Tucking in

One of the few moments of joy and peace that we have is tucking in the kids before we go to bed... you know, fixing the blankets etc that hey have managed to entangle themselves in while trying to get to sleep.

We've seen a few really cute scenes during this time... this one I just had to take a picture of. A few months back Scarlett started refusing to sleep in her bed anymore and wanted a big girls bed. We didn't have a bed that would fit into the girls room along with Dotty's bed so we upgraded them to a full size bed we had in the garage. (and a mattress borrowed from grandma).

snuggling in bed

The boys on the other hand....

Video of the boys room

New bunk beds finally setup

We've been remodeling the boy's bedroom with new floors, closet etc. We finally got to a point today where we could setup the new triple bunk beds Grandpa Clines made us. You can see several things still a work in progress in the background but the boy are so glad to finally be on their beds and not sleeping on the floor.

Oh, and Suzi themed their room "Star Wars" - the classic version of course.

Henry on top, Peter in the middle, and Charlie on the bottom

Closeup of Charlie's comforter. 

Closeup of Peter's comforter. 

Closeup of Henry's comforter. 

View from the door to their room - you can see the R2D2 run in this shot

They're pretty happy about it

2011 Family pictures

Ok, I'll make 2012 a better year than 2011. Given that I only had two posts in 2011 it shouldn't be too difficult. I'll start off by sharing some family pictures we took back in December. They turned out pretty good - we went to a park near our house, there wasn't a lot of color left in the scenery so Suzi got creative and added a lot of color to us!

Dorothy's 4th Birthday Party

Dotty turned 4 a couple weeks ago and as such we had her first official birthday party. It was just her and a few friends but she had fun. We (really meaning Suzi) had a "Spa Party" where the girls got avocado facials, got a pedicure and manicure including very girlish paint. I'm not sure if the 4 year old girls really got it all, but at the end of the day they had fun.

Suzi even had special snacks, enough to feed an army, of tea sandwiches, crackers with apple and peanut butter, home-made strawberry lemonade etc.

I'm having fun..... really I am

Pinewood Derby

Henry participated (and really dominated) in his 2nd pinewood derby this past week. There were 19 cars racing and they had a series of 17 races where everyone got to race every other car on different tracks. Henry's car finished first in all the races except one where he thought it would be fun to race his car backwards! I forgot to take the camera so we didn't get shots of his excited antics during the races.

He really was much happier than this forced smile make him appear - he just loves to pose for pictures this way.

Closeup of his car and medal

Henry's car

Henry and Peter's Cars

Peter's Car

Christmas 2010

Christmas this year was really fun, I won't try to go into all the details but we did want to share a few pictures.

We did get the pictures of the kids taken - below are some of the best.

I could not resist adding Dotty's smile.

Suzi's tree looks perfect as usual

Suzi also made seven, yes count them seven, dresses this year. Of course the girls had Sunday dresses that were amazing. This is the front of Dotty's dress (of course it's all hand made, including the detail around the neck)

Here's the back of the dress

Scarlett's matching Dotty's

Dotty also made some fun matching dresses for the girls and the cousins.

(She made five dresses but we could not get all the girls to pose at the same time)