December Fun

We've had a pretty enjoyable December here.  I want to cover things before our Christmas travels in this post and hope to get another post up before the week is out talking about Christmas.

Some of our fun has centered around traveling to 5K races.  Lara ran in quite a few races in the past few months or so and has been doing great with more impressive times at each subsequent race.  One of my favorites was the It's a Wonderful 5K in Indiana, PA.  The race took place at night through a drive-through Christmas light display.  When Lara checked in we were given the ingredients to make s'mores and they had a few fires around to do so.  Our good friend Beth (from college) is seen in the photo below with Lara.  Beth has also been tearing up the 5k scene.        

We stopped and spent the night at Grandma and Papa's house after the race since we were in the area.  Here is one of the many family pics that Grant took while we were there.

We have been enjoying the Buffalo snow.  We loved the snow we got in Edinboro and haven't seen much in the way of snow since we lived there while in college.  Somewhat surprisingly State College and Naperville did not get much snow while we were there.  Truth be told though, most of the heavy snowfall the news reports in "Buffalo" actually falls south of the city and misses where we live.  As you can see from the pics below, we do still get our fair share of snow though.

We have made a few frigid trips to the local state park.

Of course getting our Christmas tree was big excitement.  I had wanted to go to a local Christmas tree farm and cut our own but the day we were planning to get our tree was warm and the snow had disappeared and been replaced by mud.  So we decided to get a tree from a local country store on the island.  The store was adorable and had a beautiful Christmas room in the back where you could meet Santa (who to the pleasure of Grant was out for the day).  

As has been tradition for the past 7 years or so, the tree was brought home on the roof of the Saturn.  The old car has 215,000 miles and is still running strong.

The kids are both doing great.  Grant still loves space and has become slightly obsessed with tornadoes.  Gracie is talking well and tries to talk in sentences (sometimes correctly and sometimes not so much).  She is most excited about animals and babies.  She also seems to enjoy football, and tonight when the bears scored a touchdown ran around the house screaming "touchdown" and putting her hands in the air.  I really wish I had a video.  So in short, both are happy and, besides a few sniffles, healthy.  I'll be sure to fill you in with more about them in our Christmas post.  

Grant's 4th Birthday

It's been a few weeks now, but Grant had a great 4th birthday party.  Aunt Amy and Uncle Ian graciously agreed to host it.  Thanks so much guys!  It was a dragon themed party and Grant was quite excited to see the cake that Mommy made him.  Leading up to his birthday he kept saying that he had to work and wasn't going to be able to be at the party.  However, when his birthday got closer he got excited and told me to make sure and wish him happy birthday when I first saw him in the morning.  The only downside to the day was that lake effect snow moved in during the party and made everyone's drive back home miserable.

Lara made an awesome dragon cake that Grant absolutely loved (yellow & orange-his two favorite colors).

The only thing that Grant didn't like was the singing of Happy Birthday.  He never likes it, even when it is just Lara and I singing to Grace.  It was the sweetest, quietest Happy Birthday that the whole crew could muster and the little bugger still plugged his ears and looked away.

As usual, Gracie was all smiles all day.

Grant loved opening his presents at the party.  The day after the party we decided to take him to Toys R Us and pick a present to buy with some of the money he got for his birthday.  It was the first time that he spent his money on something.  He definitely understood the concept and kept weighing his options between getting something bigger or a few small toys.  It was really cute to see him want something until we explained how much it cost and then for him to decide it wasn't worth it.  Ultimately he settled on a dragon that lights up and makes steam when you press down on it's ears.  It was a cool toy and was a character in a movie that he got for his birthday.

   

Happy birthday Grant!  It's so hard to believe that you are already 4.  We can't wait to see what this next year brings. 

   

Happy Halloween!

We've got lots to post but thought it best to get our Halloween pics up ASAP.  We had a great time trick-or-treating tonight.  We walked to our 2 closest neighbors houses and then drove and parked in a nice neighborhood and went house to house.  The kids loved it and both filled their buckets with candy.  Gracie didn't hesitate to grab candy from anyone and was a little upset when we stopped her from eating it at home.  She has a bit more of a sweet tooth than her brother.  Originally Grant said that he wasn't going to go trick-or-treating, he "had work to do downstairs."  About an hour before it was time to go he had a change of heart and got excited.  After we went to a few houses I said to him aren't you glad you decided to trick-or-treat.  His response was, "yea, I am having fun but I don't need candy."  I think they both enjoyed the night but Gracie was all smiles and absolutely loved it.

Hello New York!

We are loving our new home in New York!  We are only 10 minutes from Niagara Falls so we have spent a decent amount of time there.  I think we have made 6 trips so far.  I have been to Niagara Falls a few times before but I had never been on the American side.  Much to my surprise, it is a beautiful park.

We also have a few other beautiful parks near our house where we can hike, kayak, bike, and swim when the weather warms up again.  

 
I think one of the nicest things about this house over others we've had is the nice long paved driveway.  Grant spends a lot of time riding his bike all over it.

Hopefully I'll get another post up soon showing all the fun things we have been doing with our families.  The other big benefit to our location is that we are able to see our families so much more.

Good Bye Naperville!

This post is about 1 month behind as we moved to New York at the end of July.  We loved Naperville and so it was a bit sad to leave, but overall we were happy for the opportunity in front of us.

We spent our last week or so doing all our favorite things in the area.  The river walk was high on that list.  I spent a lot of time running there and did my last big run along it.  We also went on a family walk a few days before we left town.

We spent a lot of time at the children's museum and at the playground.  This is Grant picking up his favorite stick to bring it to New York with us.  He found it early on at the playground when we moved to Naperville.  He would play with it every time we went to the playground and would hid it under a bush when we left.

These pics are a bunch of diffrent ones of us enjoying our last days in Illinois.

Then, it was time to move.

Lara did a great job packing.  Thankfully I was actually able to help get things prepared for this move.  We ended up having to move ourselves, so here is the moving crew.

I am so thankful Dad and Jase came.  I am not sure how we could have done it without their help.  Thank you guys so much!  The kids did pretty good with the move.  Grant was great with us packing things up and even moving things out of the house.  However when we took the couch, he lost it.  Thankfully he recovered fairly quickly and even though he misses a lot about Naperville, he is happy to be in New York.

And here it is...the last picture in Illinois.  We truly enjoyed so much about the area.  We had great neighbors and I had great colleagues at work.  The town had so many fun things to do, and we loved it.  It certainly was sad to leave, but we never saw Naperville as where we would live forever...and so it was on to New York!