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!

An End to Summer

School started on Tuesday and I just couldn't let my daughter start school without one last visit to my parent's farm. We had a wonderful week of enjoying nature and other local activities.

There were flowers to decorate with


Cool evening breezes to rock in


Sisters to play with


Slides to ride


Grammies to hug


Birthdays to celebrate

Tractors to ride


Zoos to visit


Even free hair eating to boot'

Funny faces to make


Webs to conquer


Farmer markets to sample


Evening rides along the creek


Morning walks through the wildlife preserve


Wildflowers and weeds in the ditch to clip

It was a wonderful way to bring summer to a close. Just a few more sweet memories of a summer's past. The memories will be priceless and oh so precious as she grows older. She will never once stop to think about the amount of money I spent on those memories. She will only remember the things we did, not the things we didn't do.

Happy Birthday Margaret!

Today is Margaret's first birthday. We actually started celebrating the big day on Sunday with a party in Indiana with family. Everyone enjoyed themselves including the birthday girl. She finished the celebrating today with a small celebration, but was treated like a princess all day by her loving sister and friends. To see LOTS more photos of Margaret's birthday check out Flickr!

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.

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.