Christmas 2011

Christmas Day dawned bright and sunny here in Iowa. Seriously, people. The weather here has been absolutely ridiculous lately, and I am loving every minute! High 40s and mid 50s for Christmas????? Amazing. I will try to remember this when we get dumped on in January.

Anyway, we woke up on Christmas Day and immediately went to our stockings!

Hmmmm, what's in here?

Among other things, Daddy and Jeremiah got new Hawkeye hats! And Mommy got a new candle, which was quickly claimed by you-know-who.


After stockings and a quick breakfast, we packed up and hit the road for Sioux City. With a sunny day, dry roads, Starbucks coffee, and "Trains" and "Gab Gabba" on the DVD player, it was a great trip (notice the lack of white stuff out the window)!

We arrived at Meema and Boppa Wissink's house just in time for lunch, and a nap for Jeremiah. After J's nap, we were able to take a walk around the neighborhood and enjoy the 50 degree temps (not exactly like last year, but still VERY nice)! Later in the afternoon, Uncle Kelly, Aunt Rachel, Kyan and Kobe arrived. Time for more presents!

First it was stockings...

Another Hawkeye hat!



After stockings, we ate a fabulous dinner of prime rib and chicken cordon bleu. YUM. We also sang "Happy Birthday" to Jesus and enjoyed birthday cupcakes!

I love cake.

And here is a video of Jeremiah saying Happy Birthday to Jesus with lots of enthusiasm (he is never lacking in enthusiasm, right Grandma Wiers?)!

And then it was time for the REAL presents under the tree! The first present Jeremiah opened was his very own vacuum cleaner!!!!!!!!!! Grandma's floor was spotless by the end of the evening. :)



Seriously, I have very few other pictures of him from present opening. He did enjoy "helping" when it was time for others to open presents, too.


On Monday, Jeremiah and I spent some time with my good friends Stephanie and Natasha-- so good to see them again! And Jeremiah had fun playing with Lucas and Samantha (pretty sure he would have stayed overnight if it meant he could play some more with Samantha's kitchen set!). Of course, we were so busy chatting and watching the kids play that we didn't take any pictures! Believe me, we had fun. :)

On Tuesday we checked out the new Sioux City Public Museum. It was full of lots of cool stuff and historical information, and having lived in Sioux City for a couple years, Adam and I both found it very interesting! I will always have a special place in my heart for Sioux City-- it's where Adam and I dated, I taught for 2 years, we got engaged, got married... it's so fun to go back and reminisce about those things. Anyway, wasn't I talking about the museum? Right.
This guy loved it!

There were lots of cool interactive things, with buttons to push, etc. That is right up Jeremiah's alley!


Giving the cow a kiss...


Inside a teepee.... don't be fooled. My smile is genuine, Jeremiah's is not. For some reason that teepee FREAKED him out! Of course, like a nice mommy, I took him in anyway. :)


The cabin was more Jeremiah's style-- perfect for playing peek-a-boo!


Jeremiah and cousin Kyan checked out some type of big machine. I won't even try to guess what it was-- after having my 3 year old nephew, Kobe, call me out for mistaking a road grader for a truck (silly me!), I'm understandably quite hesitant.



I bought this cute little wooden grasshopper for Jeremiah at the gift shop-- he loved it so much that he took it for a walk around the museum. See how the picture is blurry? Yep, he was going that fast. And it was right after I snapped this pic that he turned around to watch his grasshopper... and then he ran into that little placard thing on the left and got a bleeding gash on his head. Fun times!

After lunch and naps, we headed out again, this time to Play All Day. Of course, Jeremiah (and his cousins, too) had a blast!




After that and dinner at Red Robin (yum), it was time to call it a night!


Then today, we did a bit of shopping, stopped by the new Palmer Candy store, had lunch at the Pizza Ranch, and hit the road for home. As always, it was nice to visit family and get away for a little while, but it is also nice to come home to our own beds. We are hoping to sleep well tonight, now that J is back in his own bed in his normal surroundings. I never knew how out of whack a kid could get when you go out of town! But still, it was all worth it and we had a fabulous time. Thanks for everything Grandma and Grandpa Wissink!!!

Christmas Eve

I think that this is the very first time that we have not been with our extended families on Christmas Eve! We will both admit that it did feel a bit weird, and both of us said over the course of the day, "It doesn't really feel like Christmas!" Okay, that could be because we have no snow and mid-40s temps, too. I'm not complaining about that! It is nice, too, to begin starting our own family traditions!


Christmas Eve started out with these yummy donuts!

These might become a tradition, although I think they should have baked just a bit longer. They do look yummy, though, don't they? Thanks Pinterest! :)


Then we went to Urgent Care. :( This is something that we hope does NOT become a tradition! We had suspicions that either Jeremiah's ear infection from a few weeks ago never fully went away, or else he had a new one. We didn't want to head out of town with a possible ear infection (even though J does have an appt on Thursday to be re-checked by his pediatician-- we didn't want to risk it!). Turns out we were not the only ones who had this idea-- it is never a good sign when you pull up to Urgent Care right when it opens and there are already 10 people waiting in line outside! I was not pleased. Thankfully we were early enough that we made it out of there within an hour and a half (silly me, I thought we could just "run in." Ha!). Anyway, good thing we went because we came away with a prescription for Zithromax. J's left ear is either still not quite better or was on it's way to being infected again. Hopefully this takes care of it!!!!

So after that small speed bump, we continued on with Christmas Eve! After J's afternoon nap, we did presents. J was the only one to open presents, since Adam and I got a new TV for our gifts. Who needs gifts anyway when it's more fun to just watch your almost 2 year old open presents? :) J first opened a "Cars" sticker/story book.

"Oooooooooo!"

He also got a Melissa & Doug car-carrier truck. Not surprisingly, he loved it! And then his main gift from Mommy and Daddy was his very own easy chair! Here's a video of J opening up his chair. He was quite adamant that his chair needed to go in the corner-- he kept saying "Corner! Corner!" Finally we figured out that he wanted to put it right next to Daddy's La-Z-Boy in his bedroom. It took some convincing to get J to keep the chair in the living room, but now he seems to enjoy watching TV in it!


Oh, and Molly liked her gift, too.


Of course, Jeremiah thought that the box was just as much fun as his new chair!


After presents, we went to the 5 o'clock Christmas Eve candlelight service at our church. We have never been to this service before (as I said before, we have never been around!), so we were glad we were able to go-- what a blessing. A great sermon, plus singing "Silent Night" by candlelight-- love it!

After church we went out to eat. Since we have been married we have always gotten Outback To Go when we did "our" Christmas (which wasn't necessarily ON Christmas Eve or Christmas), but we couldn't fit that into our plan with church. So we went to Texas Roadhouse instead (how's that for festive?)-- again, silly me. I thought we'd be the only ones there! Nope. But thankfully our wait was not too long.

Jeremiah is very careful to blow on his food before he eats it.


And our little friendly guy greeted just about everyone who walked by or sat by our table!

Thankfully he is cute, and the majority of the time people greet him back.

After that we headed home, got J snuggled into his Christmas jammies, and then we read the story of Baby Jesus from Jeremiah's Beginner's Bible. He's getting quite good at identifying Baby Jesus and Joseph, but he often says "Mommy" for Mary.

And now I am sitting here, enjoying "A Christmas Story" and thinking about finishing our packing. Tomorrow morning we will open our stockings and then head out for Sioux City for Wissink Christmas. We hope that you all have a very merry Christmas!

P.S. Here's another video of excited Jeremiah!

Cookie Decorating

Not much exciting going on around here, but I had a special request to put Jeremiah's cookie decorating video (well, cookie eating, I guess) on the Blog. SO HERE IT IS!

I did a bit more cookie baking/decorating today because it's my turn to bring treats to school tomorrow. So I made my very favorite kind-- cookie press cookies (with Grandma Waanders' recipe)! Jeremiah ate about 4 of them today, so they must have turned out okay. :)

We are looking forward to our Christmas celebrations in a week. Our plan is to do Jeremiah's presents, then church, and out for dinner on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day we will "sleep in" till whenever Jeremiah wakes us up, then do breakfast (I have a yummy-looking recipe for cinnamon/sugar donuts!) and stockings. Then we will head up to Sioux City for Wissink Christmas. Of course, I have to make it through 4 full days of school before any of this can happen...

Stay tuned for more pics/videos of Jeremiah's Christmases! :)