Christmas Vacation Fun

The morning after Christmas we piled the kids and boogie boards in the car and headed down to Satellite Beach, Florida, for three days. We fell in love with the place when we were living there for 3 1/2 months while Rick was doing a preceptorship at Patrick Air Force Base his last year of school. We forgot how much we liked that place. It is so beautiful and has great beaches!

Blake and Dad spent the entire time boogie boarding and had a blast. Blake is finally old enough to be out by himself most of the time riding along side Dad.Ashlyn decided that she wanted to try out the boogie boards. We figured this summer she'd be the same age Blake was when he learned, but tried to tell her she was probably too little now. She wouldn't listen and insisted on trying - her ride was short lived when a wave knocked her off. She was pretty mad about falling off and wouldn't try again.Instead she spent her time trying to out run the waves all weekend. It was the cutest thing to watch...she'd scream and laugh her head off, running as fast as her little legs would go.
Just like when we lived there, we'd spend a long day at the beach and then end up in the pool at the end of the day to relax and get all the salt and sand off!

Merry Christmas!

We hope everybody had a great Christmas. The kids had a blast opening presents, of course, and playing with all of their new toys all day long. Santa stopped buy and left a Hot Wheels race track and Play Station 2 game for Blake and a pretty Cinderella dress and glass slippers for Ashlyn. The kids had a great day - thanks everybody for the gifts that you sent.
The most creative gift goes to Uncle Steve and Aunt Lisa's family. They found a University of Oregon Mr. Potato Head doll for us! Our kids had no concept of Mr. Potato Head (how old are we???) but loved it and ended up fighting over it most of the day.

Christmas Eve

Christmas is finally here and boy were the kids excited today! Rick ended up closing the office early and not seeing patients past noon, so we decided to take the kids out to the island for a bike ride on the beach. We sure enjoyed the sunshine and 75 degree weather as our friends and families dug themselves out of snow!Then we headed home for dinner and the usual Christmas Eve traditions - reading a Christmas book, singing Christmas carols, watching a Christmas movie and reading from the scriptures about the birth of the Savior. Then the kids opened their one gift they get to open tonight. Surprise...pajamas! (Blake has already figured out that's what it'll be darn it.)
Then since Ashlyn is old enough now, we started the tradition of all the kids sleeping in the same room on Christmas Eve from when I was growing up. However, Blake commented on how lame that was since there was only 2 kids in the family. They couldn't agree on who's room to sleep in and who got to sleep on the floor, so they compromised and both slept on the floor in Blake's room.

I Stand Corrected...

...Blake DID wiggle his tooth enough before Christmas. Five dollars richer, he can now officially sing the popular Christmas song, even though he says he'd rather sing "Feliz Navidad"!

Graduation Here I Come!

Many of you know that I have been working on my M.Ed. in Reading through Georgia Southern University for the past year. We just completed registration for summer term and they posted the tentative class schedule for next year. Surprise - the two classes I had left were not going to be offered- at all! However, after talking with my advisor this week and him approving two classes to substitute for those classes, I'll be done July 30th! Hooray for me!!!!!

Remember to Thank Our Troops this Holiday Season

I heard from a friend about a great program that Xerox has of sending postcards to our troops who are serving overseas. Using the link below you can choose from a variety of thankyou cards that have been designed by school aged children and have it printed and sent out to one of our troops. It took about 10 seconds of my time to do...please take the time to visit the link and thank them this Christmas season for all they do for our country. Leave me a comment and let me know you participated in the program.
http://www.letssaythanks.com/Home1280.html

"Dog Barf Cookies"

After church today we made and decorated our Christmas cookies. At holiday time growing up we always made a ginger cut-out cookie instead of the normal sugar cookie. The first Christmas we were married I made them and Rick o-so-politely dubbed them the "dog barf cookies" because that's what he thinks they taste like. (I wonder how he'd be able to make that connection???) Anyways, they have molasses in them, which he hates, not that the cookies are gross. We've made them for generations in my family (it's my great-grandmother's recipe) and I'm not about to break traditions - so every year I make them and ever year he complains!
This is the first time Ashlyn's been old enough to help decorate cookies, or "paint cookies" as she called it. She did really well and didn't even make a mess.
Blake is very meticulous in his decorating efforts and creates a masterpiece with each cookie.Eating one after all the hard work is definitely the best part!

School Christmas Program

Blake's music teacher did an awesome job with the kids this year! It was so fun to see them up there singing and dancing and really getting into it. We had to laugh at Blake through the entire thing however - if they were giving out performance awards, he would've definitely won for most dramatic! He was singing so loud and dramatically and gettin' down with his funky self with all the dance moves. One of the songs I was laughing so hard I was crying! It's a good thing his spot on the risers was on the end, otherwise I think the kids standing next to him would've had a couple of black eyes and bumps and bruises from it all. It was even funnier when all of our friends from church, classmates' parents and staff members commented on it all afterwards. That's my kid!

Finally...

a gingerbread house that turned out! I've tried MANY times in my 30 years to make a successful gingerbread house and it has alway resulted in sitting and eating the broken pieces while chatting with everybody doing theirs. So I was reluctant when Blake bugged to buy the kit this year. Not having the heart to tell him they are next to impossible to build, we bought one. After putting up the walls and attaching the roof it all started to fall...that's when I broke the news to him that they're a pain in the butt, which he replied - "Maybe Dad should be doing this with me, momma." Fat chance. So we started over and held things a little longer to let them dry better and even watched "A Charlie Brown Christmas" before adding decorations to give it some extra time to harden. In the end I'm not sure who was more excited about how it turned out - me or Blake. Needless to say, I would recommend the kits rather than trying it from scratch!

Becoming a Real Southerner

Blake lost another tooth last night and looks like the stereotypical southern now with a bunch of holes in his mouth. Luckily his will fill back in though, but until then he looks pretty silly. The one next to it is loose too, but not enough to pull yet. So I doubt that he'll be able to sing the popular Christmas song about front teeth this holiday season. He refuses to wiggle them when they're loose and waits for them to basically fall out on their own. This one has been loose since the beginning of the school year! He's even had one that was loose long enough, that the new tooth was completely in behind it for a couple of weeks before he let Rick pull it. Needless to say, I don't think dental school is in his future! (Sorry about the scary picture, his mouth is sooo small that ya couldn't see the hole unless he made this awful face.)

Our Georgia Peach

Ashlyn and I are in the middle of cleaning house today and listening to Christmas music on satellite radio as we work. There were a bunch of kid Christmas songs in a row and then "I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas" came on....

Ashlyn- "Mom, Christmas music, please!"

Me - "This is a Christmas song, Baby. Listen, the guy singing is saying he wishes they'll have snow on Christmas."

Ashlyn - "Oooo, yucky! No like snow, brrrrr...too cold!"
(She's only experienced Georgia winters, how does she know this?)

Mom - "Don't you want snow for Christmas?"

Ashlyn - "No, I want go pool for Christmas."

Brrrr!

Okay...we moved to Georgia for the warm and sunny weather - where has it gone? We have had to COLDEST last couple of weeks with highs only in the 50's! There have been days where my sister in Denver, CO has been warmer and days where our friends in Flagstaff, AZ have been the same temperature as us! What is wrong with our weather? Everybody's been beefing about global warming...we're not seeing it here, that's for sure! We finally went out today and bought us all some slippers, our feet have been freezing with the cold temps on our hardwood and tile floors. This time last year the kids still had the slip-n-slide out, we were wearing shorts and still playing at the beach. Hopefully this weather is just the 3 weeks of yuck that we usually get in February and we'll be smooth sailin' from here - wish us luck!

Chattanooga, Tennessee

For Thanksgiving we headed up to my Aunt and Uncle's in Atlanta since Rick actually got the four day weekend off. The day after we stuffed ourselves silly we decided to head up to Chattanooga and take the kids on a train ride. The place was full of all kinds of restored steam engines and some they were still working on. The kids had a great time on the ride through the mountains.Then we went down to their river front park and rode the carousel and walked around. It reminded us a lot of Waterfront Park in Portland with the walking bridges and fountains. It even made us miss Portland for a second - but then we remembered we were walking around in t-shirts and it was then end of November!

Ashlyn enjoyed cuddling in bed with Great Grandma Woolhiser and Annabelle to watch tv in the evenings.

Back to 2 Eyes

Well, Blake has officially entered the world of contact lense wearers, we'll see how long he lasts. Since his 1st pair of glasses that he got the beginning of September, his eyes have changed again! (He can thank his Momma and Grandpa McDowell for that one!) Since he's gotten his glasses he's only been wearing them to school and church,but has gotten to where he can't see well enough for everyday things unless he's wearing his glasses. So he went with Rick to work this morning to check on a patient and Rick fit him for contacts - that's the beauty of Dad being an optometrist, he doesn't have to wait until he's old enough to take them in and out himself! Blake's excited to be able to see better when playing sports since he wasn't able to wear his glasses while playing football...basketball season is just around the corner!

Ashlyn's CTR Ring

Okay, so we have about as girly as a girl that we could possibly have - she loves wearing earrings, she has a bracelet and recently wanted to start wearing one of Blake's CTR rings that he never wears. So we put one on and she wore it for a couple of weeks until I finally had to throw it away because it was so gross - it was just the 25 cent cheepies. She was mad, but forgot about it....until yesterday when we were getting ready for church and she saw them in my jewlery box and insisted on putting one on. All was fine until after lunch today when she wanted to take it off, without asking for help, she used her mouth to slide it off---right down her throat!!! So we'll see what happens, she's swallowed pennies before, but a CTR ring?!! How do ya explain that one to the doctor? Needless to say, we're not letting her anywhere near a ring for a good long time!

Football Party

Blake has his last football game tonight for the season. This weekend they had their end of the season pizza party and got their trophies - bobble head ones! Blake's really had fun this year, but can't wait for next year when they strap on the pads and helmets....heaven help us!

Blake's Writing Assignment

I just had to share Blake's science writing assignment that he brought home today after studying about frogs. It was too cute! I tried to take a picture of it, but it didn't show up very well, sorry.


Frogs
by Blake Harrison

Frogs are near water and when they are little they even live in the water when they are tadpoles. They live near ponds always even when they are a frog! Some frogs you think are slimy. (I think that's because frogs have different scales.) Now of course there are different colors of frogs, but my teacher said that she only had seen two different colors of frogs. (which I think are brown and green.) There are different types of frogs like a tree frog and a bull frog.

For almost the whole frog cycle, the frog is a tadpole! Some frogs are poisonness. (pretty much just in the jungle in Africa.) The sound that frogs make is called croaking. Frogs hop just like the astronauts do on the moon, but not as high. They live in ponds on lilly pads all over the world sometimes. They have long tongues that they use to catch bugs. My mom once saw one in the laundry room in the middle of the night when she was getting water from the kitchen. When we moved to Brunswick there were two frogs that lived in my backyard.

Hikin' on the Suwanee River

Rick finally had a free Saturday that he wasn't working in Atlanta, volunteering at the clinic, attending CE conferences or voluteering at health clinics so we decided to take a day trip out the Suwanee River and do some hiking.

We quickly discovered that Ashlyn was not a hiker and she ended up riding on dad's shoulders for most of the excursion. She kept asking to go to the beach instead.Blake and Dad climbed off the trail to get closer to one of the natural springs that had been created by the river. Blake wanted to touch it to see if it was a hot springs....it wasn't hot, but not cold either. It was about 6 feet deep of crystal clear water.
Here the kids found a huge hollowed out tree that they played in. Ashlyn was pretty freaked out to go in a first because it was dark - can't say I blame her! Ya never know what kinda critters could be in there!Here we all climbed down off the trail to get closer to one of the swamps. The pictures don't do it justice it was beautiful out there, especially with the fall colors starting to change. We enjoyed it so much that we're going back in a couple of weeks to go camping and to take a canoe down the river!

The Loot

So the kids ended up with quite the haul on Halloween. They were determined to hit every house in the neighborhood and after 2 hours of knocking on doors came really close. When they came home to dump their buckets and head out again, Ashlyn decided she'd collected enough and sat down to dig into it all...Blake on the other hand went to tackle the rest of the neighborhood. Once his bucket was full again he only had one street left, but decided he was too tired to walk anymore. Here they are the next morning making trades with their loot. I don't know if Ashlyn enjoyed collecting and eating the candy that night more, or laying it out and organizing all over the living room floor the next morning!

Halloween Preview

Tonight was the ward's Halloween party. The kids were sooo excited to be able to wear their costumes a week before the big day. I have been crazy busy with school this semester so I didn't even attempt to make costumes.
Blake requested to be Tony Stewart, his favorite NASCAR driver. Once again, thanks to Uncle Marvin for introducing him to the sport. Needless to say, he still watches it alone each week.
Ashlyn was terrified of every costume I tried to try on her during many outtings to find her the perfect costume - I'm talking crying, trembling, the whole works. How many costumes for a 2 year old are scarey?? Anyways, with tons of coaxing she finally agreed to be a bumblebee. However, Rick made the mistake of asking her (sarcastically) if she was going to try flying from the roof. About every 5 minutes all night long she asked if she could go outside to try to fly!

Family Fun in Atlanta

Rick's sister and niece are here for a week and we decided to take them up to Atlanta to show them the sights. We were surprised when we left our high 80's to get their high 60's temperatures - it was freezing! Luckily we had thrown in sweatshirts because we were going to the laser light show that didn't start until 8 o'clock and it was outside. Little did we know we'd be wearing them all day, all weekend...brrrr!Here's Blake and his cousin Danielle hiking at Amacalola Falls in the Appalachian Mountains north of Atlanta. We were sad that the fall colors hadn't really started turning yet. That's something that we miss here at the beach.
Here's the gang on an old steam engine ride around Stone Mountain.
Behind us you can see the carvings on Stone Mountain - The South is proud of it's history. This is our little Mt. Rushmore with Civil War Generals carved into the granite mountain. We learned that the steps of the White House and the base of the Lincoln Memorial came from this granite mine. The lawn behind us was where we watched the laser light show (the biggest in the country).
We also toured the new World of Coke downtown. This was Tony Stewart's memorabilia that was on display - boy did that make Blake's day! The new facility was fun to tour, even though we'd been to the old one. They had a 4-D movie that freaked this kids out, your chair moved all around during the movie and things shot out at you. It was a blast! Blake's favorite part was being able to taste over 60 different Coca-Cola drinks from around the world. He tried all 60, minus the ice teas - I didn't have the guts to tast all 60! We all decided the African drinks were the worst!
We also took our visitors to the Georgia Aquarium. This is the viewing area for the whale sharks - these Grouper fish were some of the smallest things in the tank swimming with the whale sharks!

Our Travels....

I found this website that you can create a map and mark off the states you've been to. Here's where my travels have taken me...

visited 39 states (78%)

Here's Blake's...The crazy thing is that he had been to all of these states before his 4th birthday - now that's a well traveled kid!

visited 26 states (52%)

Here's what Ashlyn's looks like - she has some catching up to do!

visited 8 states (16%)

A Two Year Old Stuck in a Paraplegic's Body?

This is the way Ashlyn uses her baby stroller 90% of the time! She'll sit in it with her baby doll on her lap and wheels herself around the house like it's a wheelchair all morning. As for the cheezy smile, I'm not sure what's up with it...any time we get the camera out that's how she strikes her pose these days.

Math

I have been working on Blake with his math a lot lately. This week he's gone through regrouping with 3-digit addition problems with about a five second explanation. So I decided to see if I could trick him with regrouping subtraction problems. As he did the first one he realized that something was wrong because you couldn't have a negative number in the one's place. So it took another five second math lesson to explain the concept of borrowing from the tens place and he was off doing a pile of worksheets. As he left he commented, "Mom, you're never going to trick me. You can't even trick me with any times problems." My reply was, "Oh, yeah we'll see!" I then proceeded to give him a couple of multiplication problems - all of which he gave me the right answer to! When I asked who taught him that and how the heck he could do them in his head, his reply was, "Nobody did, it's easy...the first number tells you how many groups there are and the second number tells you how many are in each group." Holy cow! Needless to say, we've moved on to working with multiplication tables.

Georgia's Coast Fest

Today was southern Georgia's annual Coast Fest. Rick was at a conference all weekend, so the kids and I decided to brave the crowds on our own. We saw an amazing puppet show (Ashlyn's favorite), got to touch all kinds of marine life, watched Civil War reinactments complete with muskets and canons being fired, face painting, trolley rides, sharks to watch (Blake's favorite)....fishing boats to tour...
Snakes to pet - Blake's afraid of a fly, but jumped at the chance to play with the snakes, go figure!....
...sand sculptures to watch being made (yep, that's sand!)...
...tons of art projects for the kids to do....
...and an amazing Birds of Prey show that we sat on the front row for. When they flew the birds as part of the show they swooped down right over our heads - we could feel their feathers go by like a fan. One even landed right next to Blake! He's really been into hawks lately, so he was pretty excited. We had a lot of fun, but were sure tired at the end of the day.