Happy Holidays!

Well, I figured I better post some pictures of Jace's Christmas! We actually celebrated Christmas the week before (so we could take the tree down and pack things up), BECAUSE (in case you don't know yet) we are moving! Grad school didn't work out for Thomas, and since I never did get a teaching job here, we are both going through the newspaper looking for dead-end jobs that we don't want to do anyway, waiting for our big breaks to come through, we figured we might as well do that somewhere around family. SO, we are cutting our losses here, packing up everything and moving to Oregon, where my mom, sisters, neices, and basically that whole side of my family live. We don't know for sure what we are going to do there yet, but we didn't know what we were going to do if we stayed here either, and I am ready for Jace to get to know some of his family. So we will only be here until about the 15th of January, and then we will be spending about a week, driving our car and a U-Haul out to Oregon.

I hope everyone had a good Christmas! We spent the real Christmas packing, as we plan to do over New Year's. :-) Happy Holidays everyone!

Decorating Christmas cookies on Christmas Eve day! :-) (Which was actually a week before Christmas - we celebrated Christmas early so that we could take the tree down and get started packing).  

Christmas Eve - we let him open one present and he was very excited to find that it was a pack of 5 Matchbox cars. He loves cars, trucks and trains!  

Merry Christmas! This is Jace discovering his Christmas stocking. Notice he is still clutching the 5 cars that he recieved in his 5-car pack the night before. He slept clutching them all night.  

Jace opening presents Christmas day. This process took about 12 hours. This was not due to his quantity of presents, but instead due to the fact that he had dto adequately play with each gift before he would willingly open the next one. He opened presents from the time he got up until the time he went to bed. :-) 

Taking a bath mid-day (which, of course, he had to do after opening his new bath toys!).  

Exploring the new castle! He especially loved the cannon that really shot the cannonball!  

Jace reading one of his new books (I wasn't kidding when I say he had to play with EACH present before opening another one - normally he won't sit and read books except at bedtime). :-) 

Blue's Clues! (He loves Blue's Clues) 

My baby - oops, I mean big boy! 

My two boys. :-) 

Our kitty-ornament - pretty lifelike, huh? 

Who would have thought that a Christmas tree was a good place for a cat-nap? 

Let's go trick-or-treating! 

Jace as a train (Thomas the Tank Engine - although all he knew was that he wanted to be the train - he's never seen Thomas).  

Our first door!  

Figuring out the whole candy thing. 

One of our finished pumpkins - Thomas carved it from one of those pattern books. He did such a good job, people actually asked if their kids could take pictures with our pumpkins! 

Jace's classroom Halloween party - Thomas and I both got to attend, it was fun! 

Jace cheating :-) at "pin-the-nose-on-the-pumpkin."  

Getting his face painted - he had a jack-o-lantern on this side (it isn't finished yet) and a ghost with the word, "boo!" on the other side. 

He loved scooping out the pumpkins. 

Look what I found in the pumpkin! 

Carving pumpkins! 

My pre-k class (minus one who left early) at our Halloween party. 

How cute is he?? This is the face that gets me - works like a charm every time.