The Day After Christmas

While the boys were all supposedly at the driving range, we took the kids to the bouncy playground to burn off some energy.

Eavan loved the big slide -- and could climb up the ladder nearly by herself!





Anna gets silly

Carter and Anna get silly together

All the cousins get silly!
(Our sad attempt at a group photo)

And where were the boys, if they were not at the driving range, you ask? Since the driving range was closed due to the snow, they had to make do with sampling (a lot of) drinks at a local watering hole, or so I hear. Apparently a good time was had, and they didn't freeze to death on the walk home, so it was a good afternoon!

Christmas 2010

Christmas morning before the chaos. As Patrick said:

Respect this mantle! Eight hand sewn, sequined stockings anywhere from 5 months to 45 years old. All hung (with care) on the same mantle for the first time ever.

Carter's big present this year was a desk, complete with office supplies. When he saw the clip magnets on his hutch, the first thing he did was RUN to his room and get a picture of Mama Helen and Daddy Phil to clip on his desk!

Carter helps Eavan with her Santa gifts

Everyone enjoyed their gifts!



Even if Eavan mostly wanted to chew hers...

Carter liked to help everyone unwrap their presents

Right around the time we went over to celebrate with the other Fowlkes family, it started to SNOW!

Just look at this hefty accumulation we had the next day!

The Fowlkes

The out-laws!

Christmas Eve and Eve Eve

We had the Stegall side of the family in for Christmas this year. It was SO nice to have us all together!

We started off Christmas Eve with delicious lunch... and absinthe.

The waiter was very impressed, as he'd never had anyone order it before noon...



After lunch, we went to see Tangled, which Carter was terrified throughout and then loved afterwards (pretty much his MO for all movies in the theater). And Eavan got to "watch" her first Christmas Eve movie, too!

Christmas Eve evening, the kids opened their requisite Christmas pajamas (Carter hasn't yet learned that this is what his present will ALWAYS be on Christmas Eve).

I didn't take any pictures of the AMAZING pork belly Patrick made on Christmas Eve (that's a new tradition we're keeping, by the way), so here's a picture of the night before Christmas Eve when we made Aarti's Down Home dinner.

Snow Day

It wasn't really snowy, it was icy. And it wasn't even icy after about 7am, but school was cancelled anyway, so Carter got to spend some time at each of our offices yesterday. Below, entertaining himself at my office and checking out the melting fountain outside my office.







- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Good News, Bad News

From Carter:

I have good news and bad news. The good news is, after this story, I'm going to bed. The bad news is, I'm gonna come out here and say stuff to you a lot of times.

Gingerbread Time!

Thanksgiving

Just getting around to posting pics from our great thanksgiving!

Christmas Decorating with Mama Helen

Mama Helen was in town for a visit this weekend, which was perfect timing to help with Round 1 of Christmas decorating. Carter had a great time with her (he also enjoyed unpacking the decorations). Once today's boxes were unpacked, he gave us all medals and dubbed us the best decorators ever.

Injury, or Fun with Words

Every night, at bedtime, Carter has the same thing to say to us: "I can't go to sleep. I have too much INJURY!" (meaning "energy")

Then he holds out his arms wide:
I have THIS MUCH injury!

An hour or so later
I have THIS MUCH injury!

A half an hour later
I have THIS MUCH injury.

A little bit later
I have this... much.. injury.

And finally
I.... have.... this.... much.... in.....

Project 3

I'm blessed to have a husband with a similarly high tolerance for mess, and a similar love of organization.

We both hit our limits with the basement mess recently, which inspired Project 3: the great basement reorg.

I'm also blessed to have a brother-in-law and sister-in-law that are equal parts helpful, hard-working, good-natured, easy-going and practical. They are a lot if other stuff, too, but those characteristics best describe what they brought to our basement project yesterday. They also brought a few more things to store in said basement.

I'm not sure the photos really read, but trust that our basement looks 1000 times better absent the 8 bags of trash and donation haul we got out of there. Not to mention the stellar furniture and box origami that we all did.
 

Oh, and it's with mentioning that there was one other really critical factor in our success: a good babysitter!

2 Projects Down

Several of you asked what kind of projects we have underway as a result of our recent home improvement prioritization. We've knocked out 2: fixing our kitchen cart (which I had nearly rendered unusable due to the force exerted by my hand-crank pasta maker) and converting our WBFP to gas (for those of you who haven't spent hours scouring classified ads for apartments with a WBFP, that means "or wood-burning-fireplace"). We love wood, but, due to some poor design, the smoke from our WBFP went straight into the intake for the heat upstairs, where it blew into our closet, right on my hanging clothes. So, gas will mean more frequent fires and a less stinky me.

This weekend, we undertake project #3 (cleaning out the basement). Project 4 may involve a Christmas gift for Carter, so I won't speak of it here until then, lest he learn to read or one of you let it slip! AND we're getting estimates for our largest (and most highly desired) project, which may or may not happen, depending on the size of the estimates... We'll keep you posted!

Home Consulting

With most of our urgent home projects taken care of (big knock on wood), stable jobs (finally! and also knocking on wood) and no major life changes on the horizon, we've been feeling ready to tackle a new project on our house. But what to do? We've been tossing around ideas for a while, but were having trouble getting anything started.

So, last week, I ran us through a little home version of a prioritization workshop I like to do (usually at work). We brainstormed on post-its, consolidated our ideas, voted on our highest priorities, and then organized our ideas on a matrix by number of votes (on the X axis) and cost/effort (on the y axis). Our french doors came in handy for this part of the exercise!

We decided to ignore all high cost, low desire items. Then, we made a plan to do the highest desire, low cost items and to research the high desire, high cost items. At the end of one hour, we had a clear action plan with tasks for each of us. More on our progress soon!

Whiteside Mountain

In Highlands, NC for the weekend. It's a perfect day!











- Posted by T using BlogPress from my iPhone

Carter on the upcoming holidays

I really love it when someone else does my blogging work for me. Here's a couple of stories shared by Cart Cart about his evening with Carter earlier this week, with a few comments from me [in brackets]:

While reading the fire engine book Wednesday night at bedtime, about halfway through Carter interrupts and raises a finger in the air, and says, "Let's pause for a moment, while I call my parents." And reaches over for the broken cell phone, opens it, and has an imaginary conversation with both of you. Then he puts the phone down and says, "We can go ahead now."

In the car on the way home, he was talking about a lot of things, and especially that Santa had come that day [for pictures]. He remarked the best part of Thanksgiving is that after that, Santa comes. The following ensued:

Cart Cart: "Speaking of Thanksgiving, do you know what kind of meat people eat for Thanksgiving Dinner?
Carter: Yes.
Cart Cart: What?
Carter: Chicken.

Cart Cart: No, actually it's turkey, like the thing you made in art class today and showed me.

Carter: Do people go out and hunt the turkeys and bring them home?

[Its news to me that Carter knows what hunting is. Last time I indicated that something on his plate was an animal he adamantly disagreed, citing (as if I was crazy) that "It doesn't have eyes!"]

Cart Cart: They can, but they usually just hunt them at Publix at the store, and bring them home and cook them in the oven.

Carter: And after they eat that, Santa Claus comes !!

Clearly Carter has misunderstood my attempts to give him a way to think about when the Christmas season starts. If waiting for Christmas is any more difficult than waiting for Halloween was, we're going to have a long weekend after Thanksgiving - not to mention the month after that!

Thanks again to Cart Cart for sharing!

Halloween