Christmas Card Photo Shoot

The weather was gorgeous today and perfect for our Christmas card photo shoot.  We wanted it outside our house since we're doubling our holiday card with our moving announcement.  Here are a few picts from the session-

 

The little posing businessman!

 This is one of the ones I used.  Romey even  popped in there. :)

 Yup, laying in the grass in "church clothes."  That's SO them!

 Love Brady's laughing face and then his serious, "I need to put my hands in my pockets" look.

 Just look at her face!  LOL!

 

Seeing Santa!

We went to visit Santa again this year at the Nature Center (like last year and the year before and the year before).  Sylvie has her choice of pretty holiday dresses that Mimi collected for her this year.  For Brady, we used his outfit from last year, but it appears he's grown a bit!  :p  We took a few picts at home first-

I thought they looked like a little old couple going out for the evening, decked out in their duds and fancy coats. SO cute!  (They wanted to take a picture by Gingerbear, who is perched in Brady's stocking today.)

LOVE these shots that the volunteer photographer captured, LOVE!

When they were done, Sylvie turned around and ran back to hug Santa one more time.  Awesome photographer got it- thank you Steve!!

Sylvie with her typical tongue-out happy face and Santa waving in the background- precious!

We met our preschool pals there (which makes all activities 100 times more fun!).  Santa + friends + balloon artist + crafts + hot cocoa + cookies...does it get any better?!

 

 

While we were there, Brady wrote his first Christmas list (with assistance from Daddy as he asked, "how do you spell ____?"  But he's doing great writing his letters!

Meal Planner

I'm always planning dinner at the last minute.  Today Sylvie and I went to HT and she helped me out by telling me what She wanted- Awesome!  Thanks for the help little miss!  She was hilarious and made several other customers chuckle as she screamed, "Oh! Meatballs!  Can we have 'doze for dinn-ah Mommy? I LOVE dem!"  The little VIC put them in her baby cart and loudly sang about them as we went through the rest of the store.  Then she checked us out ("Can I beep dis?") and then wanted to carry her dinner.

She skipped out of the store singing, "Meatballs! Meatballs for dinn-ah!"  Oh, how I love her.

 

 

 

Neighborly

One of my favorite things about our new house is that the Morels are right across the street!  This means play time any time...for us ALL (the kids love Bella & Hayes and I love Joy & Kevin!) 

This evening Bella rode home with Sylvie and me from daycare and stayed to play.  At one point, Brett said, "You have to go take a look at the girls upstairs.  They are so cute playing together so nicely."  Good thing I brought my phone for a pict-

Artists Commissioned

As planned, we had the awesome artists who created the painting in Brett's office, create a piece for my office.  They worked on their masterpiece this evening-

Falalalala!

Deck the tree with lights and ornaments...falalalala, lalalala!

The Return of Gingerbear

365 days from when he made his debut in our home, Gingerbear returned tonight in order to keep tabs on the little Luhrings behavior for Santa.

Oh, Christmas Tree

We attempted to use the large artificial Christmas tree that was beautiful in our old house with its two-story family room this year in our new home...and it just wasn't working for me.  For some reason the "artificial-ness" of it bothered me.  So we sold it to the new owners of 21520 (who are pretty awesome, btw!) and decided to get a real tree this year.  Ah!  This is what I grew up with and what I'd had my whole life, except for the past  seven years or so.  It smells wonderful!  We went to a little farm tonight to find our 2012 Christmas tree.  It was super fun...we found a tree, played on some slides, made ornaments, drank hot cocoa, and ate cookies.

 This is it!