A final glance...

December Daily 2010

A trip to White's Nursery for their Poinsettia Festival with our besties Brian & Sarah

The twins Popsicle stick ornaments

Sunday's with Santa at the VMSM

Gingerbread House destruction

Book nerd alert!

My 29th birthday

Macy's Believe

Teacher gifts

Flurries!

Braden's class party

Actual inches on the ground!

New Santa hats

First Baby Bulls practice-YMCA B Ball

Little gamers

Connor's class party

Neighbor gifts

Yankee Candles-this just makes me laugh

Christmas Eve morning

Backside of Christmas Eve-reindeer food & Christmas morning

Christmas

More gift reactions

Dec 26th-though I usually stop at the 25th-our record 14" deserved a mention

as well as our frantic trip to the ER!

Our new normal...

December was a whirlwind!
We live in a very busy, very family orientated, very kid friendly area that boasts countless winter activities so that is normal.
What is (well was) not normal is our new constant companion, the EpiPen:
The day after Christmas our area got dumped with 14 inches of snow. We do not normally get any. It was the end of the world.
On that day of all days one of the twins Braden ate a couple of cashews and immediately had an angioedema reaction to them. It was horrible, he was screaming. He couldn't talk. He started projectile vomiting. We called our friend, a medic who told us to dose him with benadryl which bought us valuable time as it took the medics longer than usual to reach in the storm. By the time they arrived Braden was completely swollen, hived and having difficulties breathing. Luckily they were able to get him stable and we made it slowly to our local ER. The nearby children's hospital wasn't even a possibility in the weather.
In the past week he's been on round the clock meds but has otherwise completely recovered from this incident. (Don't ask Mommy about her nerves!)
I am astounded by the vast amount of foods that contain either some kind of nut or may have been contaminated by coming in contact with some kind of nut.
This is our new normal. Treat every food as a threat until we can prove otherwise. Always carry an EpiPen on our person. Get countless blood tests and see countless doctors. Read blog after blog and visit health website after health website.
We are so very grateful that we were so lucky and that Braden is okay it's just a tad overwhelming the adjustment period to our new normal.

On the craft front:
I'm so pleased to say my December Daily is DONE. My Project Life album is COMPLETE! I'll photo and post about both at some point this week.
I'm also jumping in on the 52 photos in 52 weeks project that you see a link for on my sidebar. Check it out-it's sure to be fun!

Thankful is a state of mind...

It has been fluville here at our house this week so while I am not thankful for cleaning out "puke bowls", wiping little bums or the avalanche of soiled laundry I am thankful that I am crafty enough to keep us sane!

Give Thanks wooden blocks for the fire place mantel

THANKFUL banner for the kitchen I used Monika of i love it all free printable that can be found in this post thankful :: ideas, projects and free downloads and punched the letters out with a circle punch instead of making a pennant banner
A close up

Gobble Gobble Gobble

Our turkey's...

A close up of the twinkies pine cone & pipe cleaner creations

A close up of Mommy's block and mini painter sticks creation

We've been working on Christmas ornaments for another post too!

A glance back at summer...

...through my Summer in the life album, I won't even call it a "mini" this thing is huge!
It is 5 x 7 but I went a little bananas and I have "stuff" (because yes I included every single scrap of our summer in here) sticking out of the top, the bottom and the side! I LOVE it! Honestly our summer was bananas-it was the twins first summer vacation from school and we jammed it packed with so much why should my "mini" be any different!
So here is a look at a few pages-by golly it's not even half of them!

Posing in front of the green screen produced this pic at our trip to the aquarium-season passes came in handy to beat the heat this summer! The hidden tag has journaling about our visit.

Father's Day at First Landing State Park (excuse this horrible pic-the real life pic they are not anywhere near that darkened out!)
Ocean Breeze Water Park the postcard has journaling on the back

I ordered a 4 x 6 collage print from Walgreen's just to include several photo's from our day

Swimming at the Y

Ice cream social at the library-the cones were their name tags-I glued them front to back and punched them in

Chuck E Cheese on July 3rd with pals while waiting for the fireworks-had to include one of many of these "sketches" we got that night

Don't tell my kids I stole a couple of tickets!

Keeping cool by the pool

This has been called our retro Three's Company pic because of the various 1970's shades of pool wear at Water Country USA

Summer wreath pic is "matted" on the packaging from those little button paper clips!

Bringing some "twinkies" cheer to our injured hero "fire fighter girl"

Braden hits the jackpot!

Aquabatics at Water Country USA & Daddy's new work "toy"

Date night

$ Tree had four rolls of BRIGHT sticky tape-I had to scoop them up they were perfect for journaling in this album

This is hard. Our family lost a very young member after a courageous battle with cancer. Three battles with cancer in his three short years. We were unable to head to NY to attend the services so we released a Sponge Bob (Drake's favorite) balloon in honor of him.

Like me my kids haven't met a mall photo booth they don't like! They can spot them miles away! I put in the mall directory because I figure even just a year from now there will be major changes-there is always is.

Our favorite place on earth! Great Wolf Lodge-end of summer trip there to meet up with the boys grandparents-another Walgreen's photo collage

Final date night of the summer-Cinema Cafe...you can enjoy a movie and a drink at the same time!