Silliness

This is a rare moment to capture of Madigan being so silly with her friend Paulina. She's the "singing seal" in this video.... She gets the sillies sometimes and really enjoys making her friends laugh. I think when she really feels comfortable with a friend, things like this happen!

Pumpkin Carving 2010

A little late, but still good to share.

More Dancing

2010 Christmas Stroll

We didn't take any other pictures then these ones at this year's Christmas Stroll downtown...it was too cold to worry about photos! We live about a 10 minutes walk to downtown and we are so happy with our location in town. Do we think about a bigger house?-yes, of course. But then we realize we have everything we need here at this house in the center of town. Kyle just submitted plans to the city to tear down and build a new larger garage. We're still hoping to do it this Winter. It's pretty darn large (Kyle wants a lift for his VW love) and will have a large room on the second floor for guests, storage and general hang out space (think teenager hang out spot!).
One of the indoor things to do at the stroll was the gingerbread house contest display- pretty amazing stuff!

And when we arrived home, both kids were asleep and it wasn't even 7:00 yet. (Love that.)

Lots of Dancing

There's lots of dancing in our house- mornings with Mama, evenings with Dad and all that in between where its just Madigan in every ballerina or princessy costume wear she has. There's many costume changes a day and adding a little bling (like below) is always a good idea!


I love this picture! Kyle is so good at playing, I mean really playing and imagining with the kids. He acts so silly with them and they love it.

Love of Bath Time

There's a few things in the house that Leo drops whatever he's doing and crawls (very fast!) towards; dishwasher doors opening, dog food pouring and bath water running. Leo practically jumps out of my arms into the tub when there is water in it. Lately he's been laying down and kicking both legs and arms!

Sometimes I think it's so sad to live in Montana where we don't get to leave our babies naked for very long any time of year!

Gingerbread House

I'm pretty sure Madigan asked to make a gingerbread house every week this entire year! We took the long Thanksgiving holiday weekend to make ours. She LOVED very minutes of it!! Right now, Leo is in bed an hour earlier then Madigan so we usually have that time with her. We use it mostly to actually play with her or read or do little projects like this. It won't always be this way, but it's really nice while we have it.

Thankful Tree

I spend a lot of time thinking of little things we can do to remind us of the season or the holiday. This year we did a little Thankful Tree leading up to Thanksgiving. We didn't add a little leaf to it every night like I had planned, but we did talk about it while out on walks or laying in bed-so I guess that it's really the idea behind it that's important even if it didn't end up with a ton of leaves.
Madigan had fun glue-ing the leaves to the tree:

And then she decided that our tree needed things living in it and stairs to get the the hole that the owl lives in:
(Madigan just came down and saw these pictures as I posting this, so now we just cut out and wrote on 3 more leaves to be added!)

New Reading Nook

We have a very weird little corner off our kitchen. When we moved the stairwell and added a half wall around it, it left a little area that has already had many lives. It used to be the art area, then the barn/animal area, and now it's the reading area. All the kids books are there with a little chair Madigan used to love when she was smaller. I wasn't sure that the kids would take to this area, but they are often squeezed together with various pieces from the house.





And this is Mom and Madigan planning Thanksgiving Leftovers:

Tree Artwork

As most kids are, Madigan has been very into the holidays-decorations, lights, trees, the whole works. Her excitement even led us to buy and hang lights on our house this year-something we thought we would never do. (I bought LED lights promoting 80% energy savings and felt pretty smug about that!)

Here's Madigan's painting of a Christmas Tree:Of course, there's also family members a dogs in this, as in every picture she draws.

Home Bound

A month ago or so we got a wicked cold spell..which spelled home for us....we didn't leave unless we had to. Here's how Barnaby spent his time that weekend: