Sledding With a Toddler

As many of you experienced parents know, sledding with a toddler is not all of the laughter and rosy cheeked excitement that many of us remember as kids. Once I heard that we were getting a nice fresh snow this past weekend, I began to formulate grand plans of taking B sledding on campus. I had recently purchased a couple of different types of sleds at Goodwill (BTW, great place to buy sleds for cheap) and we were going to pack them up on Saturday morning and meet a couple of friends out at the slopes. Well, we ended up changing our location to that of some friends that were meeting us and this new location was a little walk from the car. I had opted to dress B in his snow pants on site so that he would be a little more comfortable in the car. Some might call this a rookie mistake...he was a little chilly when I put on his outer layers in the back of the car. I know this because he actually said - in the clearest little toddler voice - ccccccooooollllllddddd. Poor little guy. But I pressed on and got him all bundled up and pulled him out to where our friends where sledding. We went down the hill once together, climbed back up, got the other two sleds out to try and then went back to the car to warm up. This is when we decided that we were done for the morning and that we would call it a successful sledding day and head home. Total fun, rosy cheek snow time = 10 minutes...tops. From now on, I think we are going to stick with the bunny slopes in our back yard.

PB Knock-offs

You might say that I have Pottery Barn taste with a thrift store budget...or that might just be how it actually is. For some reason, I just hate to spend the $ on something that I can make or replicate myself. The following pics are a couple of my recent finds that are PotteryBarnesque. I bought some old sweaters at the local Goodwill and sewed pillow covers out of them. Cozy! For the mantel, I've been picking up some things here and there and have come up with this combination. I also threw in a picture of some recently hung photos....since we actually have some pics on the wall now! The white D isn't finished yet...still trying to decide what color to paint it.

Christmas 2010

Our Christmas this year, involved a little less time off and a little more travel. With my job, I don't have as much vacation time or flexibility as when I did working at a University. But we made it work and got to see family. My parents came in to visit a couple of weekends before Christmas and we ended up taking advantage of my Dad and his mad electrical skillz. We changed out almost every light fixture in our house which has definitely updated those rooms. He was also able to install an outlet so that we could use our dryer that we had purchased right after we moved to OH. They ended up leaving a little early due to an impending snow storm since they had to drive all of the way back to SIL.
Since we were leaving for CHI after I got off work on Christmas Eve Eve, we decided to have our Christmas on Wednesday night. Nothing too exciting just a relaxing evening at home. B was pretty excited about his new movies. He loves his VeggieTales! We were in Chicago visiting family from Thurday night to Tuesday morning. It was a great visit minus my being sick and GG being sick. I'd like to say that we rolled with the punches and were able to adapt to a new gameplan last minute. :-) It seems that I didn't take a awful lot of pics over Christmas. These were the only ones on my camera. Sorry, if you were missed!