A visit with Santa

We went to visit Santa tonight. The girls remember this from past years and have been asking continually when we're going to Santa's "friend's" house. (Kenzie knows Santa lives at the North Pole, so this is just his friend's house). This guy does a great job! He tells them what time he'll be at their house Christmas Eve night, asks what they want (then tells them how many of that item he has left), then tells them he has a few extra surprise gifts & asks if it's OK for him to bring those as well, and lastly lets them know how many chocolate chip cookies we need to leave out & to leave skim milk as well. Pretty impressive, and of course the girls are hooked :)






Camden was impressed with the beard (not the least bit scared) and wanted to get a fistful of it!

Trimming the tree

We finally got our tree up last night, and the girls helped decorate again this year. I'm getting better each year at not worrying about where the ornaments go...as long as the girls are happy with it, I don't need to worry about it looking just right :)

Here are the girls with some of the ornaments. They got so excited over EVERY one they put on the tree!



Camden was happy just to play next to the tub that had leftover ribbon in it:



For some reason all of a sudden Mackenzie got mad about something, and boy did she get mad!



When we were all done, we put our train under the tree, and Camden wanted so bad to get his hands on it!! I literally had to hold him back. Today we actually put batteries in it & ran it around the tree & it was so fun to watch him get so excited over it & just sit & watch it. Eventually he knocked it off the track, but he actually likes to crawl after it & just watch it most of the time.

Christmas concert

Mackenzie had her 1st Christmas concert for school last night. It was just my kind of concert - short & sweet! :)

Unfortunately, Tom didn't really get any good pictures of Mackenzie on stage during the concert, but here's one of Mackenzie & her friend Nick afterwards:



Then, as I was looking through the pictures after I downloaded them, I came across this picture from last night as well, which I just had to share because it is "so Jenna" and I burst out laughing when I saw it.

Thanksgiving

I'm a little late with this, but thought I'd post a couple pictures from Thanksgiving. We went to NY to be with my family this year.

One day my brother-in-law took a bunch of us (Tom, myself, and 4 kids) on a gator ride. My dad owns a 6X4 gator (kinda like a 4-wheeler only bigger) & it can get through pretty much anything. Well, it had rained the night before so it was REALLY muddy, and we had a blast slinging mud like crazy!

Here's the road we started on:



Here's what Tom looked like after the ride (note how wet his pants are!):



And this is what the gator looked like when we were done:



We also got the cousins to attempt to sit still for a picture, which is always a chore: