November Wrap Up

It's finally time to post pictures that didn't make it into another post and wrap up November. Here are Drew, Noah, and Michael goofing around. Noah was wearing our monkey costume (which is a tad on the small side). Sometimes little boys really are just like little animals. They were having fun wrestling, climbing on each other, growling, and yelping...

...and pulling faces.

Seriously - look at the elasticity of Noah's cheeks! Ha!

The boys dragged our kitchen chairs into the family room, lined them up and were climbing across them (in just underwear and firefighter hats, of course). I don't remember exactly what it was that they were doing...it had something to do with rescuing and firefighters though.

My friend Claire really loves bowling. In fact, last year for her birthday I bought a ball-shaped cake mold, and stuff to make edible purple glitter frosting (so I could recreate her bowling ball). Unfortunately, that cake was a disaster...but I gave the bowling theme another shot this birthday and made these suckers. You'd never know that it took me over 6 hours to make them (I think I'm way too slow at that stuff), but at least they turned out pretty cute.

I arranged them in a glitter basket (she loves glitter), and included some ball cleaner & a flannel pouch thing used to dry off your sweaty hands when bowling. Happy 30th Birthday, Claire!

Random Lincoln cuteness.

After Audrey's birthday party last month we had all those leftover helium balloons to play with. Here is Anna (that I babysit during the week) playing with some of them. Isn't she cute?

My boys just adore Anna, especially Noah. He is always hugging on her or asking me to take his picture with her. Here are 3 of my favorites from last month...I like this one because of Anna's "help me" expression:

One of them chowing down on corn dogs together.

And one that I took after they got done reading a book together. You can tell that she's getting more comfortable with all of his affection, huh?

My grandpa (my mom's dad) turned 80 last month! We had a birthday party for him at a restaurant and it was really nice. It was a grown-ups only event, so Mark's parents met us there and picked up the boys to take down the street to Chuck E. Cheese where they had a great time. In the meantime we enjoyed a nice dinner together as family, and did weird things like...

...suck helium out of balloons and sing, "We represent the lollipop kids" (courtesy of two of my mom's brothers, one one of mine):


We even talked my grandpa into entertaining us with with a sentence :)

(I know, probably not the type of activity to make a tradition for every family gathering, but it was pretty funny)

My mom with her parents and my dad. Happy 80th, Grandpa! We love you!

November is such a big birthday month for our family - here is my grandma after blowing out the candles on her 78th birthday cake (doesn't she look fantastic?!)...oh, and it's not really a cake - my mom made a deep dish apple crisp and it was go-oood!
Happy Birthday, grandma! We love you!