for even a minute. It was really sweet. We did the whole dinner thing and loved every minute of it. We took Bubba & Pa to Cape Cod. They had fun taking a walk on Chatham Beach.

Our last exursion was to Marble House in Newport, Rhode Island. It was a beautfiul home.

We're not dead yet

We are not dead yet, but this week definitely qualifies as the most sick my family has been in the 10 years I've been married to Jared.
This is Maddie when she was not sick, but begged to go to the doctor to make sure she didn't have strep. She didn't. It was one week later that she had a fever and has been bed ridden for a week.

Maddie got sick last Sunday, and hasn't really recovered fully even now, 7 days later. Her fever reached 104 on the meat thermometer(we don't have a reliable human one). Someday we'll get the one pictured below -- maybe Santa will bring it.

She's been fever free since Friday and I'm sending her to school tomorrow with the hope that she'll just work her way out of the hacking cough she's developed since then.

Little John has had a low grade fever off and on since Tuesday. His runny nose kicked in yesterday and has been a pleasure ever since.

Jared came home early Thursday and has been in bed for the last four days. He's starting to convince himself he's recovering because he has an experiment tomorrow he just can't miss.

I'm on the fence. I'm not at my best, but I'm not down for the count either. Here's to hoping I'm on the mend.

We're not sure if it's H1N1, but it's the most likely culprit. Some schools in our area have 50% of the kids out sick. Maddie's school had between 20-25% out last week. It's going to be an interesting year!

Another week of catching up the journal

It's time for another week of the little things in the life of a Patch.

Tuesday, September 8 -- What do you get from two silent boy toddlers? Missing keys on the keyboard of your laptop. A friend came over to work through some projects for church, and we had a great time chatting and getting things done. The boys were so good! It was perfect. After they left, I noticed the missing keys on Jared's computer. I about died. The worst part was that I couldn't find the letters at first. I thought the boys had swallowed them. How do you call up a friend and say, "I'm sorry, but I think your son ate the letter C from my computer. You might want to make sure everythign comes out alright." Turns out they hadn't eaten them, and I managed to put the computer back together. It was all OK in the end.

Wednesday, September 9th -- Discount London broil led to an attempt at marinated fajitas. Not all that great.

Thursday, September 10th -- Goofy children.

Friday, September 11th -- We had the Gray family over for dinner so that Jason could help us fix the balusters that I broke when I fell down the stairs months ago. So glad to have that finished!

Sunday, September 13th -- Yummy dessert! You know a dessert is good when the family doesn't even bother to get out plates. We ate it straight from the pan. Oh, it is so good. It's on the top of the list for desserts in our house -- the best part? It only takes about 5 minutes to put together -- from scratch!

Labor Day Fun

September 7 -- We had a great time on Labor day going out bike riding as a family. This is the first time Maddie has been out on a real bike trail. We headed to Bluff Point State Park in Groton. All in all we did about six miles of trails.

This was John's first time in the trailer. In the parking lot, he was a bit reluctant to be strapped in and closed up. We have to use the netting because we're on rocky trails and the rocks can get kicked up by the tires. Dirt gets everywhere. John was pretty content to sit back there and wave and smile a everyone. He didn't complain one bit after we were on the move.

Maddie LOVED biking. She kept begging us to take her on more biking trips -- before we had even hit the halfway mark. She's on a fairly inexpensive bike, the kind where you push back on the pedals to stop. Well, it's not made to stop on hilly trails. She nearly killed herself going down a hill -- I was behind her and could see that her rear wheel had completely stopped turning, but she was still going full speed and couldn't do anything about it. When we finally got her stopped, she was shook up, but said she still wanted to go biking some more. What a girl!

I can't get a straight on shot of John to save my life, so you get three side shots of his cute little face instead.

It was such a great day as a family. It's one where you just look around at how beautiful the surroundings are and how much you love your family and you think, "It can't be better than this!"

A Week of Enjoying the Little Things

Monday, August 30th -- The kids played on the swing set while Jared and I picked a bunch of tomatoes to use for our dinner.

Tuesday, September 1 -- We got a new entertainment center. The old one was gigantic. This new one fits perfectly into the corner. I love it!

Wednesday, September 2 -- John and I went up north to the Hartford area to check out some furniture that was supposed to be on sale. It wasn't a very good deal for us though. I needed some face lotion and so we went to the gigantic mall there. John loved the glass elevator. We went up and down several times. He was just fascinated.

Saturday, September 5th -- Jared painted our front porch. It was desperate and could wait no longer. He did a great job. John had a fun time watching through the windows.

Sunday, September 6th -- We purchased some new bar stools -- such a bargain! -- and John loved sitting on the boxes until we opened them up and put the bar stools together. It was a great climbing tower for him.

Catching up

Wow! I've been gone from blog land longer than I thought! I'm so far behind in posting our picture journal, I'll have to do some catching up!

So, some of the posts will be combined, rather than the way I was doing it before by posting day by day.

Thursday, August 27th -- I went to lunch with a friend at Olive Garden. We had such a great time. The kids did great and we were able to enjoy a nice hour chatting. After we left the restaurant, John jumped into the shrubbery outside the windows and tried to peek in at all the people eating. I was able to grab my camera out of my purse and get this cute snapshot of his mischievous behavior.

Friday, August 28th -- Maddie had her first homework assignment of the first grade. She needed to make a representation of herself to be posted on the walls. We were really proud of the idea for her curly hair. It's hard to see in the picture, but it's construction paper that we curled around a pencil.

Catch you later with more updates!