Jake

If he froze like this I don’t think he’d mind.  He just can’t get enough.  He was so worried that the snow was going to melt with the sun out.  Luckily it was only 12 degrees.

Snow!

After a year without snow last year, it came early this year! We’ve had snow for a few days now and the kids are loving it! It’s cold, but they don’t seem to mind.

Aspiring Chef

Payton loves to help me in the kitchen.  And she actually is quite helpful.  She loves to load and start the dishwasher, loves playing in the bubbles while I wash dishes (although I have to insert here that Jason does far more dishes than I do, so she plays in the bubbles while he does dishes even more often) and really loves to help cook.  But her absolute favorite thing to do in the kitchen is lick the beaters…of dough.  Not cake or brownie batter.  Not cookie dough, either.  Bread dough.  Loves it.  Pizza dough.  Even better.  Which is fantastic since the thought of eating raw eggs in the other types of dough really icks me out!

How Things Have Changed

Every year we write Santa our wish lists and leave them in the mailbox for his elves to pick up the week after Thanksgiving.  Last night we were talking about what we each were going to put on our lists this year.  Jake had lots of good ideas for things he’d really like for Christmas.  But when the conversation turned to actually writing the letter he sat thoughtfully for a moment and then replied “I think I’ll just email Santa mine this year!”

(This picture has absolutely nothing to do with the topic of this post, but I can’t resist putting it in partly because I’m really missing those sunny days at the beach as I’m staring out at the grey rainy day and partly because he’s just so darn cute!)

Oh, Payton

Payton is quite the ham.  She constantly keeps us laughing and it’s really hard to be mad at her because she turns up the charm an extra notch and she’s really good at it.  For example, tonight Jake needed to take a break from playing to regroup after getting in Payton’s face so he was sitting on his bean bag chair.  Payton wanted to sit next to him, but we told her Jake needed a few minutes to himself.  So she marched up to him, hit him, and then sat down next to him informing us that “I’m in trouble, too”.  So tonight when it came time for bed, and after we’d gone up three or four times to put her back in bed, I was none too surprised when Jason peeked over the railing and told me to come look at my daughter.  And there she was.  Standing in her room.  Buck naked.  It seems she decided going through her dresser drawers was much more important that sleeping.  So her clothes we strewn all over her room, too.  And all we could do was laugh.