Christmas Eve

Our Christmas Eve started out with a hot breakfast of waffles, bacon, and eggs. Richard's favorite. He was delighted. I sure love these three people. :)

The next festivity of the morning was making sugar cookies. This is a tradition that I have carried over from my family and I love it. We always leave frosted sugar cookies for Santa and until Richard decides that Santa wants something else, we will stick with this. Marshall was an excellent little helper in the kitchen. He made sure that the first cookies we did were Y's. I'm sure that Santa appreciated that.

That evening we had a mouthwatering dinner with all of these wonderful people. It was so fun to host this dinner in our home. We are very grateful for wonderful friends to share this grand Milwaukee experience with when family is far away.

After our grand dinner party was over it was time to open Christmas pajamas! You will have to excuse little Bridget in these pictures. She came down with a stomach bug on Friday and by this point in the day she was going on outfit number five. Despite feeling pretty yucky though, she still managed some smiles and we think she's pretty darn cute.

Marshall proved to be a great little present-opener for Bridget this year. :)

Bows! This is really all a nine-month old needs.

Marshall and his "Cars" pajamas. So happy!

I love, love, love these next few pictures. Even though having two kids drives me crazy sometimes, I wouldn't trade it!


All done!

And finally, Santa Clause came to visit! These are two lucky kiddos!

Merry Christmas From Milwaukee

Richard just commented this afternoon that who would have thought that living in Milwaukee we would have blue sky and green grass on Christmas Eve. I guess if we can't have a white Christmas this is the next best thing.

Merry Christmas!

The Move

We moved out of the wonderful little cul-de-sac the weekend of Thanksgiving. While there are some aspects of apartment life/bliss in the cul-de-sac that we definitely miss, we are so happy to be in our own space! Just having two floors to live on has been wonderful!

The move itself really did go as well as a move can go. We packed up some each day so we weren't too crazy when the big day came. Both Marshall and Bridget handled it all well, but Marshall did start sleeping in our bedroom on the floor for about the last two weeks we lived in our apartment. (He doesn't do so well with change.) Once boxes started piling up he knew something was coming! Of course it didn't help that his toys were all disappearing into boxes as well. But, he pooled his resources and was able to get creative. :)

Richard had to work Thanksgiving night (7 pm-11 am). He didn't get any sleep at all, despite being told that Thanksgiving nights are usually very slow. So, he got home at about 11:15, slept for 2 1/2 hours and then he and I started moving our kitchen. We were able to get it all done in three trips using our van.

The real move began on Saturday morning at 9 am. We had SO much help from neighbors, branch members, and Richard's co-workers. By 1:00 everything had been unloaded at our new house. Richard and I did have to make one more trip back to pull clothes out of closets, but that was it.

On Monday I went back to our apartment to finish cleaning it and check out. Our apartment life was done!

We are so grateful to all of our friends who helped us during that whole week. Not only did people help us move, people watched our kids, brought us food, had us over for dinner, helped me clean, and chauffeured me around when I locked my keys in the van (first time I've ever done that)! Thank you, thank you everyone!

This is only some of our moving crew. Thank you!

I should have taken a picture of our living room before we moved. Pure chaos. But, here is a picture of the living room in our house after we had been living there for three days. Believe me, we had actually made decent progress in this room before I took the picture. :)

We are still not completely unpacked, but mostly. With a vacation and Christmas in between all of this who really wants to spend their time unpacking boxes?!

We are going to buckle down after Christmas though so soon I will start putting pictures up of the house. Our landlord is awesome and is letting us have free reign with paint and she is also paying for it! The room we want to paint first is Marshall's room. It is the only white room and the paint looks to be the oldest out of all the rooms. We just went to the paint store last night to get some samples. This is fun, and even more fun when someone else is paying! Stay tuned!

Last Vacation Post

Alright, I'm finally getting around to posting about our last vacation activity. Our last day in Williamsburg we were on our own. We decided to pack up and take a drive to Portsmouth, about one hour south, and visit the children's museum. I am SO glad that we did this. This was by far the coolest children's museum I have ever been to, not that I've been to that many, but still, very impressive! Marshall loved it and Richard and I had just as much fun!

They had a crane that you could operate and move boxes from a truck to a boat and vice versa. So fun.


The next stop was a boat. Marshall loved his life jacket and trying to catch the fish.


They had an awesome fire truck set-up. Marshall, again, was in heaven.


A phenomenal train area. You could crawl through tunnels below the display and then they had areas where you could pop up (still in a tube) and be right in the middle of all of the trains.

My personal favorite was this bottle rocket thing. I think I did it about ten times. Marshall was terrified of it though!

Richard and Marshall loved this little gadget.

A giant bubble!

And don't worry, Bridget had fun too. :)

Christmas Letter

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Marshall's Thoughts on Primary

On Sunday I stayed home from church with Marshall because he had the stomach flu. During that afternoon he asked when he was going to go to nursery. I realized that this would have been his last Sunday in nursery so I explained that he was a big boy and all done with nursery and that soon he would be going to primary. He has since talked to me about primary many times; I get the feeling that he is not looking forward to this.

Marshall quotes:

"Oh, you will take me to primary and I will cry?"

"I am not three! I am not going to primary!"

"I will ruin the primary. I will ruin the chapel." (Should I be concerned about this?!)

"I do not want to play games. I do not want candy. I do not want to go to primary."

Good luck you wonderful primary workers; Marshall Leake is on his way!

Another boring blog post

Marshall and I (Richard) watched Rudy the other day and he said it was a horrible movie, which was a sad day.