Charlie's Cookie Decorating Birthday Party

We had some buddies over to play and decorate cookies.  Happy 2nd birthday to our Charlie Man.  He is fun, sweet, spunky and loving.  Charlie certainly brings a lot of joy to our family and I can't imagine one day without his sweet smile and loving spirit!

Advent

I got the idea from a friend and most of the posts you will see regarding Christmas events we are doing will be on this calendar.  We have our regular advent calendar up and the boys are loving taking turns putting the ornaments on the advent tree.  We also added this advent calendar to our daily events.  Each day has a fun activity from choosing our tree to Christmas plays and going out to see lights.  I hope they love it and I can't wait for each different activity!

Christmas Tree 2013

We went to our favorite tree farmer (of course he traveled here from western NC) to find our tree.  Samuel of course loved running through the trees.  The first one he stopped at is the one we chose, but quickly after he found our tree he walked to another tree (about 2 feet taller and $100 more) and declared that that was the most perfect tree ever.  Way to go buddy in finding our tree this year!  We love it!

Thanksgiving

Ryan's parents were here for Thanksgiving this year.  We had a great time being together as a family and certainly have much to be thankful for!

Alan hasn't missed a Thanksgiving in Mississippi in forever so we decided a night in MSU PJs would be just the thing to make him forget that he was in Wilmington.  I think the boys were pretty happy too!

Samuel and his class had a little Thanksgiving show.  It was so cute and so fun to see Samuel participate with great enthusiasm.  

After breakfast on Thanksgiving morning the boys painted some wooden trains I got several weeks ago. It gave me a chance to do some cooking and parade watching and for Ryan to hang out with the kiddos for a few minutes!

Taste testing the paint.  GROSS!

Charlie decided he made a better canvas for the stickers than his train.

Taking pictures for the Powells!  Charlie LOVES to hug Henry and below is what it always looks like, a head tilt with arms wrapped around little brother.

First year for the kids table!  I look forward to many more years of this.  It was amazing how loud the noise was around this table, but they had a great time!

Aljuane Graduates!

Aljuane is a college student that goes to church with us.  We have essentially adopted her into our family.  She loves our boys and they love her.  Every Wednesday we know she will be coming to hang out with our family, join us for dinner and most likely family game night.  We love her dearly and are so thankful for her.  Aljuane graduated from UNCW on Saturday and we had a party at our house to celebrate her.  So blessed to know such a wonderful young lady and we are so thankful that she is a part of our family!

We had a photo booth and others took pictures, but these are the only ones I got with my camera.  The kids had a great time!

Carolyn and Chloe (she is the cutest little girl!)

The lady of the hour!

Every Day Life

Well life has definitely kept us busy.  Between adding Henry to our family and all of the holiday activities I find that I have time to snap pictures here and there but I don't sit down and take them off the camera to share with everyone.  Here is just a little sampling of what our day to day looks like.  I will try to get holiday pics up soon!

Samuel and Charlie LOVE to hold Henry.  Often I have to move him from one lap to another every 10 seconds or so.  They are good big brothers!

Charlie hiding from me while we wait for daddy.  He loves to scream "found you" when he moves his hands away!

Morning photo shoot with my littlest dude

That one day when you look down and realize he has grown so much...yeah that happened this morning.  I snapped a few pictures so I wouldn't forget these sweet days!

Charlie shared his shark hat with Henry.  I guess he thought it was too cold in the house.

Just chillin and waiting for our friends to get to the house.