We are crib-free

As of today, we are a crib-free home. The baby swing also moved out, less than 24 hours ago, and a big wooden shelving thing for toys--not shown--(since I've purged all the 'baby' toys that Brent hasn't used since early this year). We are going to keep the playpen for now, maybe by this time next year it'll be out too, and a new toddler-size toybox from Target has moved in. I love that it's just the right size for the amount of toys he had, and that there are NO hinges! Can't tell you how many times each of the older kids have gotten fingers pinched in toybox hinges.

Here's the before(just over a year ago, when we finished construction, carpet & painting and we had barely started moving Brent and his stuff in):

Here's what it looks like now:

Stop to smell the flowers

Brent thinks it's so funny to smell flowers. He is kind of sick today with a fever. I had him on my bed while I stopped in the bathroom for a minute. When I came out, I found him trying to smell the flowers on my blanket.

Sneak peek at our Christmas photo card

This year I made our family a Christmas photo card using Photoshop Elements. I had wanted to do this last year, but it didn't happen. These are the only recent family pictures we have with everyone. They're from a wedding reception we went to this summer, and they had a photo booth(so the bride & groom knew who was who in their guestbook). Collin loved it! May have to try this again next year, since it's so hard to get everyone to be in the picture especially with Brent literally on the run. You can click on the picture to make it bigger/more readable.

Here is another version of it, with ages added. Not sure which I'll be sending out.

Christmas decorating

Let me preface by saying, I have no qualms about decorating for the holidays or others who choose to. We tend to stick to doing our Christmas tree, sometimes hang up the kids' holiday artwork from school and that's typically the extent of our decoration. Not intentional, but so far about every other year we put our Fisher Price nativity set out.

Our neighbors, we love them to death, LOVE holidays. To say they go all out in decorating is quite the understatement. They like it, the neighborhood likes it, and our kids like it.

This is how they decorated this year(my first time using the panoramic feature on the camera):

We had gotten to talking with them about decorating, and they suggested we do this(below) for our house for some laughs. It's all in good fun, and they were helpful enough to give me some pointers, since I've never done outside decoration with lights and I know there are certain things Tom doesn't want to do so I don't ask him to help with those things much. I think it turned out okay for having no clue how to do words with lights. I wish we had some black electrical tape to cover the parts in between the letters. Spells "Ditto" and the arrow points to our neighbors' house.

Almost forgot, here's our Christmas tree. The kids liked playing in the tree box after we set it up(only a 2 piece, 6 foot artificial tree). And a picture of Collin, since I didn't have a Thanksgiving one of him.

Thanksgiving

We had an awesome Thanksgiving week! Kids were off school the whole week(that wasn't the awesome part, lol). I was ready to send them back by Saturday afternoon, maybe earlier. We had one of my younger sisters & her husband and their little baby girl come stay with us the whole week from Northern California. The kids were excited to play with a cousin, albeit much younger(turns 1 on Christmas day) and it was a much needed pick-me-up for me.

Didn't have any big plans for the week, but we managed a trip to Souplantation(the kids' first time, and I must say for 5 kids--2 under 18 months--and 3 adults it went VERY well. Much better than anticipated), and two times out with my sister while the hubbies watched the kids, and we also saw some chick flicks.

I got our first, non-mantle, family pictures up before she got here. One set was taken right before Tom went off to Kuwait and the others I took the Sunday before Thanksgiving and printed them out the next day.