Tea Party

Thank you Uncle Jeff and Aunt Jess for the fun toys! We had a great time at our tea party. Baby Jackson is a much more fun guest than the typical stuffed animals.

First Ponytail

Only ten months old but able to wear a ponytail. Such fun hair!

New Shirts

Thanks Uncle Jake for the fun shirts!

Ice Sculptures

While visiting Nana and Papa after Christmas they spoiled us by taking us to the Gaylord Ice Sculptures exhibit. It was a long wait to enter, but it was well worth it. During the wait Dani had many pictures taken. If you look closely at this one you can see her first two teeth. We discovered the second tooth (top second incisor) on the way home from this exhibit.



My only regret is that I did not charge our camera battery before going and it ran out of power in the first room. At least uncle Jeffy had a new camera and has promised to share his pictures in the future.

Dani and the tree

I have been asked many times how Dani handled the tree. We did not have any issues with her messing with breakable ornaments or being rough with the tree. The bottom layer had ornaments that she was allowed to play with. The first week she was thrilled to play with her new "doll" a plastic santa ornament. She also loved playing with the note and treble cleff bells and pointing at baby Jesus in the nativity ornament. Every time she saw a lighted Christmas tree she got very excited and had to see it up close.

"Gingerbread" Houses

Back in 2005, some good friends of ours invited us to make "gingerbread" houses out of graham crackers. Admittedley, that was my first experience in the contsruction of such architechual masterpieces.

This is Jaymie's house from that event. We know it is hers because almost every square inch is covered in candy.

This is my house, complete with marshmallow smoke and snow man. And squashed marshmallow in the front door. I guess there was some sort of tragic accident involving the testing of the malleability of marshallow men.

So this year we continued the tradition of building houses for Christmas. We invited over the most creative people we could think of to see what they'd come up with. They built a mideval castle, complete with serfs, gummy archers, and licorice drawbridge.

This is them holding up their creation making their best mideval warrior faces....okay well at least he made the face.

Close up of their castle. They must've come with a layout in mind as they rapidly laid their foundation and had their house mostly built while we still barely had our houses put together.

Jaymie made a more traditional style house this year as we had <1 yr old to wrestle with through the evening. Again, you can spot her house by the one that has every square inch covered in candy.
A beautiful model next to our houses.Close up of Jaymie's house. In the back left corner she even built o pretzel manger and had a full nativity set going on that even included a sheep.


My house this year was going to be a Hurrican Ike ravaged beach property. Instead it turned out to just be a beach house....ON STILTS! It turns out engineering stilts for a gingerbread house is not very easy.
In the back you can see Manitoba with his fishing pole, trying to catch his orange slice fish in the sea of blue coconut shavings. If only Manitoba were really here to see it...Thanks for starting a great family tradition for us!

Happy Birthday Sweety!

Thank you B. for watchin Dani for us so we could go out together to celebrate.