Final 2nd birthday party!

Every year (well for the last two years, but every year in the future) Lyd's final party will be after we celebrate after my family's Christmas.

My mom took Wilton classes at Michaels and has become quite the cake decorator.

She made Lyd's cake this year and it turned out so cute! I will tell you though that she had to amputate Barbie's legs to fit her in the cake and said "I dont know how Jeffery Dahmer did it"

The girls wore their poodle skirts for the third time and mom made Jess and Syd their own skirts and Brent and Will got all gussied up Greaser Style! Brent even went so far as to grease his hair back and broke out his leather jacket! They all looked great! Mike even found candy ciggarettes (I dont know if I spelled that right)for the boys to fold up in their sleeves!

Lyd opened more presents and half way through she left, I checked on her and she said "Bed". Poor kid wanted a nap more than presents! She did finish opening and believe it or not, right after she got her second wind and wouldnt nap for anything!

Christmas with my family!

We celebrated an early Christmas with my side of the family on the 13th. The kids got way, way, way too much from Grandma and Grandpa as they always do. This year was a bit of an improvement though, seeing as we did fit in the car to come home, unlike last year.

Instead of a huge meal we opted to do a big breakfast and it was a hit! Here is the whole gang before eating (minus me, as I was taking the pic).


Here are mom's 3 kids and our six kids...


Here are a few pics of the six kidlets opening their load.

and the big surprise gift of this year was mom's Kitchenaid, poor Mike had to haul himself and kids to the Marshall, IL Walmart on Black Friday and deal with some crazed line cutting lady to get this for mom. We all chipped in and she was super excited. She has been volunteering at a local food bank/kitchen and has been a baking fool making cakes, cookies, pumpkin bars and brownies every week, so the new Kitchenaid will come in handy.

I have had mine for a couple years and I love it still, heck I even did a scrapbook layout dedicated to my beautiful mixer. Hopefully, mom will love her's as much as I do mine.

Leaves

We had a warmish day last Sunday and the girls went outside to "help" Daddy rake up all the leaves!

They had a great time jumping in and out of the big ol' leaf pile! I was cracking up at Lindsay's huge smile!

aDORAble

Lydia's friends Truman and Addy (and Miss Aura) got her this darling Dora backpack. She loves Dora and her being on a backpack just made her super excited. She takes a backpack to the Y while I workout and as soon as she opened this gift and put it on she said in her tiny little Lyddie voice "Por da Y" (that's For the Y, in case you are fluent in Lydia-ese).

I dont honestly think I have ever seen the kids smile quite this much, she was thrilled to bits and didnt want me taking it off.

Christmas Party at the Museum

Every year hubby's work rents out the local children's museum for a Christmas Party, the kids love it. They feed us pizza and cookies and we get to see Santa (and this year Mrs. Claus) and then have the run of the place.

Also, check out Miss Lydia's sense of style. For her b-day Miss Kelli got her this adorable tutu and she had to wear it that day! It is awfully cute, dont you think?

Birthday Party Take 2 (aka my party).

My sister said her third party was "my" party because Lydia could care less about a theme, I really think that is wrong and that "my" party is her friend party that she has at home!

Alright, this is going to be picture heavy! We had her 2nd party on the 10th, because her BFF's b-day is the 17th, 2 days after her's so I bumped her party up to seperate the girls parties by a week.

We had a 50's sock hop and once I got going on this way back in August I was amazed at how much stuff there was out there to find for this theme! I found some adorable balloons at the local party store and some Christmas ornaments that were perfect for a Dec b-day party favor, plus blow up guitars and microphones and rubber duckies

I got some old records and melted them in the oven and those "bowls" held our goodie bags! The goodie bags contained a soundtrack, rubber ducky, pink M&Ms, tiny gummy cheeseburgers, hotdogs, cokes and fries, and some other candies. Each family got to take one ornaments home.

We had "cheeseburger, fries and shakes" as a snack, they were all sweets though, no real food here! I added to the diner theme by emptying out tiny bottles of ketchup and mustard and refilling them with red/yellow icing for the kids to put on their fries and cheeseburgers.

I also had a record tray of truffles, complete with little peanut butter records.

Here is a pic of her menu complete with special Lydia-centric prices!

The kids all loved dancing and playing instruments to Lydia's soundtrack and of course the girls got to wear their poddle skirts again, and this time I got in on the dressing up action!

My friend Sara, a super crafty gal, made this adorable posing board for us, it matched our invitation and all the kids (and some moms too) loved posing behind it. Lindsay and Lydia still pose behind it most everyday!

Cookies with grandma

Janet got to experience the joy of baking with 2 toddlers and had 4 extra hands to help make cookies for everyone!

The girls had a blast dumping and pouring all the measured ingredients into the mixer. They must have dirtied 10 measuring cups, because they each had to have their own and they each had to put in the exact same amount of ingredients. It is amazing how they seem to see that one girl may have gotten to put in one more spoonful of chocolate chips!

Anyway, the cookies were good, not as good as they would have been had Janet been uninterrupted but they did have lots of extra little girl love thrown in!

Santa Train

This was the first year that we were able to make it to the annual Monticello Santa train.

Oh what fun, we met up with some friends on the train and had a great time, well most of us did. Little Lydia and our friend Ian didnt like Santa all that much :D

For those of you who may not be familiar the Santa train is old fashioned pullman cars that drive through Piatt Co. and you get lunch (a PB&J with cookies, chips and Capri Sun... yummo!) Santa comes and visits each child in the car and gets and earful of wishes!

Lindsay was super excited to tell the man in red that she wanted an Easy Bake muffin maker (It makes real food MOM!!) and a My Little Pony Amusement Park... hopefully Santa comes through for her!

Lydia had no desire to express her Christmas wishes to Santa, she however was deeply in love with her bag of doritos, I think her face and hands were orange for the whole weekend!