My Wisconsin trip and Christmas

I am trying to play a little catch-up here so I have to write about some of the things I missed since Halloween!

In November, our family stayed pretty close to home. We celebrated Thanksgiving at Josh's parents' house in Ashton and most of his siblings were there for lunch as well. It was a very large group. I was going to try and count it out in my head but decided I was too lazy. So I'l just say probably around 30+ people I bet.

Then in December I decided I was going to take a little trip to Wisconsin. I had actually booked my flight back in October because I had some free sky Miles that I wanted to use up. So I was only there for about 4 days but it was nice to take a little trip by myself! Josh had off that weekend and I had a neighbor and Diane help with the kids while I was gone. I actually would've loved to stay there longer but it was enough of a delicate web of babysitting for the 4 days! While I was there I did some Christmas shopping with my mom and got to see my grandma Dahlke's new condo that she moved into about three days after I left!

When I got back to Idaho around mid-December, I had a lot of little Christmas things to get ready - as does everyone in those last two weeks - and was busy helping with Gabe's school Christmas party and other things. Josh helped me make this "Pin the Nose on the Rudolph" game and we also did a little Christmas Bingo game. The kids had a lot of fun. Someday Gabe will probably be embarassed by his mom hanging around but right now he loves it. As the matter of fact the other day when I dropped him off at school I got talking to another mom and he started to have to go in the school with his class and he stopped at the door and yelled, "Mom! You forgot to give me a hug!!!" And I had to run over and give him his hug so he could walk in with the rest of his line. It was cute. I know THAT won't last for long! :)

So, for Christmas Gabe and Caleb were all about the remote control vehicles this year. Josh wanted - I mean, um - GABE wanted a remote control helipoter. It was one that had tiny parts and said ages 8 and up, but Josh insisted Gabe was advanced enough for it. It broke within about.... 2 hours of opening it on Christmas. A few too many crashes within the two hours. The also both got a couple remote control cars. Caleb is pretty into Super Heroes still. He got some Captain America and Batman toys. Gabe loves animals and was pretty excited about this A-Z animal zoo with a letter on each animal. I think it's probably meant more for toddlers but he just loves taking the animals around in little pouches and backpacks and making up little stories with them. Caleb's more rough and crazy. He discovered Power Rangers on Netflix unfortunately.... and he loves it.

Sometimes the boys get wrestling and Gabe is like - competitive and wants to be the best at everything because he's older, but Caleb is like a little tazmanian devil when he gets mad so it's usually a pretty good fight. Then sometimes Josh jumps in there and stirs the pot even more (why? I don't know...) but I always end up just comforting whoever keeps getting hurt. Then after their 5 seconds of sympathy from me they run back to the pile and continue again. It's craziness.

So, in December we seriously had like 3 snowfalls maybe and they each had just a dusting of snow then melted right away. Now that it's January, we finally got our first real snow like, 3 days ago. It was actually to the point where there was about 4 inches on the ground and everything looked really white. The boys were soooo excited. They had only put on their full snow clothes probably one other time this whole Winter. So last week we woke up and got them all bundled up and they played witht their trucks in the snow and went sledding down this little hill in our neighborhood. Then they both had school for a couple hours from about noon to 3:00 and came home and went back outside again.

I am going to post some pictures now of December, Christmas, and snow fun and then I'll write my next big post for this past week!

This was Gabe with his Baby Snowman in one of are tiny snowfalls in December.
















This is just Caleb being Caleb. He does this pose a lot when he says, "Cheese!"
















Gabe at his school Christmas program.














Here's Caleb being impatient during Gabe's Christmas program.