Merry Christmas!

Hope you have a wonderful time celebrating with friends and family.  

Here are some photos and a video from our recent Toddler Time Christmas party.

 

 

PC218897.AVI from Pink Stripey Socks on Vimeo.

Blue hands and feet

How was your weekend?

Good, I hope.

Hubby, Chuck, and I have been fighting a nasty bug.  I think Baby Chuck got it around Thanksgiving and then he passed it onto hubby.  My immune system fought a good fight, but I finally succumbed sometime last week.  

Blech. *Sniff sniff*

Baby Chuck and I stayed home for quite a bit, but we pushed ourselves to go to Toddler Time.  This Friday they did a hand and foot painting activity.  I think the children enjoyed being artists for a day.

Happy Thanksgiving

A couple of days ago hubby and I finally opened up our Thankfulness Jar.  The slips of paper point out that we were thankful for three things in life:

(1)  Friends and family

(2)  Sleep

(3)  Heat and food

Hmmm...

I hope you have a wonderful Thanksgiving filled with friends, family, good food, and long turkey-induced naps. I'll be stuffing my face and snapping lots of photos to upload next week.  To keep the Thanksgiving spirit rolling, here are some photos from our Toddler Time Thanksgiving party.  Once again the teachers were super sweet and threw a great bash for the kids.

 Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Halloween!

We just got power back.  Yay!   It feels so good having hot water, a working fridge, lights, and the internet again.  Sadly, some of our family is still left without power.  We're hoping that everything gets fixed soon.  

Even though it doesn't really feel like Halloween, I still wanted to wish you a Happy Halloween! Here's a photo of Baby Chuck in his Mr. Potato head costume.

We're just going to have a low-key day today.  With the terrible weather conditions, I'm so thankful that we were able to celebrate Halloween last Friday at our nearby library.  They did such a nice job bringing the Halloween spirit to the kids.

We like to party

During the Summer, our town hosts small Sunday get-togethers in the park.  They serve free food and drinks.  Plus, they hire a dj to play music.  Week after week I kept meaning to go but something always came up.  This past Sunday Kim, Baby Chuck, and I finally joined the festivities.  It was  a lot of fun.  We ate delicious food, people-watched to our heart's content, and even got roped into a little dancing.

Boy oh boy, West New Yorkers sure know how to party!

Love em and leave em from Pink Stripey Socks on Vimeo.

Neighborhood faces

Walking outside with Baby Chuck is one of the highlights of my day.  Every time we walk outside we see something different.  I usually don't bring my camera out, but yesterday was an exception.  Here are a couple of photos that I snapped and then edited.  Hope you enjoy them! 

Hello Tulip Time!

I can't believe how time has flown by.  It's now been a month since we left Holland and moved back East.

I still miss Michigan, but we're slowly readjusting to our new life here. 

One day when Baby Chuck grows up, I'll tell him lots of stories about our time in Michigan.  I'll share about the kindness of mid-westerners.  I'll scare him with a gory recounting of his birth.  I'll make him laugh with tales about our sweet and grumpy Charlie. 

And I'll delight him with descriptions of that quirky festival called Tulip Time. 
 

Hello Tulip Time

Oh how I love that festival! If only I had learned how to dance in klompen. :)

Our neighborhood

 

Reviewing our move: Packing

Hubby and I finished unpacking the majority of boxes this morning.  Hooray!  Right now we're acclimating to East Coast living by eating delicious ethnic food and learning how to drive more aggressively.  We're also reflecting on our moving experience, so I figured it would be nice to write a couple of posts about that. 


We packed for days and days.  Although we donated and sold a lot of items, we still had a ton of items to pack.  I packed most of the rectangular items and left hubby with the easy task of packing oddly shaped and fragile things.  (Hee hee, I'm such a good wife like that.)     
 

A couple of boxes here and there slowly grew into tall unstable towers.  Soon we were surrounded by our very own city of stuff.

While we packed, life still went on.

And wouldn't you know it?  In the midst of everything, Baby Chuck began crawling forward for the first time.

Whoa.  Not so fast, spider monkey.

Bucket list- Grand Rapids Public Museum

Here's our last bucket list item.