Home For Christmas

I hope everyone had a great Christmas! We have had such a nice time being here with all our family around for the Holidays. I am so thankful to have been home for Christmas. Mason has received soooo many gifts! Dominic had to put up more shelves in his room just so we could organize it all. He has been having such a great time playing with all his new stuff though. He even likes to put on his Santa hat and dance in the mirror. If you ask him what Santa says he says "uh oh ho!" It's too cute.Happy New Year to you all! I have a mess to clean (we just finished another Christmas) so I'm not going to say much on this post. I'll just put up some pictures for you all to enjoy. :-)

Did that really just happen?

I just felt the need to let everyone know that the winner of Survivor Samoa that was announced last night is the most ridiculous thing I've heard in a long time. Usually, the right person wins, but this time the jury got it all wrong and awarded someone who did NOTHING in the game. Russell deserved to win. Period. And that's all I have to say about that. :-)

Two, Five, Six!

I'm sitting here listening to Mason put himself to sleep by counting. He keeps saying "Two, five, six!" He is too sweet. :-)

I have about an hours worth of dishes to wash and I'm trying my hardest to put that off. Am I succeeding? Ha! But really I wanted to get on here and put up a few recent pictures for those of you who may not have seen these yet.

Mason's new thing is to play in our shoes. It's so cute to see him try and walk around in Dom's size 16's. He has a while to go before he can fit into those. (Hopefully)!
He still LOVES anything musical. His great Aunt Cheryl bought this instrument set for him for Christmas. YES it has a drum and NO it doesn't annoy me! I love listening to him create his very own music. Maybe it's the 6 years I had teaching 3 year old preschool that allows me to tolerate the noise.... or maybe it's just that anything he does is precious to me. Aw!

We bought Mason a gingerbread house kit to go to town on and decorate however he saw fit. Other than the icing that's on the roof and the icing on the ground with the sprinkles, he did this all by himself! He was very particular where each piece was going. (I wonder where he gets that from)! And he only tried to eat the candy twice. He really did such an awesome job. We made quite a mess that night, but it was all worth it.

Ok, well I suppose I can no longer put off these lovely dishes. And by the way I have no idea why the paragraph above is in a different color. You can tell I'm new at this! I hope everyone has a great weekend. Dom has tomorrow off so we are finally going to do our Christmas shopping. Why do we always wait until the last minute?!
Toodles.

My First Attempt

Hi all!
I have decided that it's time for me to start a blog. It's so hard to keep up with keeping everybody updated so I figured this would be the best way to do it. Be patient, I'm new at this! :-)

As most of you know, we moved back home to Illinois at the end of September. I love being back around all our family and old friends. I do, however, miss our friends from the Detroit area. Living there for 10 years we made friends that we call family and not being around to see them all the time or talk to them can be hard at times. If you are one of those people, we love you and miss you and can't wait to see you again! Thank you for all the years you stepped in as 'family' to us when ours was so far away.
Well as you can see, Mason didn't much care for good ol' Santa this year! He actually thought he was pretty cool when Dominic was holding him, but once he was placed on Santa's lap it was all downhill from there! The photographer lady said to me 'are you sure you want to buy this picture?' I said absolutely! This picture is classic and I will be glad we have this years from now.

We are doing great. I'm looking forward to being home for Christmas this year. We haven't been with family on Christmas since before I was even pregnant with Mason. It's long over due.

Today we spent the day with my Grandma and Step-Dad Neil. Mom dropped them off on her way to work and she came back after work and had dinner with us. Mason sure loved having everyone around! Him and his Grandpa Neil were jamming up a storm with their harmonicas. Somehow Mason ended up getting him to actually GIVE him the real one to keep! So now he has 2! Grandma and I played some cards while Mason napped. She beat me (of course) at one game 5 times. At that point she said let's play something else! I ended up winning at that, but I'm not totally convinced she didn't 'let' that happen! I wish Mom could have been here for the whole day with us, but it was nice to just be able to have her come here for dinner. All this family time is something that we're not used to since we lived so far away from everyone for 10 years! I love it. I love being able to see our families whenever we want. I love being able to have them be a part of Mason's life. And I love the feeling of belonging.


Well, Mason has now gone to the snack cabinet 4 times. I suppose that means it's time for me to get off of here before he actually manages to get something open! If he was so hungry he should have eaten his dinner! And that, my friends, is a story for a whole different blog some other day. :-) I look forward to everyone checking this out from time to time to see how we are doing. It's time to go sing a 'night night' song to my lil' man and kiss him goodnight. Toodles.