Birthday Boys!

Well... this is what the boys got for their birthdays!!!
Smoky - the black kitten. (Ryan)
Mischief - the older kitty. (Jared)

Ryan turns 16 years old today!! He is just the best son anyone could ever have! He is such a great brother and son and such a sweet and loving young man! He has finals all this week and is really stressed out about them! But, we are having steaks on the grill and birthday cake for him tonight. Then he will have some friends over on the weekend.

Photos from Christmas!

Ryan & Jard Christmas Eve

Ryan with his new laptop.

Jared & Ryan got cool new robes!
We are hoping this will prevent them from walking around in their underwear and their bed spreads!

We had our traditional Chinese take out for dinner on Christmas Eve. Since we did not have a tree up this year, we just brought out the presents we had for the boys and opened them as we ate our dinner. We also watched Mama Mia! I just love that movie. Even Dave liked it, but the boys not so much.

We just hung out on Christmas day, it was snowing a lot - so we all just relaxed in our pj's.

Friday I made a Ham for dinner and it was really good. It has started raining now and all of our snow is turning to mush! What a mess. Ryan and Dave still have another week off from school and work. I go back to work on Monday. Jared has a really bad cold, so we are trying to get him over that. Thank you all so much for all of the gift certificates and gifts you sent the boys. They LOVE buying things online and have lots of fun books and dvd's on the way.

Lot's of Snow!

We have lots of snow here. It was very cold last week, but has warmed up to about 25 during the day - but that brought us more snow. We got my snow tires on the VW. Funny story...we went to go get them out of the garage and could not find them! Started to panic ($8oo worth of snow tires missing!!!) so we called Les Schwab to see if we may have left them there last Spring. They had to go out back and dig through a lot full of tires, but found ours! I don't know how we could have forgot to pick up our tires last year, but we did. We are so thankful they found them.

We are not doing much for Christmas around here. I did not put up a tree. The boys are ok with that. We will have chinese take out on Christmas eve and then I plan to put out there stockings filled with treats and a present from "Santa." Ryan is on Christmas break for 2 weeks and is really excited about that.

Hope you all have a Happy Holiday, and those of you in WI stay warm and those of you in Florida enjoy your sunshine!!!

Love & Peace

Christmas Break!

Wanted to share some photos of what we did this weekend.  Sunday was a very good day and as you can see the boys baked cookies, the dogs hung out by the fire and Dave got to relax on the computer. I also enjoyed the day just having all of my boys with me. (please don't look too close at my filthy oven! Oh my what a mess!)

Feeling Thankful...

I am feeling really thankful this morning. Thankful for my husband, my friends and co-workers and my amazing family. I could not and will not be able to go through this crisis without all of you! Thank you for understanding my need for privacy and your willingness to just be there for me. I am so very grateful.