Maddy and Sam

Moving

I'm moving my blog...

http://madeleineandsam.blogspot.com/

First step

Sam just took his first step. Tim and I got a little teary eyed. He is our little boy and getting so big. He took about 3 steps and then realized what he was doing and sat down. Good job Sam!

Happy birthday little brother

It's my little brothers birthday today. He's 27! Happy birthday Kalle.

The sun is shining on the snow and it's warm enough to not have a jacket on outside. Feels great! I brought both kids outside for quite a while. I pulled them around in the sled, we went swinging and we climbed in the snow. Maddy loves it, Sam seems ok with it. At least he doesn't complain.  Right now they are supposed to be sleeping although I hear pitter patter from upstairs.

Tim is outside working on stuff (our DVD shelf):

Cold Winter Weekend

It has been so cold outside lately and I'm kind of a baby about cold. It's very hard to say no to Maddy though when she wants to go out and play. Thanks to Tim we don't have to go far! This weekend we've spent quite a lot of time outside sledding and skating (and falling down on the ice) and it's actually a lot of fun. I just put on my snow pants and my big ski gloves. 

Sam is almost 1. I can't really believe it. He's getting so big, but still feels like our little baby. He's so sweet and funny. He stands up for a few seconds by himself and it feels like he's getting ready to walk any minute.

Maddy and I went to a birthday party on Friday night. All the kids made their own pizzas. They were pretty tasty. Yesterday I brought Maddy to a movie (The Princess and a Frog) with my friend Sarah. It was a really cute and fun movie. Maddy really enjoyed herself. 

Today Maddy and I went to swimming class. The first one where parents are not in the pool (yeah). She did really well and listened to the teacher, following along in all the activities. Although it's nice and warm in there, swimming in the winter does bring on some challenges with wet hair and freezing temps.

 

So many projects

 
  
Poor Tim has a long list of projects to work on in the next month. I feel a little bad, but he has agreed to all of them. We'll see what happens though. Right now his main project is getting the ice rink in the back yard ready. We had talked about this last year and there is a kit available to make a hockey rink, but they are expensive so we didn't want to do that this year. Instead he snow blowed a rectangle in the back yard and lined it with a tarp and put water in there to freeze. A little more complicated apparently, but that's the basic idea. Should be lots of fun. Maddy already has a helmet and knee pads, but no skates. We want to find her double blades, but stores are pretty low on inventory for her age and ordering without trying on seems hard. We will find something though.

The other projects are (In my order of preference): finishing our new DVD shelf. It's done, just needs to be painted, finishing Maddy's night stand, painting Maddy's dresser, put up pictures on the wall, and move a book shelf into Sam's room.

I have wanted to make our living room feel more spacious. We can't buy a new couch right now, but getting the leather chair out of there (it's too big) along with the bookshelf will help. It will be nice for Sam to have the bookshelf with toys and books in his room, I just moved the glider chair into the living room and it looks pretty cute.

Enough about our house. Kids are doing fine, Tim and I are doing fine. We're all excited for a great 2010.

Happy New Year!

Christmas Celebrations

Whew...Christmas is over. I thought a recap of the festivities would be in order as I haven't blogged for a while. It's been a different Christmas this year, but thankfully our beautiful daughter didn't notice and had the time of her life.

Tim's dad is still in the hospital with lung cancer. He will most likely be coming home tomorrow, but he hasn't been doing too well lately. He's been getting plenty of visitors though and has been in good spirits. It's going to be tough though once they figure out what type of treatment he needs.

On Christmas Eve we usually celebrate a Swedish style Christmas with a relaxing morning, me cooking and Tim's parents coming over for Swedish Christmas food. Then presents and bed. This year was a little bit different as Tim wanted to pick up his mom and bring her over, bring her to church in the evening and then visit his dad. It also snowed about 8 inches overnight and during the day so Tim spent a good deal of time working on that. Dinner was good, but not the same without Tim's dad. After dinner we quickly opened gifts. We concentrated on gifts from Sweden and the gift from Tim's parents. The kids got several really good books (The book about Lotta and her bike is one of my favorites). Maddy got some wonderful clothes as well. The gift from Tim's parents was a fun play kitchen. After Tim and his mom left I got the kids to bed early and then wrapped some gifts and went to bed.

Early, early Christmas morning Maddy woke us up. As always she stands at the bottom of the stairs and calls for us always waking up Sam at the same time. We are used to it and bounded out of bed to grab some coffee and help Maddy open her gifts. She was so excited about all the fun things she got. Books, clothes, puzzles, games and a Sleeping Beauty doll.  Her stocking was also full of candy and animal crackers. Little Sam loved opening his small gifts and playing with the wrapping paper. Tim left around 8 to pick up his brother Mike who was coming in to visit his dad. We went to pick up Tim's mom and played there for a while while Tim attempted to clear the very wet snow that kept coming down.

Around noon we arrived at Jeanne's where everyone was busy in the kitchen. It was a full house as usual. Jeanne and Greg with all their kids home from college (Sarah, Peter and Rachel), Mike and Molly with Hannah, Willy and Chris, Chris and Patti with Hunter, Charlie and Olvia, Mary and Bryan, Mike, Therese and Buster and us. Jack was unfortunately sick so Michele and Joe decided to keep him home.

The food was wonderful. Sam had a whole plateful of mashed potatoes. It's so much fun now that he can eat real food. Maddy also ate a big plate of food which was nice, she tends to get too busy. She had so much fun playing with Hunter and Charlie and now it's fun because Olivia is now following Maddy around. After dinner we opened gifts again. Maddy had fun handing them out. She got several new fun things, mostly pink!

We were all happy to have the weekend to recover. We are now relaxing on the couch watching Criminal Minds.

Almost Christmas

It's been a hard week since finding out Tim's dad is sick. The hardest is probably not knowing yet what action they are going to take. It may be after Christmas that we get results from some of the tests. And with the way he's feeling we just hope we can spend some time on Christmas with him.

We had a wonderful, relaxing weekend planned. And we got through some of it before getting sick...we spent Saturday morning hanging out at home and after Sam's morning nap we drove to Riverfall for lunch with Tim's sister. It was fun. And we barely saw Maddy the whole time. It's really nice that she now gets along so well with her cousins.

Our evening plan was Hollidazzle parade with my friend Allison, her boyfriend and his niece. Right after her nap Maddy got sick. We thought at first that it was just the pizza flavored snacks she had at Patti's, but after getting half way to downtown it happened again. We still saw some of the parade, but then I was sick all night. And today I've been in bed all day. Maddy much happier, but she hasn't eaten much today.

On a happier note, Tim is done with our new DVD shelf. It will go on the shelf and it looks so nice. It will fit almost 300 DVD's which should last us a little while. All we have to do is paint it (haven't picked a color yet) and then fill it up.

Cute video

Christmas tree and stockings:

Maddy playing in the snow:

2 videos:

Download Picture 2641

Download Picture 2643

Also, my son is a very methodical learner. He has really gone step by step with everything he has learned. He went from rolling over to sitting. He then started scooting at 6 months, crawling around 8 months. He started walking with a walker at 10 months and is now walking along furniture and while crawling he sometimes gets off his knees and walks like a monkey. It's fun to see him progressing. Love the little guy. He will look at you and laugh for hours.
 
 

Christmas Fun - a weekend of pictures

Building (decorating) a gingerbread house.

Reading a book at Lisa and Andy's house. She sat like this for quite a while. The rest of the time she was running wild with the other kids.

Building a count down to Christmas.
Walking and laughing. Happiest baby! 

Playing with Emil's new puzzle. He had quite a good time. Except when little Miles (18 months) tried to "hug" him by laying on him.

 
 

Gloggfest and Reindeer

On Friday night Swea had its annual Christmas party. For the second year we had it at the American Swedish Institute (the "castle" according to Maddy). I went early to help set up. Once Maddy and Tim showed up it was time for the annual luciatag. Maddy knows the songs, but has so far refused to sing in public. She wanted to be part of it, but did not open her mouth once. Until she came up to me and said she wanted to color. Once she was sitting at the table she started singing, pretty funny. The rest of the evening was really fun. Maddy watched a Swedish Christmas movie and played with all the kids. I think I've said it before, but it's amazing how many daughters we have. Of the people I hang out with there are almost only girls...Madeleine, Agnes, Tilde, Clara, Emily, Isabelle, Felicia, , Karin, Sara, Lisa, Hannah, Filippa. Emil and Sam are starting a trend towards more boys, but otherwise there are very few.

All the girls singing:

 Maddy not singing.

Anyway, the rest of the evening was nice. Maddy played with the girls and Tim and I enjoyed talking to friends and eating food. We stayed until the very end.

Today we went to St. Paul's Grand Avenue to meet Santa's reindeer. It has finally gotten cold which is nice and Christmasy, but a lot of work to bundle the kids up. They were good about it though, but I've decided I need a nice new jacket for the cold weather.

After that trip we stopped by our friends Sarah and Nate for a little while and then went home for a nap. After dinner we sat and looked at the Christmas tree for a while and now Tim is working on setting up for the new TV. It's up an everything, but he's moving the cable jack to hide it behind the TV.