Now that I have been blogging all afternoon, it's time for the REALLY BIG NEWS. We are having a new baby (for real, not just pretend). The baby is due in June. The kids and I went to our first visit with the midwife last week and got to hear the heartbeat. It was really nice to hear the heart beat and know that I am not just a nauseated, lazy person for no reason. I am counting on the morning sickness being over in about 8 days. (12 weeks is the magic number, right???) Hopefully that nesting instict will kick in after that and I will get all those half finished projects done soon.

Currently we refer to the baby as "Racecar" because someone thought that would be a good name and I don't have anything better yet. We will work on it for real later.

This is the kids "new car." It is a red and tan van. The steering wheel is grey. You might think that the chair in front of the love seat is a seat, but it is actually the TV for the kids in the back seat to watch. The front seat is the body pillow and the CD player is also the steering wheel. Robyn is such a good mom. She makes sure all the kids are securely buckled in. Grace is seven in pretend so she doesn't need a car seat - she gets to just use the pink seatbelt that in real life is a towel.

The really fun new game recently has been - Library.
Colin is the librarian. The girls bring him books which he scans into the computer.
The girls then take the books to their pretend house and read them to their babies. Colin lives at their house at pretend night. While he is there he reads the computer to tell them when the books are due.
Then they return them to the library and Colin reshelves them.
One special feature of this library is that if you want a picture of your baby, the librarian will scan the baby too.

Playing in the snow.

Another fun Christmas activity we did last week was to make a Gingerbread house. (I cheated and bought one of those kits so it was very easy.) We had a lot of messy fun building it. We took this picture as soon as we were done. Then I moved it so I could wipe off the table. I moved it before the frosting was set and the roof crashed to the floor. I decided that was the way to do a gingerbread house because we got to have the fun of making it, and then we ate it for desert after lunch and I don't have to worry about where to keep it or get after anyone for snitching. We snacked on it for a day and then I threw the rest in the garbage.

We curled all the ribbons on the candy chains and the kids wanted to do it themselves. Everyone learned to do it, even Grace. We had curly ribbons all over the house for two days because they did it all day the first day and when they woke up the next day, they wanted to do it again. They used the ribbons to decorate the tree some more and wore them in their hair. Unfortunately, the ribbon supply was exhausted after two days of curling so that activity had to end. Luckily, I did my shopping and my wrapping early this year so I am okay that the ribbon is gone. Scratch that, Colin was reading over my shoulder and said that I am wrong - he found a giant roll of blue curling ribbon - let the fun continue!

This is us making candy chains to count down to Christmas. Colin and Robyn's chains are pretty accurate, but Grace likes to speed things up a bit and cut a candy off a few times a day. She is her momma's girl - we both love candy and cookies. She tells me, "I hungry mommy." I ask what she is hungry for and give her some suggestions like yogurt or cheese, but she always says, "candy" or "cookies." She also tells me, "We should buy licorice at the store." And she always knows exactly how many candy canes are left on the tree.

Here are some pictures of our Christmas tree. We went with Grandma and Grandpa and the cousins up to the forest to get a real tree. It was fun. The kids loved it until they got cold, but Grandpa saved the day and all was well.

When I told Colin we were going to get a tree from the forest, he asked, "How will we know where to put the branches? If we get it from the forest, it won't have colors." My poor city kids. It is about time they had a real tree for Christmas.
We had a lot of fun decorating it. Colin insisted we get pictures of it right away.
They are still having fun decorating it. It changes every day.