A Busy Day on the Mississippi

We took the boys down to the levy yesterday morning to see the river and the big ships. The river was hopp'n with lots of ship and barge traffic. And if you were wondering what happened to all the water that flooded Toledo a few weeks ago - I found it. The MS River is very high, which made me very nervous about Ben falling down the wrong side of the levy. If he went down the side, Adam was going down with him.

Grandma's Butterflies

Grandma now has some pet butterflies. She found the caterpillars in her community butterfly garden and brought them home to see if they would turn into butterflies. She ended up with two swallow tail butterflies. She is going to release them into the butterfly garden. Ben got a kick out of them!

Road Trip!

Wednesday was the big road trip day! We packed up the car (to the gills) and hit the road around 4am for our trip to New Orleans. We rearranged the car a bit so I could sit in the back with the boys. Ben moved into the 3rd row, temporarily. The boys were extremely good on the 17 hour car ride. We pretty much didn't have any crying, whining or fussing. Ben watched movies quite a bit and Nick slept quite a bit, which he needed since he has a cold. Once we got to Grandma's, that's when they had melt downs. But I'll take melt downs at grandma's house over the car any day!

Tent

The boys love their new tent. Ben got a camping play set from Uncle Kevin and Auntie Dre for Christmas. It came with a working lantern, camp stove, skillet and shovel, along with this tent. The boys love playing in it. In and out, in and out. Ben stored all of his toys in it one night. Nick drank a bottle in it. Even daddy got in and checked it out.

Spaghetti

Nick's first experience with spaghetti. Overall, I thought he was pretty clean, though I didn't give him a ton of sauce, either.

He still managed to get some in his eye, though...

Ta Da!

Now and it is time to reveal my most awesomest Christmas present...My Canon T3i camera!!! With some very generous Christmas gift donations, winning money from a Pioneer Woman give-away and saving my lunch money, I was able to purchase my camera this weekend! I was going to order it from Amazon and just get the camera body and a 50mm lens, but Best Buy had a good sale with a bunch of bonus things, like a telephoto lens, memory card, UV filter and bag, so I went with the lens kit at Best Buy (and I have it on good authority that Santa will be bringing my nifty fifty lens that I really really want :)  But this camera is totally awesome. Say goodbye to flash photography! These pictures below were taken in the kitchen with the lights on, which isn't super challenging light, but OMG - the pictures in the living room with just the reading light on - AWESOME! It's like daylight. I do get a lot of blurry pictures with the 18mm-55mm kit lens because the aperture isn't real low/high on the lens so the shutter speed is low, but I think the nifty fifty will fix that :) And the shutter response time is amazing! Yeah, I'm either going to have to learn how to delete pictures or I'm going to need another external hard drive pretty soon. Good thing I have a 16 hour car ride tomorrow to read the manual a few times over. These dslr cameras are complex pieces of equipment! But, ugh! I love it!

*Disclaimer: Before I could go to Best Buy, I was told I needed to make note of the fact that I have a super awesome husband that let me get my camera before Christmas and didn't make me wait to open it until Christmas*

A Wolny Christmas (Pt 1)

Yesterday we celebrated Christmas with the Wolny's. We had a traditional Polish Christmas Eve Dinner complete with beet soup, perogies and meat free. Conveniently, before dinner we saw a huge herd of deer in the field out back. We asked Ben if he thought they were Santa's reindeer. After dinner, Ben and the boys went outside to see if they could find Santa (while the rest of us frantically filled the living room with presents). Just as Ben was coming back inside, we heard Santa's sleigh bells - Ben had just missed Santa! This is a video of Ben as he came back inside after hearing Santa's sleigh bells.

A Wolny Christmas (Pt. 2)

Pictures from the Wolny Christmas. We are going to need a bigger room next year with the addition of little baby Lewalk! The boys both got a TON of wonderful presents! They loved all of them, and played with a lot of them today when we got home. The camping tent is a big hit with both boys and is currently the home of all the wooden blocks, ball pit balls (still in their bag), bulldozer and Mater. But hey, it's not in the middle of the floor for me to trip over in the morning, so I'm happy. Nick loves playing with all of Ben's toys and Ben loves playing with all of Nick's presents. Yet, neither one seems to be able to share with the other. No major issues today, but Ben did get corrected for stealing toys from Nick. There are more pictures to come of the boys playing with there gifts, including mommy's new gift...which is totally awesome and anyone who reads this blog will fully appreciate my most awesomest Christmas gift. But that will have to wait until tomorrow. :)

Nick LOVES his Eeyore buddy!

Ben was actually giving Nick a kiss. It just always looks like he's biting him when I take a picture

A Traditional Polish Christmas Eve

Nick's first traditional Polish Christmas Eve, complete with fish, perogies and beet soup. Nick missed the beet soup course, but he definitely gobbled up the fish and potato perogie. And I guess he's not allergic to shell fish - woops, wasn't thinking and gave him the cod with the crab meat stuffing!  

Painting

Now that Ben is coming up on 3 and his maturity level is increasing, I have decided to start venturing into other creative media besides colored pencils, crayons and Color Wonder. He painted pumpkins at Halloween, but now he is starting to paint with water colors. He does a very good job for the most part. We have had to have a couple of talks about how we don't mix the paint colors, but overall, he does well. It took a few minutes to figure out how it worked - add water to the paint in order for them to 'work'. We haven't really started focusing on coloring inside the lines or anything, but sometimes he does try to paint/color just one object. I guess that's the first step toward controlled coloring...