Wednesday, November 28, 2007

Happy Week After Thanksgiving!

(Please click on the photo to see more pictures.)

We hope that everyone had a great Thanksgiving. We sure did. We spent Thanksgiving day up at GnGT with DLCnM and Great Grandma and her friend, Gloria. We all ate way too much food, except, of course, for Jake who is attempting to survive on bananas, raisins, and cereal bars.

On Friday we headed over to MPnA's and spent the day with them. They had hosted a dinner at their house the day before, and were more than happy to just spend the day relaxing.

Rewinding back, a bit... on Saturday, November 17, we met Bret and Jen in East Lansing for the final MSU game of the season against Penn State. While Bret got sick and didn't get to stay through the whole game, the rest of us saw a thrilling game where MSU came back from being down 17 points and won the game!

A few days later, our friends had a big day. Jeff and Marie had their baby girl, Adela. You can read all about it in their blog here, and see their photos here. She's a cute little girl, and her parents couldn't be happier!

Fast forward to the weekend after Thanksgiving... after Jake went down to sleep, Michele and I put up our Christmas tree. We had both forgotten how nice and thin the artificial tree is that we bought last year, so we were pleasantly surprised. Jake awoke the next morning and was so shocked by the whole thing that he ended up laying back down. When he got up an hour or so later for round 2, he started to get into it! We got him dressed up and spent about the next 30 minutes trying to get a photo for the Christmas card. Luckily, this year, I didn't have to do any major editing to splice multiple photos together like last year. We found that getting him to count to three resulted in a great looking smile when he said "three".

I've also got three different videos to share with you this time (the feature is getting more and more use on our camera).

This first video is of Maiya playing happily with a couple of plastic golf balls. I can't believe how fast she's growing up, and her laugh was too cute to only capture some photos. Everyone was a little jealous because she really seemed to take an interest in me this time. I even got quite a few kisses that everyone else had to beg for!


This is a video showing Maiya chowing down on table foods. I would have videoed Jake, but it would have been him shaking his head, saying no, and then screaming if we forced the issue.


Lastly, this is a video we captured a little before Thanksgiving. Jake was having a blast splashing in the tub, so I thought I'd get it on video. What I didn't know was that he was going to bust out into an anatomy lesson. Make sure you have the sound up, and watch to the end. I'm thinking of submitting it to AFV.



Sunday, November 04, 2007

Welcome to November

(Please click on the photo to see more pictures.)

Regardless of how much fun we have traveling locally or far to see friends or family, sometimes it just feels good to stay home. That's what we did this weekend. We still go to see family as my parents and Alison came down to watch the football game on Saturday. We were very excited for a little bit in the fourth quarter, but eventually UM came back and beat the Spartans. Luckily, that pain was dulled on Sunday when the Lions demolished Denver.

Aside from leaf-work, I think I performed the last of the yard work for the season. After I spent a good part of the afternoon finishing that up, while Jake and Michele played outside, Jake pretended to mow the lawn as well. One of us did a pretty good job. You can see his attempt below. (No one bothered to film my work... oh well).

To my fellow Spartan fans, while the football team is now very close to not receiving a bowl bid, at least their hockey team is undefeated in CCHA conference play, and have only lost one other game outside of the conference!



Thursday, November 01, 2007

Happy Halloween

(Please click on the photo to see more pictures.)

Jake had a lot of fun in his costume this year. Like Michele has told anyone that would listen, the $20 was definitely worth it. Not only are we not as creative as Nez, but in the fall Michele doesn't have the time to make a costume either. Jake looked so adorable it was totally worth it.

We took him to a few neighbors houses where he got a couple goodie bags (we did not know that was customary, so we'll have to bust our butts to make our goodie bags next year make up for not having them this year). He then spent a good chunk of time playing on the porch, eating a banana, and helping hand out candy to the other kids.