Christmas Time

We thought we'd destroy the competition by being the first to post this year. Take that guys!


Early in the month the Canadian Pacific Holiday Train was cruising through the country, and we couldn't pass up that opportunity. Wesley loved it after we were back in the warm van watching videos of it coming up. It was cold that day even though the rest of the month was like summer. It also passed through Minot.


Legos are a very popular toy around this place. Sometimes one of the kids disappears during the day, which is suspicious since they are usually climbing and clinging all over her and whining. This is where Amanda finds them when they sneak off, where they can pull off all the hats and hair.


Amanda found a neato use for the boxes our Christmas presents came in.


It must get boring sitting around the house all day long all week long.


Wesley is very good at making faces.


There was some thingie where a couple dudes with model trains set them up at the garden so they could charge kids to watch them drive around. Wesley loved that too, if you can believe it.


Amanda organized a big gingerbread house extravaganza and even made the houses herself. It was lots of work and then only one person showed up. Oh well. Wesley said he had fun.


Here are the stockings all ready for Christmas courtesy of Grandma Heit.


This is how we spent Christmas Eve: at the office! How sad is that?


We also smidged over to the lights in the park. Wesley spotted this one before we were even in the park.


Christmas morning after Santa's visit! Too bad everyone was sick so they just sat there until 3 PM. That's even later than when we were growing up and our parents just hid in their bedroom for ages.


Eventually some stockings got opened. Look at all the Christmas excitement going on.


Mommy got lots of presents! She wasn't very excited either. In fact, she didn't even seem to have a clue what her presents were until after nearly all of them were opened. She still managed to build it all by herself though, so now she's excited. One of the first things going on was Railworks 3, courtesy of Uncle Randy. It's the best game ever!


Here is something for Reed to watch.


Wesley got a train table just like at the library! Hi wow and sto mon hun!


This picture pretty much sums up the Christmas prezzies. Be grateful kids because you're not getting another one like this, heh heh heh.


Too flesh out our Lego city, Amanda made a McDonald's.


And a library. Isn't it awesome?


This is what things quickly devolved to.


Here's Kate showing off her Christmas present for Mommy. Kairi can do it too but only Kate prefers it over crawling these days.

The End

Fall Funness

I was surprised that we didn't have this picture up here yet. This is the harvest of the carrots that we grew at our Epic garden this year. Sadly they only lasted about a month or so with our kiddos eating them up the way they did.

Right before our trip out to Minot, ND we went raspberry picking. Here is Wesley getting some goods. He really enjoyed this so much that he insisted we go back a second time and bring some along for the Minot grandparents.

This is near the start of our hunt for the juicy ones.

Kairi was starting to get grumpy since she couldn't pick any raspberries herself. This was our final product of our first trip. Chris turned the berries into a delicious pie for all of us.



Enjoy some raspberry picking fun!

See I told you we went to Minot. We got to do loads of things like visit relatives and parks and clean houses etc. Here you can see Wesley and Brie getting ready for a family reunion picnic lunch.

I bet you can't guess where this picture was taken! If I am correct it was at the Scandinavian Heritage park. We are standing under a giant painted horse. I am holding Katelyn. Kairi is on the stroller and Wesley is flying.

Speaking of Wesley the boy is absolutely obsessed with trains. They are his best friends, so we engaged in a train hunt with him in Minot. Here is a good shot of the girls and him and dad on a train bridge just before we caught a train passing underneath it. Let me tell you moving trains are some cool things.

As part of our vacation in Minot, Chris and I escaped one night on a date. We ate at Royal Fork, and went mini-golfing at some peoples backyard. That was one hard course! Then we went bowling and then came back in time to still put the girls to bed. Grandma seemed a little surprised, but I guess we are just fast at playing games and stuff.

Here are some goofs riding on a banana at the new office building section at that one work place.

Can you find the sleeping bear in this picture? This is at the Milwaukee Zoo. We really came here for the train ride, but the animals are cool too.

The train ride! Wesley says boom and wow, if you can't tell. I love the little jump.

Um. This is a picture of me. I may have finished writing a story that I started back in high school and published it. However, me being me, I still don't know if I like it. I go back and forth most of the time trying to decide if it's good or not. Chris says it's good. I do like the cover though. I took that picture myself!

Wesley insited on me making him a castle for his trains one day. He kept telling me that I hadn't made it for him yet until I finally got around to it. Here is what I made. Half the things I do with art projects are made out of our many diaper boxes. Ah. Diapers. Enjoy the classic Wesley smile.

Kate on the left and Kairi on the right are holding up their heads and almost crawling! So exciting, except that now it is a little old news. They are getting everywhere these days and it's tricky to keep them out of Wesley's legos (pictured somewhere below). They love walking and are getting close to doing that on their own. My fingers are crossed. Perhaps Santa will have them walking for Christmas then I wouldn't have to get climbed on so much. :)

All aboard! And tickets please. Three kids get a custom homemade train ride (practically every day) in diaper boxes.

Here we go! This has spurred Wesley's lego making creativity. One day he grabbed the bucket of legos which he used to only use for the cars we'd made him and started tinkering. For hours I heard that kid telling me "I'm making toodles!" Here is the finished product. He had to show "toodles" off for a few days afterwards.

Here are some of his recent makings. You can see on the left a train station with train tracks in the front. There are two trains and a hopper car and a windmill and a smoke stack...

Kairi here is giving you all a musical concert.

For our Halloween fun this year we went back to the pumpkin patch and rode the barrel train ride.

We played in a hay maze. Wesley loved that part.

And we floated some ducks down the ramps. This was another favorite.

You've got to love this smile face he puts on. :) Here he is playing in some corn kernels at the back of the maze.

This year he did such a good job of picking a pumpkin that did not have a pokey stem.

I signed Chris up to make a pie for our ward Fall Festival. He made a cool banana cream pie. It was the best decorated one out there. Sadly it did not win first place although I don't know why. It was tasty!

Ta Dah! People have been asking me for a picture of our halloween costumes. I sewed up some towel ducks for the twins to match one that Wesley already had and boom; instant costume. It was a little hard to keep the hoods on the girls head though. Oh and before anyone asks, Chris always does something random to his face around this time of year.
In my spare time, ha ha, in the time I took to be spare time, I made some office decorations for Chris since his place had only white walls. They're a little random and all of them feature hidden diaper boxes. Well except for the toilet paper roll flowers. :)

The End! I hope you enjoyed the quick post for our last two months of living.

80th Post Wowzers

Real food is what it's all about these days. Just like Wesley, they started off with Cheerios, which he was happy to teach them about.


Without his help they aren't so neat.



Then again, maybe he did teach them how to eat.


In July or so, Amanda decided to make some pies. First was a strawberry one, then a peach one, then we finally decided to get a picture with her strawberry banana cream one. Talk about yummy stuff!


Since Saturdays are the only day Amanda can get a break from three whiny faces, we have to go to lots of places. Aren't the rhymes in this post just sublime? First, we went to the Midcontinent Railway Museum, where we found a real ding ding sign out in the wild!


Then we rode Diesel (actually we were in a green car, so we were riding Percy), a 100 year old train that couldn't move faster than 5 miles per hour. It went in a straight line for twenty minutes, then they moved the engine to the other side and came back. I thought it was rather disappointing, but Wesley liked passing ding ding signs.


Here's some peeps on a train.


There was a big building with a bunch of train cars like dining cars and sitting cars and sleeping cars and other cars with dudes in them. This guy gets special attention. See if you can figure out why.


Once upon a time Wesley went to the zoo with his nursery friend Elsie. I wasn't there, so the end.


Another Saturday we headed up to the Dells. These guys might bring back some memories to some people.


Unfortunately, it wasn't the place where I stole the wood balls, so I guess I'll never know where that was and send them an apology. On the bright side of things, absolutely none of their futuristic technology has changed there in the last 20 years. It was great painting on a CRT touch screen and waiting 10 seconds as the color slowly sweeped across to fill the image. We did find out the Kinect was invented 20 years ago though, since we played soccer on it. Actually Wesley thought it was Start the Party, since that's his favorite game ever.

Oh no!


Uh oh!


Shoo! He still has his body! We decided to check out the Wisconsin Ducks before the kids were old enough to get charged money because then they would be prohibitively expensive, which may be why I never remember going on any ducks. They're trucks that drive full speed into lakes and hope they reach the other side before sinking, in case you're wondering what they are.


Then this weekend we made our annual visit to the Olbrich Garden. Wesley still likes the elephant.


So does Kate.


It was also craft week, so Wesley and Mommy made a papercraft Tardis. This is apparently his smile for the camera face.


It come out of nowhere!


Oh, and here are Katelyn's first words.


Bye. See you next August.