What's Up? (Picture Edition)

What have we been up to?

A little Christmas decorating.  (That's a police car driving through the Christmas village...the village and trees get rearranged on a daily basis.)

Some members of the family aren't very helpful at decorating.

Speaking of helpful, this man cooks AND cleans.

Which is a good thing, because he has been so clingy that I stuck him in the baby carrier one afternoon just to try to get some things done.  Unfortunately- or maybe fortunately, since he's really too old for that- he hated it screamed to get out immediately.

We put up a pretty tree.  (As pretty as it can be with all of the ornaments on the top 1/3 of the tree.)

And I've been trying to get some cute pictures.  That part isn't going so well.

Aside from that, we're doing some hot cocoa-drinking, which is really just an excuse to eat marshmallows,

some wrestling,

and some book-reading.

How cute is that last one?!

Hope you are having a great holiday season!!

4 Years: 3 Parties

Birthday Party #1- (7 days before the big day):  This party was at Aunt Rachael and Uncle Garett's house with our Southern IL family.  After dinner, Jacob got a birthday-boy ribbon and a cell phone cake.

How cool is this?!

I think Jacob was pretty happy, to say the least.

After dinner came the presents!  Jenna and Brett helped him unwrap and kept him focused.

(A photobomb by my hunka-hunka burnin' love, who hadn't put his shirt back on after dinner..)

To top it off, Jacob got to have a slumber party on the couch that night with Brett.  He liked being a "big boy," and went to sleep grinning from ear to ear.

Birthday Party #2- (2 days before the big day)  Party #2 was at preschool!  This was my first experience bringing in treats, but due to the class being both nut-free and egg-free, I couldn't find anything to fit the bill. I ended up with organic fruit snacks, which I wasn't all that excited about, but Jacob didn't seem to care.  I also had to fill out a sheet with his likes, etc, because the teachers spotlight him on his special day.  He got a little crown to wear, which might have been the highlight of the whole experience for him!  Much to my surprise, his teachers also sent him home with a wrapped gift.

Birthday Part #3- December 7- His actual birthday! We've always tried to make the whole day special, so he got his present, a little Cadillac car that plays music, as soon as he woke up.

He also opened the gift from his teachers, a Pete the Cat book.  He liked it, despite what his expression conveys here!

We went to Krispy Kreme for snack, and Frank was going to take him to a movie, but Jacob ended up napping too late.  Normally, we would have woke him up, but he needed the nap.  Trust me.

For dinner, he said he wanted Taco Bell.  We managed to upgrade that slightly to Moe's, so the birthday boy still got his cheese quesadilla.  It made me laugh to think about what his dinner request may be in ten years, and whether he would ever believe his favorite dinner was a cheese quesedilla.

We kept the evening simple and went home for cake. His only request was that he wanted to put the sprinkles on the icing by himself.  This resulted in a handful of sprinkles being dumped very unevenly over the cake, so amazing-looking cell phone cake it definitely was NOT!  But look at that shiny little face with those 4 candles...

Happy 4th Birthday Jacob!