Merry Christmas

We hope everyone enjoyed the holidays! We were thankful for the opportunity to remember the birth of our Savior, and enjoy the magic of Christmas.

We wish everyone a Merry Christmas!

Love,

Jed, Erin, Ben and Eliza

Gingerbread Extravaganza!

This week we made gingerbread sleighs to decorate as a family! When Jed was growing up they used to do this every Christmas. I got the recipe and instructions from Jed's mom, Michel, a few years ago, and now I enjoy keeping the tradition alive with our family.

Benjamin helped me roll out the gingerbread dough... Here he is giving it all he's got! Luckily this heavily floured piece of dough was all the unwanted leftover bits put together. :)

Jed creates real masterpieces on his gingerbread sleighs. He makes cool scenes on all the sides: a pine tree in the snow, a Santa head, wrapped gifts, a star, a snowman.... He's a real artist!

I'm not so creative. That's why I decorated four sleighs in the time that it took him to decorate two. :)

Jed showed Benjamin how to put a wart on his nose. Jed said they used to do this when they were kids, so apparently he is just trying to keep ALL the traditions alive. :) Jed was definitely the instigator -- by 'gluing' mini m&ms on the front of all of his teeth and smiling at us with a silly grin (and a few silly warts on his nose too!). :)

Benjamin decorated a house and some gingerbread men while we decorated the sleighs. It was hilarious to watch him! He would do a big layer of frosting, then a layer of candies, then a huge layer of frosting again, and so forth...

After we were through with decorating, Benjamin took this picture. I was pretty impressed! Most of his pictures don't turn out so well - many of them are of himself, with the camera angled for a great picture up his nose. :)
Even though Eliza slept through our Gingerbread sleigh decorating, she was able to fully participate in our Graham Cracker House decorating party this morning! I invited a few friends over and we all decorated houses with our kids. At the beginning, I was helping Benjamin get started while Eliza sat in her booster across the table with a graham cracker house. She didn't have a frosting bag or any candy within reach, and so I guess she looked at the house and figured the only thing to do was start eating it. I looked up just as she was chowing down on the roof. How hilarious!
She had a fun time decorating her house. After a while of dutifully putting candies where I put the frosting, she realized that she COULD be eating this candy instead. Thus began an internal debate every time I gave her a candy to put on the dollop of frosting: "Should I eat this or should I put it on my house???" Eventually she decided to take a bite out of each of the candies and THEN put it on the house. Every time I gave her a candy, she would say, "a taste" and then take a bite out of it before putting it on the house. It quickly went downhill, and soon she was simply not interested in wasting any more candy on her house. When we were all done and cleaning up, I saw her picking off and eating the nice row of m&ms we had put on her roof at the beginning. What a sorry looking gingerbread house that was, with a gaping hole in the roof, half-eaten gumdrops all over it, and a row of missing m&ms from the top! :)

Benjamin learns a lesson from King Wenceslas...

My #1 top all-time favorite Christmas Carol is Good King Wenceslas. I have the whole thing memorized and have sung it to Benjamin over the past holiday seasons. He now asks for it whenever we sing Christmas Carols. The other day I was belting it out in the car and came to the part, "Bring me flesh and bring me wine, bring me pine logs hither" and Benjamin said, "Mom, are they bad men?" I was surprised that I hadn't ever explained the story of the song to him, and immediately started to explain to him what it was about, "Oh, no, honey. Good King Wenceslas was a good, kind, serving King..." and I told him all about the story and what the words meant --- about how he was bringing food, water, and wood to the peasant man that he saw, and how his page was getting cold and didn't think he could trudge through the snow any further, and how Good King Wenceslas told him to walk in his footsteps in the snow where he would find a bit of relief from the storm. I couldn't believe it, but I actually started to get all choked up!! (I know, I am so crazy. I really love this song, though!)

Anyway, the next day we went to the library and Benjamin begged to go to the park. I relented even though it was too cold to be outside without winter parkas. Anyway, after a while I told him we needed to go inside because I was getting really cold. Benjamin then said, "Mom, walk where I'm walking, in my footsteps, and you won't be so cold." I thought that was adorable. :)

Therefore, Christian men, be sure, wealth or rank possessing,

Ye who now will bless the poor shall yourselves find blessing.

6 months exactly

This is me at 27 weeks (6 months along). I'm due March 11. My sister, Brittany, is due on March 30 and has been asking me to take a picture of myself. So, anyway, here I am. :) Something happened during the picture, though... somehow my belly shrunk like ten inches because I just KNOW it's about twice this size in real life....

On a side note, baby boy has been kicking me like no other for weeks now. He is a squirmy little thing! Benjamin thinks it's pretty neat to feel the baby moving around in there. :) Eliza still loves sitting on my lap, but it's starting to get rather uncomfortable- for both of us! :)

Daddy's home!

I am so excited that Jed is done with his Trauma Surgery rotation at the Main downtown Detroit hospital. It was loooooong hours, and we all missed him! I took this picture a week or so ago, when Jed was staying up even later in order to read the kids a book before he crashed to bed. He had been awake and working for probably 30 hours at this point. I thought it was so cute when I discovered him reading to the kids after finally arriving home from his shift. Every time he got home again, they were so excited to see him!

An encounter with Snakey

Jed came home a couple weeks ago with a teeny-tiny little snake that he had found on the sidewalk. He had scooped it up in a cup and brought it home as a surprise for Ben and Eliza. They loved 'Snakey'! Above you can see little Eliza waving to Snakey and saying "Hi snake! Hi!"

This video is so funny! I really wish the lighting was better. Eliza wasn't afraid of holding the snake at all. She thought it was fun! However, Ben was put off the idea of holding Snakey when Snakey pooped a little on Eliza when we first took him out of the cup. (The poor snake was pretty frightened I'm sure!) At the end of the video, Benjamin declines holding him and says, "He might poop on me."

We kept Snakey for a few days in this tupperware. I felt bad starving the poor thing, so we took the kids to Petsmart and spent 70 cents on five tiny minnows (which is what garder snakes would like to eat). Well, Snakey didn't touch the minnow (who was swimming around in a bit of water in a half of an egg shell). At that point, Jed looked Snakey up on the Michigan snake registry and he is actually a brown snake, not a garder snake. And brown snakes live mostly under the dirt and like to eat slugs and worms. Ben and Jed went outside at night to search for worms, but to no avail. So we let Snakey go back to the wild. I really hope he wasn't too weak for lack of food to be able to bounce back.... Maybe we will come across him again in the summer. He was a good little pet snake! (And now I have the deaths of five little minnows on my conscious... I feel guilty that they all just died eventually.... well, three did and the other two were killed in fishbowl water changing accidents (ask the spoon, not me... we found out it's true what Jed's dad says: Use the right tool for the right job....) )

Anyway, the kids loved Jed's surprise, and we sure had fun with Snakey!

We had just put the minnow in Snakey's 'habitat'. We all sat and watched him expectantly, as if he was going to pounce on the minnow and gulp him down before our very eyes. I think we watched him for longer than I am willing to admit. "Any second now..... oh! -there, he moved toward the minnow.... hmmm..... any moment..."