Holiday Fun!!!

Eventhough we are in a new state, far away from family, certain things hold true. (Especially when you have a 9 year old that will remind you of everything that needs to be done for the holiday) We had tons of fun spending our time doing some of these great holiday activities.

Madison is a bit to young to particpate in many of our activities but I thought she deserved recognition of her great behavior allowing us to do these fun thing. Plus, she was great eye candy to look at and smile any time we needed it.

One of our first holiday activities was making Christmas Cookies. Every year the boys get to roll out, cut out, and frost sugar cookies. The kitchen here is pretty small so I had to do it in shifts and the dining room table is over carpet and that sounded like a recipe for disaster so turn taking in the kitchen sounded much more workable.

Another tradition that began last year was making a gingerbread house. We started again this year with a kit due to limited kitchen items, but the thing that did change was Mommy was in charge and decided that the "glue" in the kit last year didn't work right so I made royal icing. This was also a challenge with our little kitchen supplies, the largest bowl was pretty shallow and it was hard trying to keep the powdered sugar in the bowl.

Mark, Brian, and Steven decorated this lovely house with tons of candies, or at least all the candies that they did not eat first :). What a great time!

Tomorrow I will post more holiday happenings, stay tuned!!!

Merry Christmas!!

Meier Fun!

The great thing about our LONG journey out to the northwest was being able to see family. We stopped in Clarkston , WA, a few hours from our destination and we saw Uncle Steve and cousins Tori and Kobe!!


We also stopped in Cedar Rapids and had fun with Grandma Meier, Uncle Charlie, and Uncle Robert. The boys definitely got some wiggles out as the "played" with their uncles. What a great time!


I hope we will able to get back to the central part of the U.S. to see family again sooner than later. I know that now we are so close to Uncle Steve that we will be able to visit Clarkston again when the weather clears up.

Car!

Yeah, we got the Protege from the shipping people yesterday. That means that Mommy was able to get out a bit without having frozen solid toes, YEAH!!

This was after the family went out searching for homes that I got addresses to that are rentals. Not great luck, but we did find one that is right next to an elementary. It is a duplex and it is two stories and has a privacy fenced back yard. It is not new by any means, but that is probably best. It is empty right now which is a HUGE plus! We tried calling but they didn't answer, it would be nice if it worked out. I would LOVE the boys to be able to walk to school, the school yard is literally right across a side street, I could watch them walking/running on the way home.

We will see. The only problem with our search this morning is our heat is not working so by the time we got home all of our toes and hands were ice cubes. Hope we can get some moolah this week so we can get our car fixed. We got an estimate.......apparently this is a design flaw in the Ford Windstar, it is a hole in the pipe leading to the heater unit......yikes....a $400 fix. Luckily David has some great people he works with that are willing to share their good connections and we found a trustworthy mechanic.

I guess we are back bunkering down this weekend, hopefully we will get a call about the rental so we can get a peek at the inside of the duplex.

Hope you all have great weekends!

What a CUTIE!!

Okey dokey, now today is just some cute pictures of Madison to warm the heart!!

We miss you all terribly but we are doing okay. Hopefully we will get the van fixed soon and hopefully get our Protege so we can do more to check out the area.

Take care all and know that we are thinking about you.

Getting Settled

I have spent the last couple days trying to get settled and trying to get the house Christmasy with just the few things we brought and the Christmas tree we bought at Wally's. Oh, I love the command hooks, gives us a place to hang our stockings in this temporary apartment. We are getting there....wow, I forgot how much money it would cost to get the essentials for the house to eat, clean, wash clothes, etc.......yikes it adds up quickly.

I have been searching the classifieds and found a few places to look at hopefully in the next couple days....two are houses for rent and one is a duplex. One is in Kennewick, one in West Richland, and the other in Richland. Hopefully we can get it all worked out so that after Christmas we can get a more permanent place to live.

The boys are surprisingly not bored. I brought a few toys with us and including their DS's they have been mostly relaxing and getting used to things. Unfortunately our Wii decided to eat a game the first time we tried to put one in and would not let it go...grrr. But after about an hour on the phone with Ninetendo, we ended up with not having to pay for the repair and they will expedite the shipping of our Wii back to them if I sent it UPS today since they are out of WA we could have a much better chance to have it by Christmas. Of course today of all days is the coldest...... -1 this morning..brrr......and with only one vehicle right now we all had to take David to work then we all (me and 5 kiddos) went to ship the Wii out. So this morning, all the kiddos had on two shirts, two pants, two pairs of socks, winter coats, gloves, hand warmers, etc.....Benjamin still managed to take off his shoes and mittens in the car (silly boy). They were all very well behaved (of course they were working towards their candy bribe :) ) With any luck we will have it back by Christmas.

I thought I would share a couple pretty pictures from our trip here. The mountains were just beautiful. Too bad the weather wasn't better, we might have been able to enjoy them more.


Here are some cute pics of the kiddos enjoying the pools where they had a chance to swim. Funny thing......at the motel 6 in Clarkston, they had to walk outside to get to the indoor pool, BRRRRRRrrrr.

Hope everyone has a great day!!!

We Made it to Washington!!!

Wowza, what crazy day we have had, but we beat the BLIZZARD!!

Had to share some things from our adventure......first of all, we drove through South Dakota. We found out that there is NOTHING in South Dakota!!! We only found 2 Mickey D's in SD and neither one of them had a play place. YIKES, 4 boys in the car for HOURS and no play place....not good. We made it to Rapid City and the boys were able to enjoy seeing the HUGE dinosaurs in 20 degree weather.....Madison and I stayed in the car :)

The boys spent much cuddle time in the van (whether they liked it or not :) ) Mostly they didn't kill each other, but we had to break up some altercations of course.

The mountains through Idaho were beautiful, though we saw them going 40 miles an hour down hwy 12, well at least the passengers who could see out the front window could see them since the others were iced over on the INSIDE and of course we didn't let David look since he was driving......oh, did I tell you it is BUTT COLD in South Dakota and Montana.....oh and when we had a conversation with people from Montana about the cold.......they just laughed, nothing else, just laughed.

One thing that was unique about South Dakota and Montana was there were casinos EVERYWHERE. The picture shows an example of that.....a gas station, fast food, casino in the same building at a corner stop off the highway. Too crazy.....hundreds of casinos....of course only when there was a town.

After many hours on the road, we are now just about 3 hours from our destination. We spent a great afternoon at Uncle Steve's house with him, Tori and Kobe and her friend Madison then they came over to our hotel to swim and have fun. After drying off and getting into jammies, the boys laid down as I got the movie ready and 5 minutes into Wall-E, ALL 3 of them were out!!

We are going to take it slow in the morning but then run by Uncle Steve's and head to Richland after lunch. Hopefully I can post again tomorrow and share more pictures.

Packing Day Is Upon Us

Can you believe that it is already packing day and the movers will be here tomorrow? Yikes!! Even though we have been planning for this it seems like it should still be weeks off. We will miss everyone dearly but I am sooo glad that we have technology like blogs and web cams to keep in touch.

I better get off the computer so that I can get everything organized and packed and give the boys one last goodbye to the computers before shutting them down for probably about a MONTH.......they will go through some major withdrawl...LOL

Thinking about all of you as we are packing to move to the NW!

So Sweet!!

Benjamin loves rubbing his hair for comfort when he is tired, mad, etc. Well, the other day he was cuddling with Mommy on the couch and Daddy had just set Madison down beside us. Next thing you know, Ben was rubbing Madie's hair for comfort and fell asleep beside her. How sweet is that. All the boys, even Benjamin already are in love with their little sister and will do anything for her. Let's hope that stays that way as she grows up!!