A real post!

Sorry for the pseudo-posts lately. Life has been full.

Thanksgiving was wonderful. We spent the day with friends from church eating and drinking, singing hymns, playing outside, eating and drinking some more, and laughing a lot. Here are a few photos and videos:

Singing:



Playing with the older boys:

We've done lots of fun family things lately in anticipation of not having a lot of family time in the near future. As I mentioned in my last post, I have a very hard-working husband who is an excellent provider. He's taken on a second job so that we can pay off our student loans (his grad school loan just came up for repayment - $17,000 - ouch!) more quickly. We are actually doing well financially (thank you God and Hillcrest!) and have no problem making ends meet even with the new loan payment - so don't worry about us - but my ever-practical-and-wise husband wants to escape some of the interest on these loans and take advantage of our rent-free housing by paying off our debts as quickly as possible. Our undergrad loans have better interest rates (only 2.4% on one and 5% on others) than his grad school loan (7-something%) so we're going to pay that off first and then we'll rest a bit easier. Anyway, Rob won't be getting home until midnight most nights now, and I haven't decided yet if I will regularly wait up for him, get up when he comes home, or a combination of the two. We'll see. Tonight I'll probably wait up.

Getting back to my segue - we went to a lovely restaurant and to the symphony for Rob's birthday. It was a Christmas concert and they even played Chip Davis' arrangement of Greensleeves! I thought of you daddy! Aidan went to the Adams' that night and stayed for 4 1/2 hours! With drive time, that's 6 hours without nursing! I am in no way looking for him to wean soon so we don't regularly push those limits - I didn't know if he could go that long, but evidently he did very well and fell asleep with no problem. My big boy!

Speaking of big - he weighed in at 23lbs. 10oz. on Friday! :D

I know there are a million more things to tell all of you, but I am too tired now to remember most of them. I'll try to wrap it up with a few misc. happenings:

*Aidan walked 4 steps on Thanksgiving and has ventured out a few more times since then as he gains confidence. :) :) :)

*Aidan waved bye-bye to daddy for the first time Friday morning!

*Rob snuck in ANOTHER Christmas present for me and made me open it early (I have no idea how that man managed to pull off such an amazing wedding proposal - he's horrible at surprises!! haha!) - it's an awesome digital camera!! I'll post more about it later and you'll be seeing much of the erm... fruit... of the gift soon. :)

*We are delighted to be celebrating advent season again and got to do the advent reading at church on the first sunday. I also taught a "class" on the history and meaning of advent here at hillcrest that night and I found a great resource that I meant to post much earlier: home devotions for Advent brochure (.pdf file).

I'll leave you with a few more photos for posterity (or something like that).

haha! oh, I know it's bad to laugh...

Can you believe those eyes??