Take It Easy

I know I have been a bad blogger this month but I have been on a reading binge lately.  It seems I have spent all my free time reading books this month and very little doing anything else.  I've read all 3 of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo series (soo sooo good) and then some from the Rizzoli and Isles series (also good but not addictive like the Stieg Larsson ones).  So anyhow, I would recommend them all and that's mostly what I have been up to for January.

We did take our first family vacation last weekend.  Finally.  We went to Honey Creek Resort in southeast Iowa.  I got us one of their little cottages to stay in for a few nights which worked out really well.



They are basically like a little tract house- ours had two bedrooms and two baths, a full kitchen, dining area and living room.  It was really nice but I had a few concerns.  Wyatt had never slept anywhere besides our house and I was nervous about him sleeping in the pack & play.  And he had to share a room with Rex.  Looks like it went okay.



They both did really good with sharing a room and sleeping in beds other than their own.  The other major concern was childproofing of the cabin.  I brought some doorknob covers, knowing that would be my biggest battle.  Of course, all the doors had lever-type handles and my covers only fit the standard round ones.  Ugh.  Here they are, trying to make a break for it.





And this doesn't look like much of a problem, does it?



What could be wrong with standing on the oven door??  Oh my.  It was a challenging trip but we had fun too at the waterpark and playing around in our cottage.







It snowed a little while we were there and that was kind of fun too.  Everything was fine on the drive there and back.  It snowed some more this week and Rob finally had to break out the snowblower.



Today is brutal though- freezing rain.  That is the worst.  Driving in snow= not so great.  Driving on ice= crashing and bad things.  So we are staying put for today and probably tomorrow (except for Rob going to work).  Looks like it should be warm and sunny enough on Tuesday to get rid of this crap.  I still have two more books from the library though so I am set!  The boys will definitely be stir-crazy by then so we'll for sure have to get out and do something on Tuesday.  Hope everyone is having a great weekend and Go Niners!

To 2012- More Fun. Less Work.

2011 is over and man am I glad about that.  It was a tough year.  Rob has been working on a multi-year project that is just about wrapping up now but it was a lot of workin' last year for him.  And when he wasn't doing that, he was doing the family room.  In 2011, we went on zero vacations.  I haven't been anywhere overnight away from the house since I was in the hospital giving birth to Wyatt.  WOW.  He's nearly 20 months old, by the way.  No one else has gone anywhere either, it's not like I just got left out.  All we did in 2011 was work our butts off, especially Rob.   Rob and I had a little funtime drinks at home on New Year's Eve and he asked me to make the toast and this is what I said, "To 2012- More fun. Less work."  We have some small projects for the house this year but most of them involve painting and/or organizing.  The biggest thing we need to get done is get a new garage door and garage door opener installed but we will be hiring that out.  Too much work.  So to sum up 2011, good year but not enough fun.  Looking to turn that around for 2012.

The weather this winter has been crazy.  It's snowed twice, maybe three times, and nothing has stayed on the ground.  It is warm here- many of our highs for December and January have been in the 40s and 50s.  Yesterday, according to the thermometer in our backyard, it got up to 61 degrees.  61 degrees on January 5th!!!!  That is nuts.  The boys and I took a walk and ran around in the backyard all afternoon.  It was awesome.







There has been a lot of playing with all the Christmas gifts around here.  It is a lot of fun for me to just sit back and see what they come up with.  Like this first picture here...

Working on Tiny with his Handy Manny tools-


Modeling their Spiderman jammies-



Apparently, Wyatt got the power to scale buildings (and beds) with his jammies-


And here is Rex, using the train table as a desk so he can color on his new Cars coloring book-


It's going to be a busy, busy weekend around here for Rob and I don't think we'll be seeing much of him. My plans for the weekend are just to do whatever he needs us to do and help him so he can wrap up this work project and be done with it on Monday.  And then we can start looking at what to do for a vacation- Yay!!