Happy Birthday Mary Berry!!!

'Twas two years ago that into our life

popped this little berry out of my wife

With four other children already present

the housing situation became very unpleasant

But with eyes and a smile so sweet

having her around turned into a treat

She's learned to say bumblepus, Dora, and fries

but love of the latter has resulted in 95th percentile thighs

While all the kids love to smother her in hugs and kisses

a somewhat disappointed Tanner still wishes

that while he and Mary are of the same genus

there are days where he'd rather she had a...

...lego set

bicycle

comic book

cookie, etc.

What were you guys thinking?

Yesterday was a big day

Tanner had his first pine wood derby. While his car wasn't the fastest, I overheard some of the older scouts say that they thought his car was the coolest.

How do you know which way R2D2 is facing?

Ella lost another tooth. She got hit in the face during basketball practice. She was actually pretty excited about it. She even wrote a note to the tooth fairy explaining what happened.

I think one of her friends at school told her that the tooth fairy's real name was Sarah.

It's great to be eight.....

...just ask Tanner.

His birthday started with a request for breakfast in bed, which Dad made for him. French toast and juice in a sippy cup! (We don't usually allow food out of the kitchen/dining room to avoid messes!)
There was lunch with Dad and Marc was excited because Tanner actually wanted to go somewhere besides McDonalds or Burger King. When they left, the plan was to go to Taco Bell. While that would not be my choice if I could go anywhere I wanted, it was his. But, when they came home they told me that had gone to McDonald's after all. Tanner said it had been a year since he had a chicken patty! Marc took the camera but forgot to actually use it!

We then had a great party at Lazer Kraze, a local laser tag place. Great for me because all I had to do was send the invites and bring the cake!

Mary enjoyed the arcade.

So did Sarah.

The cousins inside the arena.

The army man cake.

After the party, we invited the family back to our house for dinner. Tanner's request? Hamburgers and french fries. I think that means Marc had the same meal twice in one day.

After dinner everyone joined in for our inaugural playing of Beatles RockBand. I think grandpa may have enjoyed in the most.

A little info about Tanner at eight.....

• He is SO smart.
• He LOVES Legos.
• He is a voracious reader and prefers non-fiction, especially wars and military books.
• He is a Cougar fan (of course) and roots for the Steelers as well (just like his dad).
• He likes spending time with friends , but I think he secretly prefers his family, especially when we play games or do fun things together.
• He has a great giggle.
• He is a thoughtful brother and son.

Christmas

I wish I had my own personal photographer who would come and capture Christmas morning on film and allow Marc and I to just sit and enjoy the children and all the excitement. Ella woke up at 3:30, blaming the wind for waking her up. Marc and I are not sure she went back to sleep. By the time everyone else woke up, around 8:30, she was almost too excited to contain herself.

I think the kids enjoyed their presents from Santa and from Mom and Dad. There was lots and lots of smiling! Enjoy the pictures.

Okay, no smiling on this next one, but I needed to include a picture of Rylee. Isn't the hat cute?


Santa left some clues leading the children to this gift in the basement.
Mary would have been completely satisfied with a stocking full of Hershey Kisses. Once she found the chocolate, she could not have cared less about the rest of the gifts.

It's finally Christmas Eve

Our children have been counting down for a long time for this day to come. We had lots of fun. Here is what we did. We made an assembly line to finally get some Christmas cards out. Daddy licked the envelopes, Ella stamped them and Tanner did the address labels. I had not put the stockings on the mantle. One, because I wanted to decorate it how I wanted to and also because I thought those heavy stocking holders would just be begging for Mary to pull them down on her head.

So part of our day was getting out the stockings and putting them on the mantle.

I think they had been up about 5 minutes when one was pulled down but the victim wasn't Mary, it was Sarah.

We decorated sugar cookies for our eagerly awaited nighttime visitor.

At grandma's house, we had our own little Christmas pageant. The wise men brought baby Jesus a really lovely wooden box full of poker chips!

And we came home and opened our new jammies!

The kids, especially Tanner, were SO excited about Christmas, but all fell asleep really fast. It was a fun, fun day.

Favorite Rylee pics

I been meaning to post these pictures since my last post. These are some of my favorite pictures of Rylee but they didn't have her toy so they needed their own post.

I believe this is her first Christmas. She made out like a bandit.

Here is my little Rylee burrito.

Sheer joy with bubbles.

Just cute.

Just a perfect smile and actually looking at the camera.

I don't know what happened here.

OK, this one isn't so good of Rylee, but look at that hair! Oh, the memories.

It's raining men!!!

Rylee has always had only one toy that she will really play with. We call it "Mr. Happy Face" and other than the church hymnal it may be the only toy she will crawl across a room to play with. Over the years we have lost several Mr. Happy Faces but a couple of years ago we stopped being able to find it in the stores. The one she has now is one I found on ebay a couple of years ago. Recently, she has chewed off one of his "ears" so he looked more like a Van Gogh toy but with a sunny disposition. Kenna and I began to wonder how we were going to find another Mr. Happy Face. It is made by the Sassy toy company, so I went to their website and found a "contact us" form and explained our situation. A couple of days later we got a call from a company representative saying that they no longer make that toy but she had gone through the warehouse and found three toys stashed back in some unused corner and while they weren't in perfect condition we could have them if we paid for the shipping. We very happily paid for shipping and just a few days ago they showed up, much to her delight.



Well, this got me to thinking about when Mr. Happy Face joined our family. And so I started digging through old pictures to try and find his origins. Try to find Mr. Happy face in the following pictures.

Here he is at Grandma Wilson's house guarding Rylee from Kobe the dog, or is it the other way around?

Here he is in Canada whale watching with Tanner.

Here he is watching a Fourth of July Parade in Washington, PA.

This is a tough one, but if you look close you can find him posing with Grandma and Grandpa Wahlquist.

This is in black and white but you can still make out his button nose (no pun intended). A pre-marine Uncle Scott was trying to cut in on the action.

Here Cousin Cameron seems to have succeeded where Uncle Scott failed. This picture was taken in April of '01. The lambs later testified against Calvin in the ensuing custody battle.

Here he is getting ready to go for a swim in the pool with Rylee and Tanner. Keep your legs comments to yourself, thank you.

And this is the earliest documentation I could find of Mr. Happy Face. He seems to have joined our family on Christmas day 2000.

Thanks, Mr. Happy Face, for being Rylee's bestest friend for so many years!