Our Family Christmas in Pictures

It's been a wonderful Christmas here in the Lah household.


Last week was Addie's Christmas Show at school.

I guess some goofing off is allowed at Christmas when you're 6.

Then, we spent a long weekend in Indianapolis and took the girls to Conner's Prairie. We at dinner there and went on a candlelight tour of Prairie Town at Christmas. Margaret was a tad cranky (ear infection), but other than that, we had a great time.

We also visited with Emily's Great Uncle (Fr.) Mel and had a nice visit after mass. Later, we went to the children's museum and played and played and played.

The Barbie Exhibit

I think one of Emily's Uncle's was the inspiration for this doll.

Dinosaur sculpting

The real dinosaurs (a little scary)

Addie taxing some shady characters at the Egypt exhibit

On Christmas Eve, we had brunch with some friends here in town.

Activities for the kids.

Food for all.

And a few gifts exchanged.

That evening was the Christmas Pageant at church. Addie was the Innkeeper and had one of the longest lines.

When we got home, Santa had come - the coats could not come off fast enough.Lots of excitement capped off with a bedtime story by the tree.

On Christmas day, we opened gifts from each other.

We'll be heading out soon to see our families - hopefully ahead of the latest winter storm. I'll try and get some more pictures uploaded to flickr before we go.

Merry Christmas to all!

Spooky Sisters

Happy Halloween!

At the beginning of the month we tried to schedule a 'Fall Harvest' party for the end of the season. After studying the calendar a bit, and seeing all the spoken-for weekends, it quickly turned into a Halloween party. We had also hoped to have it outside, but had to limit that to a photo-op due to the cold, breezy day.

We played games, read books and enjoyed some fall snacks and warm mulled cider. Later that evening, we had dinner with some friends and the kids went trick-or-treating together.

Family Update

Again, it's been far too long since we've posted. Trust me, it's not that there is nothing to talk about. Quite the opposite. So much going on, so little time to post. But what's new?

I'll tell you what's new. Most recently, the dogs treed a groundhog. Yes, thats right, and that's him below. Trouble is, we (and the dogs) had no idea what to do with it.


He was about 15-20 feet up and trying to keep his grip. The neighbor had a BB gun, but as soon as he walked over with the rifle, that groundhog made a break for it. At least I have a better idea of where his den is.

Next up is our superstar soccer player, Addie. Saturday was her first game of the season. The girls did well, and several of her teammates had made quite the improvement over the winter. It took Addie a bit to warm up, but once she did, the other girls couldn't stop her.


(That's her with the yellow ponytail holder) She ended up with 3 goals, and very nearly had two others. Once, she had the opening kick. With that, and a second kick she nearly had another goal - the ball missed by about foot.

After the game, Margaret and I went to run some errands and Addie and Emily went to an estate sale. Little did I know they'd come back with a surprise.... haircuts! Addie had been wanting to get it cut short, and we knew it would be easier on all of us.


Here she was reading a book in the living room. Did I mention how great she is doing with reading. She loves it, and it is so fun to catch her reading by herself.

The previous weekend was Easter. It was so nice to be able to spend so much time with both sides of the family.

Emily and I have been busy Sunday nights teaching Financial Peace University at our church. This weekend was class 5 of 13. So far, our class has shredded 138 credit cards, and as of Sunday, two had payed off a car loan. That's a half-gallon Ball jar full of shredded cards.

We've also been busy with home repairs, though slightly less hands on as normal. This weekend, we ordered the shingles for our roof. We are planning to replace it in June or July this summer. A couple of weekends ago we replaced our boiler, and while we had the new one installed prefessionally, we did remove the old one ourselves. The old 'Majestic' incinerator left as well.

After an afternoon of hard labor, Ben and Tom and I agreed, were earned that $1600 that they knocked off the bill for doing this part ourselves. It was neither fun, nor easy, but nothing that the three of us couldn't handle. The new system is below.


Last, and certainly not least is Margaret. She's a busy little bee these days - talking terrorizing and getting into everything. The fun part is that she wants to interact with others more. She loves playing peek-a-boo (usually starting it herself), and she loves to raise her arm at dinner, hoping to get us to do the same.

Masterpiece Puppet Theater

As luck would have it, Santa brought the girls each a 'special present' at the house. Addie was a bit perplexed by the puppet theater at first, but once she got inside, she was hooked. It wasn't very long before Marg and I were watching Addie's short productions and needing to 'sign up for the next show' (Addie's idea).


So far, I've seen The Pig in Town, Where are all the People?, and The Hopping Bunny. Emily was presented the original production of A Pig Jumping in the Mud. Too cute.



Margaret got a wooden doll pram (stroller). At first she tried to use it as a walker, but found that she couldn't put so much weight on it. Her walking gets better and better by the hour. On Monday, sh walked from the dinning table to Addie's bedroom nightstand, by herself, with no help, and without falling down. It's getting tough to keep up.

Merry Christmas, and Happy New Year

They both took an unbelievable amount of coaching to get a good picture. There's a ton more on the Flickr page.


Margaret was quite content hanging out with Grandpa Breymeyer. They discovered that pretzel sticks are great for teething.

Margaret enjoyed her first Christmas, and even started helping unwrap presents by the end of it.


I'll get a look for putting this up here, but Emily was absolutely radiant.

It was a very busy Christmas, but we all had a great time and enjoyed seeing so many family and friends. New Year's will be a bit quieter here, followed by a special family brunch and 4 days of work on the bathroom project!

Cheers.

"Breaker 1-9, Breaker 1-9, I've got a silly PaPa."

I think we had a little too much fun with the walkie-talkies. At one point, Lucky kitty was wearing them and meowing to the little girl on the other end. Ryan and Ben pulled off that ruse quite well.


They fit Addie a little better than PaPa.

Walker, Michigan Baby

We had some fun video of Margaret discovering her walker and terrorizing her sister and I, but I think the following video will trump that. We knew that she was getting close to walking on her own. We also knew that with Emily babysitting our friend's son, Carter, Margaret would be working hard to keep up with him, despite being a few months older.

Last night seemed like the perfect storm of being ready and slightly cranky. We present The Amazing Walking Baby.

We've been a little distant lately

Especially here on the blog. Life always seems crazy, then they somehow become more so.

First, our camera died. Attempts to revive it were fruitless. Then Mom came to the rescue and lent us her old one. Well, I'm not sure if we ever got around to telling you, Mom, but it lasted about a week - maybe two.

But we weren't totally cameraless. We took some great video of the girls... and never got around to posting it. Ug.

Then, we thought we had this whole bathroom redux planned just right. I do think that it would have been... had the plumbing not proved to be too much for me. Even though the plumber was able to come out the next day, it set us back just enough to throw off the weekend, then I was out of town on business. It's taken a lot longer than we would have liked. But we're getting there.

On top of that, our roof leak has returned.

Well, we finally replaced the camera. After much research, out past experience and our new priorities, we finally settled on one. We like it a lot so far and I'll post some of the first pictures at the end of the post.

The bathroom is nearly functional again - we'll be showering at home this weekend. We still have some drywall and flooring work to do, but that will come along.

During one of my many, many trips to Lowes, I found an elasimeric product for sealing roof leaks. I've applied two coats already and am hoping to get one more on before it turns too cold.

Despite all of the crazy projects going on, we have made the choice to slow down from time to time. We've been thoroughly enjoying Addie's soccer games. We'll be signing her up for the spring league, so there's more to come. She loves it and is one of the best on her team. Emily has been taking Margaret once a week to the Bouncing Babies story hour. They both have fun with it. I've signed up to play league basketball this winter on my department's team. We've been playing pick-up games this summer and had a lot of fun. I must say that I am one of the very few who shows up with his own cheering section - complete with pom-poms!

We also got a nice surprise the other day. Lynn and Marv Freeman, our friends from Austin, were in town. They were here visiting some family, and discussing how nice the area is. When they were told that a lot of it was because of Whirlpool, they though, "Maybe this is where Emily and Michael live!" A quick review of the phone book confirmed it. We had a nice visit. Short. But it was great to see them.

So much else has happened. Too much to list.

Fear not, family and friends - we're still here and we'll keep blogging.

Oh, yeah. Emily has been canning apples. She and a friend are splitting the duties and using their own kitchens. Emily plans to do 50 quarts for each family. Her friend has been canning pears and will do apple pie filling. That's three cases full of apple sauce next to Addie. The new camera has a wide-angle lens which allows us to get so much into this shot taken from the dinning room table.

Deer feasting on the apple scraps. Emily's big requirement for this camera was a large zoom. It has 10x zoom and she has already put it to good use. Taken from inside the house.

Margaret is growing and changing all the time. She seems to be taking a parallel path on the walking and crawling. She seems to get better at both at the same time.

Our soccer star! Before the game, getting ready with her team, and some warm up kicks before-hand.

The last piece of cultured marble going up and a close-up of the Mountain Granite pattern that we chose.

More pictures here.