Happy Thanksgiving!

Chaos in the playroom!

Grandpa entertaining Sydney and Andrew.

Sydney bonding with Andrew's Great Grandma.

Andrew and Sydney sharing the portable DVD player.

We had our first snow on Friday night. A beautiful, heavy, wet snow that melted the next day. We had to play in it a little and the kids didn't care that it was melting or that they were freezing and soaking wet!

Andrew and Sydney playing in the snow on our "hill."

Andrew helping Keith put up our little mini Christmas trees.

How cute is Brenna in this hat and coat?!

Happy Thanksgiving a couple of days late! We had a relatively quiet Thanksgiving this year. All of the Nislys except for mom, dad and grandma were with other family this year. So we had Thanksgiving at our house with the Petersons, who came to stay with us and joined us for the feast. The food was fabulous, but sadly I didn't think to take any pictures of our bounty, so you'll just have to trust me. Unfortunately, Andrew caught the stomach bug and lost all of his Thankgsiving dinner. I'll spare you all the gruesome details. We are just praying the rest of us all stay healthy, especially Brenna and Sydney!

Happy Birthday Grace!

Check out this AMAZING cake that Amy made!!

Andrew, Lejer, and Holden - the only boys at the party.

Grace, the pretty, pretty, princess opening her gifts.

Andrew and Lejer hanging out in Grace's room, away from all the girls and party fun.

The dads - Keith, Joel and Cameron

Andrew's friend, Grace, turned 3 on Sunday and Andrew wnet to his first birthday party. He didn't care that it was a pretty Disney princess party. He was thrilled to hang out in the playroom and play with all the new toys and ignore all the party festivities. I was a little worried that he would try to open all of her presents, but he could not be dragged away from the toys to be social or in the way! He was, however, interested when the cake and ice cream was served! Thanks Grace, Joel and Amy for a fun party! Happy Birthday Grace!

Oliver and his new "friend"

Here's a scary video. We had the windows open the other night and I had baked chicken for dinner. Apparently it smelled yummy, and we attracted a neighbor cat to our deck. Oliver was not pleased with our little visitor and spoke to him/her in a very scary and disturbing devil voice! I don't think it scared the orange cat as much as it did us! :)

Random post

I realize I haven't posted in awhile, so here are some random photos from the last couple of weeks....

Andrew wanted to share his snack with Dora. Let's just hope this spirit of sharing continues when the baby comes!!

One of the only times we've captured Andrew with a hat on. Sadly, it was short lived and Keith was forced to wear it shortly after this photo was taken.

Andrew is very serious about sandbox play and believes the best way to play is to climb right in!
I don't know if you can tell what is happening in this photo, but Andrew is IN LOVE with Dora the Explorer and much to our dismay, she is everywhere we go. It makes shopping very interesting. We can't escape her! But that's not the point of the photo. Andrew has little Dora and Boots figurines and he set them up between the rails on the back deck and then tried to sit with them. It was too cute and I tried to capture him in imagination world!

Happy Halloween!

The beginning of the end of trying to keep the hood up...

Our neighbor gave Andrew a Ninja Mr. Potato head kit to decorate a pumpkin, so Keith and Andrew worked on that between answering the door.

Andrew was a little monkey this year. We've been trying to get him to warm up to his costume for about 2 months and he always said - "No Monkey!" But last night, thanks to some early trick-or-treaters, Andrew got the concept and was ready to wear his costume, kind of. We could not keep the hood up, which is where the monkey face was, but we tried and hope you can see how cute the hood is in some of the pictures. Andrew can say trick-or-treat very clearly, but after he would ring the doorbell, he would just stand there in awe of the big bowls of candy near his face and say nothing. Occasionally we got him to say thank you. But as soon as we would get to the end of a driveway he would say, "More tweats?!" And we would take him to the next house where he would say "trick-or-treat and Happy Hawooween" at the end of their driveway, but never to the people at the door. *sigh*

We only went to about 10 houses on our street and then came home to hand out all of our candy and microwave popcorn, which I over bought. If anyone wants some mini bags of popcorn, I've got two boxes to share! Anyway, we let Andrew eat a lollipop from his loot and then our doorbell started ringing. We're not sure, but we think Andrew was almost more excited about the trick-or-treaters coming to our house than he was about actually trick-or-treating. Everytime the doorbell would ring, he would run to the door and yell, "More people! More people!" And after they would go, he would ask, "Where da people go?" We finally had to turn off the lights so we could get him to bed. Now my new fear is that he thinks every time you ring a doorbell, you get candy...

P.S. Thank you Aunt Audra, Uncle Dave, Ben and Cate for my CUTE treat bag!

couch potato

Andrew had a little snack while watching a movie the other night. What a little couch potato!

Pumpkin Patch time

Here's one attempt to get a picture with mommy and Andrew. Notice how tightly I'm hanging onto him...


Andrew would not sit on daddy's lap for this picture, but I thought this turned out pretty cute despite the lack of cooperation!




"Oh dat to heavy!"


The Running Man

Yesterday we found a local pumpkin patch and let Andrew run free. He loved running from pumpkin to pumpkin and tried to pick a couple of them up. But his favorite part of the pumpkin patch was the "wadrfall." We had a hard time getting him to pose for any pictures. Mostly we captured the back of his head or the blur of him running past us.

Keith captured this monarch butterfly on a flower. Isn't he talented?!