Christmas re-cap

Not many pictures from Christmas that Luke and I hosted but it was great.  We moved Christmas to a few days later and ordered pizza and wings from Pontillo's. Amazing idea since I did not have to play with the oven and store a bunch of food in my fridge.  Here are some pictures from before people came over of our decorations.  Some family did have to work that evening, but overall most were able to make it.  6 pizzas and 8 dozen wings later (only 2 slices of pizza left over!)

Our fireplace area (family room) all decorated for Christmas.  We have Jen's dorm room tree there as well.  No photo of our "upstairs" tree since it is sideways and blurry.  The tree was in our living room though.  

clothes line of cards

I mod podged clothes pins with scrap book paper and hot glued buttons on the top of them to use as a display for all the holiday cards we received.  Most of the family doesn't mail cards to family since we see each other (it's not that we don't have friends for the "lack" of cards).

all the shoes in the hall

In the basement we had our other tree set up for the kids gift exchange and grab bag.  The basement is the only room large enough for all to be in.  It is not a finished basement but some paint on the walls and lots of area rugs help warm it up a bit.

the bar area...make your own

downstairs tree

Happy Valentine's Day!

Just wanted to say Happy Valentine's Day to the two people who always told my sister and I that, "you don't need a special day to tell people you love them, you should tell them everyday." Well, you are loved!

Christmas Decorations

So, I was ambitious after Thanksgiving and decided to decorate. My ambition ended after I carried all our decorations up from the basement. Yup, that's all the decorations for our house, including ornaments, in just those boxes. We have one additional bin for our outdoor net lights. One bin is all Disney Christmas stuff and is my favorite bin. Perhaps this is the real reason my ambition ended... plus the fact that there was the Grinch on T.V. I did manage to get this little bit done though.I will be spending this Saturday decorating since last weekend I worked on report cards and took a mini-cottage overnight break paired with the Festival of Lights in Syracuse. (2 miles of lights and Christmas music)

Cookie Day

So I fail miserably at taking pictures. I brought the camera, but did I take pictures. Nope. These are the few I took from the typically chaotic baking day. Baking this year on a scale of 1-10 was probably a 3. A huge failure in quantity of cookies produced, likely due to the lack of Martha aka Jen. Here are the peanut butter kiss cookies. Later, Jen's father-in-law stopped over to install wireless for my mom and then let her borrow his ipad to facetime chat and "bake" with the aunts. Lack of baking lead to Jen taking us on a walking tour of her decorated for Christmas home. We also got to watch the dogs play/fight with each other and Paco ignore Jen. I will try to do better at remembering to take pictures. Blogs are real boring without the pictures. Although making spritz cookies and using red hot dollars instead of the cherry center taste pretty good. No pictures of that though. But mom did throw red hot dollars at Max to catch in his mouth. She threw them as if they were darts. When she threw them for Wes to catch it was the rainbow, softball toss. There's no favoritism there.