Happy Holidays

Happy Holidays everyone -- we hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. Did Santa bring you what you wanted? The boys were very happy with what Santa brought this year. They both received new Build-A-Bear bears -- David's is dressed in a Green Bay Packers uniform and Jonathan's is wearing UofM attire -- just like they asked for. Jonathan was also very pleased that Santa heard his pleas for a new backpack for school, his was getting rather worn. The boys were also excited to receive Nintendo DS game systems from mom & dad! It seems like our Christmas vacation is flying by. We got the tree and decorations down and put away, just a few more gifts need to find their homes and we can finish cleaning up the house, and hopefully start the new year off on an organized foot. We spent yesterday being very thankful that we had a generator. We lost our power in the early morning hours (we think it was between 2-3 am) and didn't get it back until about 8:30 last night. We were thrilled to get it back when we did -- when we called Consumer's the recording said we wouldn't have it back until the middle of Tuesday. Having the generator definitly made the power outage much more tolerable. Heat, running water and TV are nice things to have. We have lots of limbs down in the yard -- seems like everytime we get wind our yard looks like this, it never ceases to amaze me that we even have any trees left. Have a safe and Happy New Year!

Love, Us

Oh, the weather outside is frightful ...

Well, it's a little less frightful today than it has been, the temperature is a bit warmer, although they are saying it's going to get colder tonight and rain -- that could make for some interesting driving, in the morning. We've already had 2 snow days this year, so we are hoping we don't have anymore before Christmas break. This past week the boys both participated in the elementary school music program. Here are the links to the sections of the video that show their classes singing. I don't know how well they will look or if they will take a long time to load, I've never tried uploading video before. We hope all is well with everyone out there ... keep warm!
~ Kati
David's Class
Jonathan's Class

Hello!

Jonathan and I just thought we'd take a minute to say hello! Things here have been busy, but then again, when aren't things? :-) Last week was Homecoming week at Montabella -- we had fun taking part in some of the spirit days at school. Both of us really liked "crazy day" where we dressed in mismatched clothes -- Jonathan even wore his shirt backwards. Mom and Dad didn't necessarily like walking with us that day, but we thought it was cool. We walked in the Homecoming parade -- that was fun as always. The game was great -- we played our rivals to the east -- Vestaburg, and beat them 52-0!! It's looking as though there's a chance our football team could make it to the playoffs this year. They are currently 4-1. The band looked great -- they did their half-time show during pre-game since they wouldn't be able to do it at half-time. One of the band members was crowned Homecoming Queen (Yeah Trevin!) Monday I got my expansion retainer thingy ... the dentist says there's a chance I won't have to have braces if I wear this thing to help make my mouth wider. I don't mind it too much except when I want to eat. Jonathan is playing flag football. It was kind of a last minute thing. Mom actually thought the flag football "season" was already done, but they sent home a note last Friday saying it started this Monday. Jonathan said he wanted to play, so he is. He had practice on Monday and again tonight. He will play 2 games on the next 2 Monday evenings. Mom will take pictures and maybe even video tape one of the games, but they really aren't much to watch.

Well, that's about all the news there is to share right now. We are looking forward to this coming weekend when we will be making our annual trip to Klackle's Orchard in Greenville with our friends the Keillors. We'll be sure to tell you all about it next week.

Love, David (and Jonathan)

New Camper

We went looking at 5th wheel campers last week to gather some information, and ended up finding something we really liked, so we traded in our Jayco travel trailer on a new Malibu (by Skyline) 5th wheel. Click on the "5th wheel" link in the "Our Photo Albums" section to the right if you'd like to see pictures.

We hope you all had a nice weekend.
~Chris, Kati, David and Jonathan

First Day of School

Hi everyone! Yes, we know, we've been very bad about posting for a very long time ... we are going to try to get back in the habit!! We just wanted to pass along this picture of us on the first day of school. We started school this past Thursday in our "new" school -- our school system underwent a major reconfiguration over the summer, closing 2 buildings and moving everyone around. The elementary students now attend school in what was the high school and the 7-12 graders are now housed in what was the middle school -- this reconfiguration was partly to blame for mommy not posting over the past few months, she's been very busy moving the libraries all around.

I'm very excited about being in the 3rd grade. My teacher's name is Mrs. Fenton and I think I'm going to have a lot of fun. Jonathan has Mrs. Smith for Kindergarten, and I know he's going to have a lot of fun also (I had Mrs. Smith, so I know her class is fun!!)

~David

Link

The link in the Leap Year day post isn't right ... mommy will try to upload that file somewhere and put out a new link tomorrow. Right now, it's getting to be her bedtime ... :-)

Happy Leap Year Day!

Hi everybody! We hope everyone is doing well. Things here are great -- except for the snow, which seems to just keep coming and coming. Thankfully we haven't had any snow days either last week or this week!

Jonathan had a nice birthday, and I even got one of my presents early too ... we both got gift certificates for Build-A-Bear Workshop, so 2 Saturday's ago we went there and "built" our new friends, "Dino" and "Jonathan" (aka "Jonabear").

Last weekend we met Uncle Ron, Aunt Christie and Brandon at Splash Village in Frankenmuth ...we had a lot of fun playing in the water park, and on Saturday night we went up to Saginaw and watched a Saginaw Spirit hockey game (they won ... it was cool!)

Daddy's bands have been getting ready for Band Festival coming up this Saturday, we all hope they do well. We'll let you know how they do ... speaking of bands. There was a cute article in the Lakeview newspaper this week, listing the best of Montcalm County's high school basketball ... Best Pep Band -- Montabella! Go Mustangs! Here's the article if you'd like to read it!

More Later

~David

Nasty weather, nasty weather GO AWAY!!!!!

We're sorry if you are one of those people who love the snow and cold, but we want it to STOP! :-) We are at home again today for our 9th snow day this year (and it sounds like we might be headed for #10 tomorrow). We'll admit, we like snow days usually ... 3 even 4 a year are a nice way to break up the months of January-March when it seems like we don't get much break from school, but 9 is too many (7 of them have been since we went back to school from Christmas vacation). We would much rather be there now and get out earlier in summer so we can enjoy the warm weather :-) We hope everyone is staying warm, dry and not getting cabin fever like we are!

~ David & Jonathan

Hi! Let's Catch Up!

Wow! We have been lax about posting haven't we?? We knew it had been a while, but we didn't realize it had been quite so far back as Halloween. Well, we'll try to catch you up on all we've been doing ...

Well, let's see ... we had a nice Thanksgiving and a great Christmas. We saw Santa at Wal-Mart a couple of weeks before Christmas ... I sat on his lap -- David was being ornery and wouldn't. David participated in his school music program -- his class sang really nicely! 2 weekends before Christmas, we went to Grandma and Grandpa Hill's for our annual cookie making day.

We didn't do too much over break which was kinda nice. We did go to Grand Rapids one day and spent time with our friends the Keillors. We went to a place called Craig's Cruisers ... think Chuck E. Cheese only nicer :-) I really liked riding in the go carts with mom. We got lots of great Christmas gifts and had a great time hanging out with all our cousins. One of our favorite gifts were the digital cameras we each got!!

On January 5th we went to our cousin Brandon's house and celebrated his 3rd birthday -- that was fun, and the ice cream cake was AWESOME!!

Last weekend we met Grandma and Grandpa Hill, Uncle Ron, Aunt Christie and Brandon in Saginaw to watch the Shrine circus. It was neat to see all the animals and acrobats. Mommy and I even went on an elephant ride!! Mom's posting a bunch of pictures from all these things to our Picassa account (reminder for those of you who receive the blog in your email, you'll have to log into the blog itself to get to the link for the pictures ...) most of the pictures she took at the circus didn't turn out -- taking pictures in large arenas like that is hard, plus they had the lights out a good share of the time. We kept only the best pictures, and even some of those aren't that great :-)

This week is off to a lazy start ... we didn't have school yesterday so the teachers could do some "Professional Development" (mommy and daddy like to translate that into "a wasted day"), today we are enjoying our 5th snow day of the year. While having a day off is nice, we are thinking it would be nicer to be at school ... we would rather be there now than in June. We got well over 6 inches of snow last night ... it's piling up out there!

Well, I think that just about covers what we've been up too ... we hope you are all staying warm.

~Jonathan