Sweethearts on the Hill

  When you're 5 and 6 years old, living in East Tennessee, and the stars align perfectly resulting in a load of snow dumping into your world, you definitely don't pass up the opportunity to soak up every ounce of it…    so that is what we did!   We made a snowman, threw snowballs, ate snowballs, went sledding, and played our little hearts out. As a girl who had her fill of snowy days growing up in Michigan, all it takes is this smile to convince me that it's worth every single shiver.   And the reflection in these eyes...   Luckily we have some fun neighborhood friends to get crazy with outside. I quickly learned that the best way to get 6 hyper kids to cooperate, be somewhat still, and look into my lens was to let them throw a snowball at me.     They were beside themselves excited (well… maybe not Charlie in this picture :)      Ready?! Aim!   Fire!!!   Success!  How...

Since I'm so pathetically behind on getting my pictures out here, I'll just give you a couple snippets of how we celebrate Christmas. We focus intently on decorating the perfect cookie And then we focus a little more intently on eating them with style   We wear super cute reindeer aprons Aunt Lisa, Uncle Jim, and Lauren got for us   And we happen to make the aprons look super extra cute   We make masterpieces   Grandpa's glasses make things look blurry (or maybe that's just mommy not focusing her camera right!)   And extra sweet giving Grandma some love   Super cool shark helmets keep us safe on our bikes   We laugh like there's no tomorrow We are completely baffled as to how our Elf, Flash, was able to sneak Handy Manny and George from our beds so he could hang with them in this rocking chair!  We decide it must just be another one of those magic miracles of Christmas… why would we ever question that?!   ...

Well, my littlest buddy turned 5 not too long ago… well, sort of long ago… 2 months ago. But I already explained that one.  So, just take a moment and look at him! Look at this peanut! Doesn't he look extra sophisticated now that he is 5! He waited and waited and waited for this day to come. I can't tell you how many times he has said "Sam, are you so happy that I'm 5 now?" "Sam, are you so happy that I'm getting bigger now?" "Sam, are you so glad that I'm growing up?"   Charlie kind of had his heart set on having a laser tag party ~ unfortunately, I had to talk him out of it because many of his friends wouldn't be old enough to play… and it would have just been messy. So, we decided to do a redo of our successful party from last year - We went to Big Gym (also known by Knoxvillians as Tatarus).  From what I could see from behind my lens, everyone had a ball. Charlie and his curly headed twin, Bennett.    So excited ...