We had a lovely Christmas at home, just the four of us.  I was really hoping for a white Christmas, but alas, it turned out to be beautiful.

Christmas Eve we had our traditional fondue dinner

Then Santa delivered new pjs to the front door

Woody and Buzz!

After bed Santa came again!

I think this was the best Christmas yet, the boys were both really into the whole thing.  It was magic.

Parker couldn't wait to open the big presents

Scooters!!

I think there was a little too much excitement-they both ended up in time outs.  Ha!

The first week of Sam's break was spent in Florida with Sam's family.  We roadtripped it down.  The boys love the car, can't you tell?

We spent the night in Atlanta with some friends.  I love this picture of them.

Once in Florida, we spent a lot of time hanging with the fam, going to the pool, and playing Dance Central.  Well mostly Meg played and we watched.  

Parker having a dance off with Aunt Meg

Of course we had to do Disney one day.  The Schmidts love Animal Kingdom so we started there with the safari.  This giraffe was leading the way walking down the road.  

Later at Epcot we got to meet all the characters.  Parker was being weird and didn't want to see Mickey. 

The one he really wanted to see was Daisy. 

Later that night Sam brought Lincoln back to the hotel, but Parker wasn't ready to go so we had a "date" (his words) and went on a bunch of rides together.  It was the best part of the day.  I love hanging out with this kid.

He's the only one that will go on the teacups with me

Autopia

We also hit up Downtown Disney on afternoon and played at the big Lego store.

Oh my gosh I haven't blogged in 3 months.  Time flies.  My laptop was running low on disk space, so I couldn't import any more pictures from my camera.  What's a blog post without pictures?  I finally bought an external hard drive, so we're back in business.  Unfortunately a lot has happened the past 3 months.  I thought about just skipping over them, but I would be sad if I didn't document.

Flashback to December...

We decided to do an activity advent calendar.  I just made up some envelopes from striped paper and we wrote 24 activities on little cards to go inside the envelopes.  Some were bigger than others, but the boys loved waking up each morning to see what we were going to do.

one day we had an indoor picnic

we rode the train downtown to the Christkindle market

getting some pretzels at the market

afterwards we stopped by Magnolia Bakery for cupcakes (for the boys) and banana pudding (for me)

we visited the Winder Wonderland Express at the Chicago Botanic Gardens (twice actually).   It was awesome-that's downtown Chicago made of plant materials.  

We visited the children's museum where Sam taught Parker some dad skillz

my favorite favorite FAVORITE thing we did was ride the Christmas CTA train.  Seriously it was awesome.  There was tinsel, lights, and elves handing out candy canes inside.  AND Santa and his reindeer ride on an open car in the train so you can get out and say hi at the end of the line.  Magic.

It was a fun month and by the time Christmas rolled around our wall looked more like this.  I love holiday cards.