Birthday girl and Easter!!

Rachel is 2!!  I can't believe she is growing up so fast.  We had lots of fun celebrating the big day.  The official day was on Thursday, so we went to Applebee's for supper then to Runza for ice cream!  Rachel got a new kitchen from us, which they both love.  Saturday was the party!  We had lots of friends and family celebrating with us.  What a great day!!

The next day we went to an Easter Egg hunt at the Country Club.  Luke and Rachel had a great time looking for the eggs, but probably most enjoyed seeing what was inside!

We had a wonderful Easter weekend with family.  Matt had Friday off, which we filled up with yard work.  We spent most of the day putting down mulch.  The yard looks great!  Saturday we spent in York with Matt's family.  On Sunday, we woke up to see what the Easter Bunny left for us and headed to Fullerton to spend the day with my family.  Lots of good food and family time made a great weekend!  I still have the day off today (Monday) which I am enjoying.  Only 17 days left until summer vacation!!  Yay!!

Here are some pictures of the last few weeks!  Some highlights were that we got to celebrate Luke officially being potty trained!!  YAY!!!  We spent the morning at the Lincoln Children's Museum and ate lunch at Red Robin. 

We are gearing up for a busy spring!  I officially have 23 days of school left!  Luke starts soccer in a couple weeks, and Rachel's birthday is next week.  Time is flying by!!

Valentine's Day!

I have recently become addicted to Pinterest!  I have found lots of great ideas for our house, the kids, and for school.  I wish I had time to make/do all these projects!  Pinterest is where I found some inspiration for Valentine's Day.  Here is what I made:

Rachel's favorite snack food is goldfish, or "shishies" as she says.  So, we thought this was a good Valentine for her to give to the other kids at daycare. 

Luke's valentine's were a superhero.  His said "You're a super friend".  I took some of the extras to school with me to give to my students.  Those said "Have a super Valentine's Day".  Easy and cute!

Here is a wreath I made for the front door.   Again, it was very easy to make, but it took me 4 different evenings to put it all together!  It looks really cute on our front door.

Another cute pinterest find is this wall hanging.  Someday I will add each of our names to the hearts.

Here are some pictures of Luke and Rachel from this month, too.  We don't have much going on, so these are just pictures of us hanging around the house!  Lots of great family time!

January recap

Well, my resolution to post every week in 2012 has not started out so great.  I blame that on the fact that January has been a pretty uneventful month in our house, and we are ok with that!  We have spent lots of good family time together at home.  Here are a couple highlights we did have:

Grandpa Krings had a birthday on January 2nd.  We went to Fullerton to celebrate.  We recently discovered that Luke can write some letters, so here is the birthday card he wrote.  We're so proud!

 

We decided to start up our muffin tin meals again, so we have them on Fridays.  Here is the first one of the year, and Rachel's first ever!  We kicked off the year with a rainbow theme.  They have been singing the rainbow song they learned from Mickey Mouse a lot, so I thought they would like it.  It was a huge hit!  We had yogurt with red sprinkles, orange Cheetos, yellow cheese, green beans, blueberries, and purple jelly on a sandwich cut into a sun shape.

Another favorite muffin tin is the "make your own sandwich" with crackers, lunchmeat, and cheese. 

Playing on the ipad has been a popular activity.  It's amazing how fast they both picked up how to use it.

Another favorite activity has been eating popcorn and watching a movie. 

This weekend we get to celebrate my birthday!  I plan to enjoy this last year of my 20's! :)

Happy New Year!!

Well, today is the last day of my Christmas break.  Tomorrow is back to work. Luckily, Thursday and Friday are my normal days off, so we have a nice easy week!  We had a wonderful month of December, including a trip to Mexico and lots of fun time with family.

Of course, Christmas preparations have to begin with the picture for the Christmas card.  Here is how our photo session went:



Next was a much needed 3 days of relaxing in Mexico for Matt and me.  It was beautiful there!  We got a massage, laid by the pool, and enjoyed as much food as we could eat.



Luke participated in the Christmas program at church.  He didn't know the words to "Away In A Manger", but he looked really cute up there! :)

On December 18 we celebrated Christmas with the Holthe family.  Luke participated in BINGO for the first time, and had lots of fun!  We received a lot of nice prizes.  After that, we opened presents!  Rachel really got into ripping open the presents this year.



The next few days were filled with cookie baking and treat making.  Luke had a great time decorating cookies.  Rachel was not as interested.



This year we started a new tradition.  We had an Elf on the Shelf visit our house from the North Pole.  He watches over us everyday, then reports back to Santa while we are sleeping.  We woke up to find him in a different place every morning.  Our elf's name was Jake, and we had lots of fun finding him each morning.  His last day with us was Christmas Eve, so we planned a special day.  We had snowman pancakes for breakfast, decorated a gingerbread house, watched the Polar Express, opened presents, had a snowball fight, and went to church.  It was such a fun day starting new traditions for our family!  Christmas morning we woke up to find that Santa left us some presents under the tree!  Then we went to Omaha to spend the day with the Krings family. 



We had a big year of changes for our family, but feel very blessed!  What a great end to a great year!  We are excited to see what 2012 will bring.  I have several resolutions this year - to be more crafty is one of them.  I even started this in 2011 by making some decorations to ring in the new year.

Halloween

I realized once again that I am behind on posting.  So, here are our pictures from Halloween.  Luke was a pirate this year, and Rachel was a Cornhusker cheerleader.  They both looked so cute! We had a lot of fun trick-or-treating around our new neighborhood.