Flight to Florida

Yesterday morning at 7 a.m. we left our little town of Durham and headed down to the Detroit Airport. We boarded a plane bound for Florida!! We arrived at our final destination last night at 7 p.m.. We came down here for a week long conference. We left all the snow and below freezing temperatures for palm trees and summer-like weather. What a nice and refreshing change! A palm tree has never looked to good to us before. The boys did really well travelling. Carsten and Logan slept for most of the flight and Rylan played by himself. Before the plane took off the pilot came and got the boys and took them into the cockpit. He let them touch the buttons and everything! They thought it was really cool. We are now enjoying our conference and the lovely weather!

Gotta love the nose picker in our family plane photo!

Family Walk

The other day we decided to take a nice family walk. We bundled everyone up and headed outside to walk around the campus. The kids had a good time, even Logan seemed to enjoy himself! Here are a few pictures:

Christmas day photos

This year for Christmas we spent the day together as a little family of 5. We started the morning off eating biscuits and gravy and eggs. Once we were done with that we had the boys open their gifts from us and from my grandparents. Later in the morning we skyped with both my parents and Jeff's parents so that they could watch the kids open their gifts. Then we spent the afternoon playing with the kids and had a yummy home-made lasagne for dinner. Overall it was a nice and quiet day.

Watching daddy open his gifts!

Happy and content to just hang with daddy.

Very excited to get a Cookie Monster that "eats" cookies!

Realizing he just opened his very own digital camera!

Thank you to everyone who sent us such nice gifts in the mail we really appreciate it!

Christmas time activities

Over the past month, we have done some different Christmas activities with the boys. Before school let out for the semester we made several dozen cookies to give out to the kids teachers and friends on campus. The boys got to help decorate the cookies. Carsten did more eating than decorating, but they both had a lot of fun doing it!

After we made a quick trip down to the states, the boys got to make giant gingerbread men that we bought at Trader Joe's. They were only 99 cents each! This was also a fun project. After Carsten put the candy on he ate them right off!

Logan has been spending his time playing while the older boys have been doing different activities.

Apparently toy bars are fun for all ages!

Carsten singing random songs

Logan jumping

Christmas decorating

     This past week has once again been extremely busy. I keep thinking things are going to slow down, but instead they seem to keep picking up speed. We have one week left of this semester and then we should have at least some relief from all the busyness. Last Saturday we spent the day decorating the house for Christmas and making 8 dozen sugar cookies! We made some for our Sunday group Christmas dinner as well as some families here on campus. We of course ate some ourselves! The boys had fun helping to cut the cookies out of the dough and then they each got to frost a few of their own.
     On Sunday night we went to our Sunday group Christmas dinner which was really fun. It was a formal dinner so we all got dressed up. After dinner we watched a live performance and sang some Christmas hymns. On Tuesday we went to a Christmas sweater party. The boys had fun running around with their friends. They each got to take home a mug with all the ingredients for snowman soup (hot chocolate, 3 Hershey kisses, mini marshmallows and a candy cane to stir with). They both really enjoyed that special treat yesterday!

Carsten drinking snowman soup!

Rylan enjoying his snowman soup!

Trying hard to put an ornament up

Reaching high to put an ornament on

Gotta love the jingle bell earrings!