Clean and Christmas!

Thanks to encouragement from my mom I got the house professionally cleaned yesterday. It was so nice! It is a lot of work though getting ready for them to clean - I got very organized and even found some long lost toys! I decided to take a couple pictures since I don't think I ever did with all our stuff in the house. Sorry they are so dark. I even tried to lighten them up on the computer and it didn't help much. 

The dining room (or play area) and entryway.

Living room.

The hallway leading to the bedrooms. For this season of our life I am loving the ranch style house!

Our bedroom. We were just saying last night how much we loved our bedroom set. It was very much worth the wait (yes we had a double for the first 8 years of our marriage and 2 pregnancies).

Jacob's room complete with a tired baby!

I love my large laundry room!

We also got our Christmas tree this past week. Chase has loved everything about it - the lights, ornaments, etc. He has so much fun decorating. We also starting our advent calendar which has been a hit. 

Rest of the Weekend

Here are a few more pictures from our weekend. I loved having the help with Jacob! Tiana was such a good helper as well!

We had beautiful weather so we headed out to Cliffs of the Neuse for a couple hours. You always have to throw rocks in the water when the opportunity presents itself.

An attempt at a family picture!

We also enjoyed several bike rides around the neighborhood.

 

Chase has been to a couple Chuck e Cheese for a couple birthday parties and has been asking to go again so I promised him we would go when Tiana was here. They loved it but I think their daddies loved it even more. Kevin at one point even had to get more tokens.

We celebrated my dad's birthday with some frozen yogurt. 

You know you're the second kid when your parents use Sophie to balance your bottle!

At the frozen yogurt place you can pick your type of yogurt and toppings. 

The birthday boy holding J.

Thankgiving

Hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving! My parents, brother and niece came down from Maryland for the weekend. My first time responsible for cooking the meal. Brad took a huge load off of me when he decided he was deep frying the turkey. He did have to go to 4 different stores on Wednesday night to find the oil but he did it. He injected it with the cajun spices and it was so yummy!

The men enjoying the weather and cooking the turkey.

The spread.

After dinner we did our tree of thanks. We went around saying what we were thankful for and wrote it on a leaf. It kept the kids interested as they go to put all the leaves on the tree.

  I also got a turkey craft to keep the kids busy. We also watched a lot of football. 

I'd say that was a good day!

I'll try to post again soon of the rest of the weekend.

Jacob is 5 Months!

Little man is 5 months! We started cereal the other day. We are going slow....just giving him a few bites each morning to get him used to swallowing. With Chase it was much more stressful trying to get him to eat cereal because the doctors actually wanted him to get calories from it. So its nice not having to worry about that this time around. He just had his 4 month appointment and he was up to 17 pounds (67%) and 27 inches (89%). He is starting to nap in longer chunks and rolling all over the place. He is great at giving his toothless grins. We love this little guy so much!

Veterans Day Weekend

We actually did something fun this weekend to blog about! We enjoyed a three day weekend thanks to Veterans Day. Huge thanks to all those who have served and are currently serving. There is a squadron from our base that is gone right now and I think of them often as they are away from their family during the holidays.

On Saturday morning Brad and I went horseback riding. I had a groupon for it and since Brad had never been we thought we would be a fun date. Brad got assigned Vegas.

And I had Cindy.

We brushed the horses then got them saddled up and rode around the ring for a bit to make sure we could control them. Then we set off on a half hour trail ride. It was a nice day and the colors were beautiful. She gave us the offer to come back for a longer trail ride. We might just have to take her up on that. We both had a lot of fun.

On Friday we headed up to the Science Museum in Raleigh with some friends. There were a lot of animals to see and a 3-D movie on Tornados.

I think this was the highlight of the day for the kids - riding the escalator. The adults had to take turns letting them go up and down.

Jacob was there too :)

We have been reading several dinosaur books lately so I thought he would be more interested in the dinosaurs. He really wasn't. He also wasn't too interested in taking pictures. Oh well.

I just remembered I need to post Jacob's 5 month pictures and the pictures of the first attempt at eating cereal. Look out for another blog post :)