Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

We had a great Christmas this year! We got our tree a couple days after Thanksgiving. We found a gorgeous one!

We ❤ Christmas trees!!

I had so much fun decorating our new house for Christmas! I splurged for some new tree decorations and got to hang up the stockings I made last year. Everything looked so pretty!

Some of the decorations in our family room.

The weekend before Christmas we celebrated with my family in Napoleon! We had a great (too short) visit. These kids are so lucky to celebrate Christmas so many times!

My dad, Cece, and I made molasses sugar cookies from my Grandma's recipe. The. Best.

My brother Andy and his fiancee were home from Texas! I wish we could have visited with them longer, but we had a good time.

The following week was Nathan's busiest week of the year at work, so he had to spend most of his time there. The kids and I were able to spend more time with his family and make cookies with friends.

Nathan's parents wanted to wait until Jonathan's family was in town to get their tree, so we ended up going two days before Christmas... but the tree farm Larry had scoped out was closed for the season! After a couple phone calls to the owner, we ended up slipping money under the door and getting our tree. Whew!

Our family Sunday Morning (Christmas Eve).

We decorated cookies on Christmas Eve, as well as opening one gift each in the evening.  Nathan and I usually open our gifts to each other on Christmas Eve after the kids are in bed so we can have a special time together. I planned a year of dates for Nathan, and he got me an Amazon Echo and a robot vacuum!

My beautiful children on Christmas morning :)  We had the kids open their gifts at home before we headed over to celebrate with Nathan's family.

One of the things we got the kids for Christmas was a hamster. Cece especially had been talking about wanting a pet a lot, and this one is SO cute. She's really sweet and the kids are doing well with her. We named her Dandelion (Dandy for short).

Allie brought a special Christmas book to read to all the kids.

We spent the next couple days spending time with Nathan's family and had a wonderful time. It really was such a nice Christmas.

In the evening of Christmas day when we got home, I noticed that the fireplace grate was askew and open. I mentioned it to the kids and they found a shiny wrapped present in the fireplace! Nathan had sneekily bought them a Nintendo Switch (through some crazy combination of gift cards and monetary gifts he only spent like $30 out of pocket!?!). It was SO exciting and special for them.

To finish out our holiday craziness, we stopped off at my parents' house for a couple days before heading up to Michigan to celebrate New Year's with our college friends. We are so blessed to have these beautiful people as our lifelong friends.

What a great blessing we have in our family, friends, and special celebrations!

LegoLand Michigan mini vacation

Ever since they saw the ad for LegoLand resorts on the DVD for the Lego Movie, my boys have been begging to go there. They are located in Florida and California, so that's a no. We tried to appease them by going to the Lego store in the Mall of America when we went there three years ago, but it didn't work. Since then, a new LegoLand Discovery Center was built in Michigan! It's not a full resort, but we knew the kids would be thrilled to go, so we took a mini vacation to Michigan a couple week ago!

We got to spend two nights at Nana and Papa's house, which is conveniently on the way! Hazel was happy to be there.

We were there on Desy's birthday, so we got to have a party with cake, ice cream, and presents!

Hazel slept straight through the night in her fancy bed... ha!! I didn't want to bring her co-sleeper because we loaded up the van with a bunch of camping stuff, so we got creative ;)

Saturday morning we left bright and early for LegoLand! We drove through Hazel Park (a Detroit suburb) on the way! I had originally wanted to stop and take pictures of signs with all of our names (Desmond Road, Cecelia Street...), but it was such a quick, full trip that we didn't have time!

We met my roommate, becca at LegoLand! She is one of my very best friends, so it's always so good to see her. She lives so close to where we were going that it would have been a shame to not see her! She was a big help keeping an eye on Cecelia too.

Meeting Hazel for the first time! "A hazelnut she's not allergic to." :P

Of course the kids had a blast. I think we took them at exactly the right age. It was definitely geared toward young kids.

They spent the most time building and racing cars! There was a cool track that started all the cars together at the push of a button.

I've always thought "girl Legos" were dumb, but Cece was enamored with them. This is a girly girl if I've ever met one.

There were some really amazing Lego creations depicting Detroit landmarks in miniature. The buildings at the top of this post are Lego models. There were even some moving parts in some of them.

There were two rides and a 4-D movie (with rain and wind effects) as well as all the building stations and playgrounds. It was a fun morning for sure.

When we left LegoLand, we had lunch at the Detroit Burger Bar down the road. We all ate massive burgers... I don't think any of the adults ate dinner that night.

Just 15 minutes down the road was the lake and little town of Lake Orion!! I was soooo excited when I discovered it on the map. Orion was pretty excited to see his name plastered all over the place!

becca explored the cute little town with us and then we parted ways. I love my roommate!!

We stopped at the local Super K Mart so I could nurse Hazel and so we could look for Lake Orion t-shirts (found them!), then we were on the road again.

So. Part of the goal of this trip was to go camping. We have a big, awesome tent and the kids are always asking to go. I'd been watching the weather forecast like a hawk all week and it just looked worse and worse. The night before we were supposed to camp there was something like a 60% chance of evening thunderstorms. So we had to change our plans (because who wants to camp with four kids in a thunderstorm?!). Nathan booked us a room at Splash Universe in Dundee!

...of course, when the evening rolled around the night was calm and beautiful and perfect for camping. Sigh.

...but the kids had a GREAT time playing at the indoor water park for hours on Saturday night and Sunday morning. Even Hazel seemed to like it. All of the kids even went down the really big slides! So much fun.

From there we were only half an hour away from Nathan's grandparents, so of course we stopped in! Grandma was so excited to meet Hazel and got some nice snuggles.

It was a really quick visit, but it was nice to see them! :)

For our last stop, we headed back north a bit to see some of our closest friends, Geoff and Amy, and their family! They got to meet Hazel too, and we had such a nice visit. Again, way too short, but I love how we always pick up right where we left off. We are so blessed with great lifelong friendships.

It was a super fast but super nice little trip! We wished we would have had another day or two so we wouldn't have had to rush around so much, but we squeezed a lot into one weekend. I'm so glad we have such great little travelers! Even Hazel was perfect in the car. 

Here's to many more adventures!

Friendcation 2015: Treasure Lake, Pennsylvania

This summer we took a vacation with our college friends for the first time! We rented a big house for a week in Treasure Lake, PA, and had a great time together. We did a whole lot of just hanging out together, played games, took the kids to the beach (on the rare days/hours is wasn't raining), kayaking/canoeing (well, the guys did), and really just had a relaxing week. I can't wait til we can do it again. I did NOT take enough pictures, but here are the few that I did take!

We celebrated our 8th anniversary while on vacation, and our lovely friends were kind enough to watch the kids so we could go out to dinner.

A Very Merry Unbirthday Party

We spent an afternoon at our Alma Mater, Spring Arbor University, with our closest friends to celebrate our collective 30th birthdays! Jennifer planned an Alice in Wonderland themed party and it was SO much fun. It was great to celebrate together, as well as catch up with a few long-lost friends and professors. Thanks for a great party, Jennifer!

Kissin' on the bench where we started dating 10+ years ago!

Minnesota Adventure Time

It's time for another epic travel saga, folks!

On Thursday afternoon, we all piled in the car and began our journey to Minnesota to visit our friend Mark! Mark was one of my closest friends during the second semester of my freshman year of college (the one full semester he was at SAU!), and in the 10 (!?) years since, he and Nathan have gotten closer too via email and facebook.

Anyway, we left home Thursday and drove about six hours to the Chicago KOA campground, making a few stops to feed Cece, take potty breaks, and eat dinner. The campground was great, with a playground close enough to our campsite that the boys could play while Nathan got the tent set up and our beds made. Our new tent worked great!! SO much room to move around! The kids all went to sleep pretty well and slept great.

...however, Nathan and I woke up a couple hours after going to bed FREEZING... it was way too cold to sleep... we just lay there shivering and trying to figure out what to do. We ended up deciding it was dumb to just suffer and not get any sleep, so we got up and packed up everything at about 3:00 in the morning, strapped the kids in the car, and began the second half of our drive. Amazingly, the kids all slept well in the car (and I got a couple hours of sleep too), and after stopping for a nice breakfast we made it to Mark's house at like 10:30 am! We were very tired, of course, but all things considered the trip went great.

Friday after we settled in a bit, we headed over to The Mall of America! Orion has been begging to go to Lego Land since seeing an ad for it before the Lego Movie, so when we realized there was a big Lego store at the MoA we figured that might satisfy him... so he's been counting down the days til our Minnesota trip because he was so excited.

...OK, Orion seemed slightly underwhelmed by the Lego store, and he read the sign on the way out of the mall and declared it was the Lego Store, NOT Lego Land. Sigh.

BUT the coolest part of the MoA is that there is an amusement park right in the middle of it! Nickelodeon Universe, if Orion's memory is correct (which it certainly is). Nathan got to take Orion on his first roller coaster! O wasn't sure about it at first, but by the end he loved it!

Desy was very upset he didn't get to go on the big orange roller coaster (he's too short), but we found a smaller one that he was able to do. He also loved it!

Look at that happy boy.

 Some of the rides the boys did were pretty fast and extreme, but they seemed to love them all! Nathan had a blast taking them on all the rides and can't wait to take them to Cedar Point.

Meeting Aang!

 Ninja Turtles! The mall totally wore us out (after 12 hours of driving!), but the boys had a lot of fun.

Friday night Mark invited some friends over to play board games with us. We ended up playing my favorite, Lords of Waterdeep. We had a lot of fun with these guys!

Saturday we went to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival! It was SO. HOT. but the fest was awesome and we had a great time exploring it anyway.

Ren Fest selfie.

Orion and I RODE AN ELEPHANT!! Yeah, that's super exciting and awesome and you should be very jealous.

This little hobbit was content to watch.

It's not a day at the Renaissance Festival without a massive turkey leg!

As if the Mall of America and the Renaissance Festival didn't make for a full enough weekend, after church on Sunday we went to the zoo! Mark is a youth pastor and had a trip to the zoo planned for his students, so we tagged along.

This bear was being adorable. Unless you're Sadie, in which case he was being terrifying.

The zoo had some cool features like this log with windows that kids could crawl through to get a different and close-up perspective on the animals!

We did a crazy amount of fun stuff in such a short visit! We had a lot of fun!

We're huge dorks and neglected to take a picture all together with Mark until we were headed out the door to leave for home. In our sweet renaissance garb? No. At the awesome zoo? No. Lame.

It was so great to see Mark and catch up after so long apart! I love being able to keep in touch with far-away friends and it's extra awesome when we can actually get together. Thanks for all the adventures, Mark!!

Monday we began our drive home, stopping in Wisconsin at a restaurant called the Milwaukee Burger Co. for lunch... which was fabulous. We had giant cheese curds. Yum. We decided against camping because we were super worn out and because it was supposed to storm that night (it did. hard.), so we ended up getting a hotel in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. We found a super deal online, so when we got to the hotel Nathan just asked about it at the desk and they gave us the online price without any of the online fees! And they even ended up waving the parking fee when we left, so it only ended up costing $12 more than camping did. WORTH IT!

This is how two little boys can share a queen bed. :)

We walked around the city a bit that night to get some of the boys' energy out and to look for food. We ended up ordering pizza, and enjoyed it that night and for lunch the next day.

Rooftop view from the hotel!

We had a pretty good drive home, though all of us were worn out and tired of being in the car, so we were relieved to finally make it! All things considered, the kids all did great on such a long trip... I'm thankful for such good little travelers... and for the ability to watch movies in the car ;)

Thus concludes the tale of our latest adventure! It was fabulous... full of fun and good company. Let's do it again sometime!