My Children are Turning into Legomaniacs! Kaleigh collects the "City/Town" series and the Spongebob legos. As you can see the latest addition to her collection is the Spongebob Emergency Room. They are enjoying that one quite a bit!

Cole's latest collection of Lego "Agents" series is almost complete already! He has 1, 2, 3 and 5 of the 6 "missions". Now he is also collecting the Power Mining series too!

There is another photo of the Agents somewhere, don't know where it ended up on my page as I downloaded it after writing everything!

As you can see by the photos, they have quite a few and this is not all of them. Our livingroom is sometimes not passable unless you have shoes on...otherwise it is quite painful! So for those of you who know what a legomaniac is....um Tina? Heehee. I don't know if my kids will every have as much as Trevor but it will be fun trying to! The kids love playing playstation lego games too, but you can't be as creative with that stuff. Oh and by the way, Cole seems to have a knack for building new and creative designs ... Trevor would be proud!

Merry Christmas Eve! Our wonderful tradition of Aebelskivers and sausage didn't change a bit this year, other than knowing we need to make more next year! Carl and his mom hang in the kitchen making the round pancakes (found in Solvang, mostly) and heating up the sausage. I get the house ready and make the mulled cider. We have a great dinner with Carl's Mom and Dad, his sister and her family, Great Uncle Kenton (to the kids) and of course, Us. This year was really nice and we all had a great evening. After dinner the guys and kids pack themselves into a couple of cars and drive around looking at Christmas lights. In our town there is one neighborhood who really does it full on! So they drive over there until we call them and let them know that the Christmas room is ready. When the troops are back home the bell rings signifying that the Kristkind has left the building! German tradition for those who don't know about the Kristkind. Different than Santa, of course, and a little closer to the real meaning of Christmas. Directly translated, Kristkind means Christchild, although I am a little fuzzy on the way a baby is supposed to do things on Christmas Eve. Anyway, Carl and his mom did another great job, making these tasty treats!

Cole and Grandpa had matching hats this year! Although, I think Grandpa just wanted to keep his head warm!

The Christmas room.... The tree, and the main present area.

The nice and warm fireplace (you can see that we don't put the "teller" too close to the fire! For those of you who don't know it...there is a doll house that was made by my dad for Kaleigh on the right side of the photo.

Kaleigh and Cole with the Christmas tree!

So to all of you from all of us! I hope you had a great Christmas Eve and Merry Christmas Day tomorrow! More photos coming later!

Holiday at the Park Well, we have a good friend who still works for Disney and she doesn't mind signing us in occasionally and we appreciate it! So, for a little treat, we decided to let the kids play hookie from school and I took a day off of teaching to take the kids to the park. We had to pay for one ticket as sign ins are only for 3 people at a time. I know when Carl and I worked there, the park was pretty much a ghost town from about the first of December through about the 10th. There are many little pockets of time that were totally slow in the park! By that I mean about 15, 000 people would visit on those days verses the oh...60,000-70,000 that you find on a typical summer day! In otherwords no lines anywhere! Unfortunately, I don't think those days exist anymore! The Annual Pass has brought those days to an end. There are so many out there these days that any day can be crowded just by the sheer numbers of Annual Passholder that go every other day! We found that the crowds mainly consisted of adults, young children (under school age), and twenty somethings. So there were very few school kids there unless they were on vacation, a few of those too. But all in all it was a fine day! We got to spend time with our family and see some things we haven't seen, like the Nemo sub ride. The kids tried Space Mountain and LOVED it! Went on Indiana Jones too, but were a little scared of what was in the ride verses the ride itself. It was a good day, but I do miss the emptiness of early december like it used to me....ah being nostalgic for the olden days...never thought that would happen!

The Big 1-0! Ok, so Kaleigh will be 10 on Sunday. She has already had one birthday party, with family because December tends to book up a little fast with Christmas and all. She doesn't mind a bit having her birthday near Christmas, and we have a nice family gathering come to the house and celebrate with her. This year since it was right after Thanksgiving, we decided to just make it really easy and get pizza and have salad and cheesy bread! The guests all appreciated not having to bring something (usually the ladies in the family contribute to the meal in some way) and Carl's mom just had to make the cake. As you can see, Kaleigh liked the cake. Right now she is in pre-competition swimming and truly enjoys it! So Grandma made her a swimming cake. Kaleigh had a hard time deciding what kind of cake to have until while in Julien, McKenna came up with the swimming idea! Thanks again, McKenna! Look how good it turned out!