One last entry...wouldn't you know

So Santa, John and I bought Austin lots of presents this year...and what is he playing with at 10:00am on Christmas morning????  cardboard, scissors and tape - he does love to make things.  Check out his Christmas loot and then what he had more fun playing with...

Merry Christmas!

Here's a few pictures of our 2011 Christmas...

Bathroom floor

John is becoming an expert at tiling.  His second tiling project is now completed.  See the pictures below.  We are both loving the improvement to our bathroom.  Next project is for him to tile our kitchen backsplash...hopefully tomorrow!

New Old Bed

With the happiness of new carpet in our house, comes additional changes.  I did not want to put Austin's current bed onto the new carpet because it would have left a large, squished rectangle on our brand new carpet.

When my Grandpa passed away, I was lucky enough to get the twin beds from his house.  We had put them in the basement and I had intended to give them to Austin someday.  Well, tonight we assembled one of the beds and bought a new mattress set for it.  This bed is much higher than his old one, so hopefully he doesn't fall out of it!

He's excited to be sleeping in Grandpa-Great's bed.  I'm lovin' it, too!  Seeing it everyday will be a great reminder of Grandma and Grandpa and the times spent with them in NY.

(yes that is Ellie UNDER the bed)

Christmas Cookies 2011

This holiday season has been full of excitement around our house.  Let's see...Ellie singing at the zoo for school, Ellie singing at church, Austin's basketball games, brand new carpet throughout the house, John tiling our master bath (it looks awesome and I hope to do a blog posting to share the before and after photos...), and oh yes, the regular Christmas fun, like decorating cookies.  We squeezed that fun into our day last Saturday.  It was lots of fun and now we get to do it again this weekend since the cookies are ALL GONE already!  Yum.

First Basketball Game

Austin played in his first basketball game today.  He's had two team practices and today was the first real game.  There are 6 players on his team so they rotated in and out so that everyone has a chance to play.  Here's a picture of Austin sitting on the bench for the first 10 minutes of the game...

4 out of the 6 players were "pros" as far as 5 and 6 year olds can be.  Austin and one other boy were definitely on the beginning of the basketball learning curve.  Still, I'm so proud of him.  Anything that the coaches asked him to do, he did it.  You can see that by him (#5) guarding #2 on the blue team in this video.  Well, he did great guarding her until she caught the ball...

I think Austin only touched the ball 3 or four times, but that's pretty good considering it was his first game in his whole life, he is only five years old, and his father doesn't live and breathe basketball like I think some of the other dads obviously do.  

So far Austin seems to enjoy playing ball and I hope it continues, because his Mama loves to watch basketball!

Decorating the tree

So, I'm so proud of myself.  I let the kids decorate the Christmas tree this year and I let it stay "that way" for at least 3 days.  Impressive!

The tree is "fixed" now, but it was fun to let the kids do it themselves this year.

Ellie and I also got out the Nativity set.  She didn't remember it, so it was quite fun watching her open all of the figures.

I'm still having a hard time believing that it is Christmas time, but maybe now that my classes are done I'll get in the spirit a bit more...