Christmas Day

Christmas 2011 was a wonderful day spent with family. It's been so fun to start our family traditions. This was a colored light year, with some white interspersed.
Santa brought Madeline an easel and ball pit.


Still loving boxes.....
I gave Mark moose nutmeg glasses from Christmas Vacation.
The car is all loaded up to make our 2 stops.

Happy Birthday, Jesus! Merry Christmas!!

Christmas Eve

We headed off to church Christmas Eve. We were able to attend the 7pm service but I think this was our last year of adult services. Next year we will be at the 3 or 5 Children's Services. A new phase in life. I guess in 13 years we can return to the 11pm Candlelight Communion- my favorite!

*Someone had put little fingerprints on my camera. The next photos should be better.

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Holiday Happenings

Just some random shots. I have determined I am not good about having the camera handy to capture memories. I will try to do better.


I headed off to visit Sarah in DC for a long weekend. We had a blast and this is the only picture I took from the weekend! We had tickets for the dress rehearsal of Christmas in Washington. It was so fun! There were all kinds of choirs plus Jennifer Hudson, Justin Bieber, Celo Green, The Band Perry and all hosted by Conan O'Brien, my fav! I meant to try to catch the actual one on TV but forgot to search for it to record it. Oh, well.

Madeline and I take a music/dance class. Here are some friends from our class.
Madeline is helping Daddy with the decorations.

Kinsey Family Tree Farm

We headed off to Kinsey Farms to find the Macdonald family Christmas tree. This was a really neat place in North Georgia. We plan to make it a family tradition!

Roasting smores. MMMM.


Madeline was excited to be there!



She loves marshmallows so I was expecting her to like the smores. She wasn't a fan of toasted marshmallows.

"Where is our perfect tree?"

You could chop your own down or go with a precut, which is what we did this year. We also went to the petting farm. We had to pass on the tractor ride but we will do it next year.

Zoo Atlanta

On Thanksgiving Weekend Madeline and I headed to Zoo Atlanta with Uncle Kevin. We had a wonderful time!! The weather was perfect!

Here we are on the train. We didn't realize it didn't go all the way around the Zoo so that was a bit disappointing.




Willie B

Checking out the red panda

Thanksgiving

I am happy to say with this post, I am current! I have been very negligent in posting lately.

Our Thanksgiving was wonderful! We spent time at Mark's parents' house and then headed off to my parents' house. Lots of tasty food!

We have so much to be thankful for. I am trying to be aware and be grateful for things, big and small and turn annoyances into thanks. Like when my daughter is taking off her diaper, I am thankful to have a daughter and I am thankful she is able to take off her diaper.

Here are Grammy and Boompie with grandkids






Lots of blue eyes...

Madeline with Aunt Christie

Thanks be to God for his bountiful love!

Visting Grammary

Last week we headed for a long weekend to visit Mark's grandmother at Compass Lake in Florida. We hadn't seen Grammary in awhile plus she can't come for Thanksgiving or Christmas so we decided to visit her! We had a great time!

It was a welcome break from being at home. Madeline lately has been taking off her clothes and diapers in the crib and making messes. I could handle that annoyance. But then she started climbing out of her crib. This has worried me endlessly. She hasn't done it in 2 weeks so maybe the fascination is over. I hope so!

So the change of scenery did all of us well and restored some of my sanity. Madeline was all over the place, entertaining us endlessly, I am sure Grammary slept for awhile after we left! Friday night we headed into Panama City for the Christmas Celebration.


Dancing! One of our favorite things!

I love these photos of the two of them reading together.

Trick or Treat

Here we are preparing for the evening's festivities. Madeline is carrying my little pumpkin from long ago.
Starting off on the trek.
Meeting up with Lulu and her mom. Susan is an artist and is so creative. Lulu will have great handmade costumes over the years while Madeline will be stuck with premade ones.
Back home ,carrying around a picture frame. We had a lot of fun! She hung in there longer than I had planned! Thanks for sharing your candy, precious Madeline.

Halloween Party

Our friends, the Sears', had their annual Halloween party this year. This party is always a blast and we have had many costumes over the years.

This year, another Halloween first was that I actually saw "The Wizard of Oz". I have never viewed it. Of course I know the basic story but hadn't seen it. What prompted our costumes was the musical "Wicked". I am a Volunteer Ambassador at the Fox Theatre and I had recently seen " Wicked". It was wonderful and I wanted Mark and me to be characters from it. I think I have a really unique perspective on the movies because I saw "Wicked" before the "The Wizard of Oz". I have been told the book and the musical are vastly different so I need to check out the book.

So here we are as Elphaba (AKA Wicked Witch of the West) and Scarecrow (AKA Fiyero).


Ever since the party night, whenever Madeline sees the scarecrow costume she says "Dada" and when she see my wig she calls out for me. She is so smart!



Our friend Kay joined us as Galinda (AKA Glinda the Good Witch)

Pumpkin Carving

The annual pumpkin carving took place in late October. I loving carving pumpkins and carve one every year. This was Mark's first year carving a pumpkin. Not sure how that happened but he has now carved one. This was a Halloween of firsts for the Macdonald family, more on that in another post. Mark decided to be super impressive and go with a design from the stencil.

I went with traditional carving but tried for spiral eyes. They didn't turn out as well as I had hoped. They broke off.

Ladybug fun

Our little ladybug flew off to another Fall Festival.

She still loves her thumb. I'll tackle that hurdle next year....