Happy Birthday, Brynn!

Brynn turns 8 tomorrow!  We spent a lot of the weekend celebrating - first on Saturday in Collins, and then on Sunday in Depew.

First up:  Collins Birthday!

Enjoying yummy strawberry cake at Grandma and Grandpa's house.

Present time!  Brynn got lots of really neat Lego Friends sets, and a Spirograph!  Remember those??

And of course, some game time with Grandma.

Birthday in Depew:

Presents first - Grandma won the best present reaction with a soundtrack from the movie Frozen.  Aunt Lisa won the most confused reaction with a "Boogie Board" (which is apparently some kind of electronic writing tablet).

Cake - Pokemon!

And just some random party shots:

I apparently didn't take any pictures of Jonas at this party.  He was there.  So although this is technically still Jonas' blog - he is pretty hard to find in this post.  I think you can spot him on the right side of one of the gifs if you look close enough...:-)

The Last Christmas Post

Since we did not have all of the kids together for the majority of Christmas Day, we celebrated again at each of the grandparents' houses this past weekend.

Saturday we went to the mall in the morning to get the cousin Christmas picture taken.  Somehow we had the wrong time and got there 40 minutes early...so we walked around the mall finding as many escalators as we could to go up and down.  That worked surprisingly well to keep the kids all amused, and we were able to successfully get a nice Christmas picture, which you will have to wait until January 9th to see.  

After that we headed to Grandma and Papa's for lunch and presents.  

Grandma always gets the kids each a Christmas ornament:

(an alien for Jonas)

(Perry the Platypus for Bransen)

(A horse for Brynn)

And the kids all got lots of other presents from their aunts and uncles, and Grandma and Papa.  It is a rule at Grandma's to open one present at a time so that everyone can see everything, but even with that rule, things get a little crazy, and I still missed a bunch!  Here's some of the cool things they got:

We had fun watching our family open presents we had picked out, too.

After opening presents for HOURS, we relaxed and had some game and movie time.

On Sunday, we went over to Grandma Deb and Grandpa Dan's for another delicious Christmas meal and to open gifts there.  The highlight for the kids was their glow pets!

And the highlight for Duane and I was our super cool new portable picnic table!

The kids spent some time relaxing and playing a fun Disney game with Grandma Deb after the present opening.  

And with that - we are finally done with Christmas posts!  Merry Christmas!

Happy Halloween!

We did a couple of fun things for Halloween this year.  

First, we had our church's annual Trunk or Treat on Sunday.  Jonas dressed up as the black Spiderman and walked around and around the gym and got tons of candy.  Then we heard a fun devotion led by Mr. Willert.

 On Thursday we headed to Uncle Mike and Aunt Mary's church for their Trunk or Treat, despite the windy rainy weather.  Jonas dressed up as a shark this time, and Duane dressed up too.  Apparently I was the party pooper with no costume :-)  There were no hot dogs as planned due to the rain, so all 12 of us went to Pizza Hut for some dinner.  Yum!

In keeping with our tradition, we graphed all of our candy.  Duane and Bransen helped us out, and the candy bars won by a long shot!

I hope you all had as much fun with your families as we did.  Happy Halloween!