Reeve Lost his 5th Tooth

I've been reading the kids Harry Potter for about 3 hours every evening...no kidding at least 3 hours a day! Well there's not much to do from 7-10pm at night, and they can't get enough of it. Kyle now doesn't go anywhere around the house without his wand, and he's constantly performing Cheering Charms on Reeve or trying to disarm me with an exhuberant Expelaramus when I'm asking him to clean up his toys. We're on book 5, and the other night, during a particularly gripping part of the book, Reeve flicked out his tooth with his tongue. It really startled us all!

He's always happy to lose a tooth!

You might have heard that we had a blizzard here this weekend. Even this morning there were still flurries flying through the air. It dumped over A FOOT of snow again in one night! It's worse than that for us because we're on the ridge top and we get a lot of deep snow drifts from all the wind.
Santa's worried...can you see the ridge of snow behind him? I can tell you it's above my knee!

Snowy December

Well we were happy to drive home from Florida and Tennessee with very good weather. When we crossed over into Wisconsin there was no snow on the ground, but by the time we came closer to our house there was an inch of snow still on the ground. The kids were thrilled to come home to snow.

The weekend that we came home it snowed about 8 inches total. Before I could unpack Reeve and Kyle first insisted that I decorate for Christmas..."It's snowing already and we don't even have our tree up!" They enthusiastically pointed out. Then they could take it no longer and HAD to go outside in the snow...that took some more diggig to find all of their winter gear (gloves, hats, boots, snowpants, etc...). Reeve knew where his snowboard was, so he was glad to get that ready.

Kyle had a snowboard too, but his boots were too big and he kept losing them on the way down.

He's such a goof

Hobe Sound Thanksgiving

We celebrated Thanksgiving this year at Tom's Mom's house.

It was quite a feast

This is Lauren's (Tom's neice) boyfriend John helping to carve the Turkey with Barbara's friend Pam.

The kids were very well behaved.

The sun must have been in their eyes for this pic...they do look like cousins!

And they get along sooo well :-)

Deck Demolition at Ken's in Tampa

After our day of fun at Busch Gardens we spent the next day helping my brother take down his deck. The deck needed to come down, so the building contractor's could start work on Ken & Erin's new addition.

The building contractor's had to design a special foundation to protect their neighbor's Florida Oak Tree.

Ken and Tom made a good team, and the deck came down fairly easily and quickly.

It's going to be really cool! They'll have a new bedroom and bathroom, bigger kitchen, and a laundry room.

Here's a pic of Ken in the front of his house. It's a really nice house in the historic district of Tampa.

Busch Gardens - Tampa, FL

Before Thanksgiving we visited my brother Ken and his wife Erin in Tampa, FL. We lucked out because that was the weekend that Jack Hannah was visiting Busch Gardens.

He put on a pretty good show with beautiful exotic cats and other creatures...weird birds, etc...

After the show Jack stuck around to sign autographs. Reeve and Kyle have seen him on David Letterman, so they were pretty excited to see his show and get an autograph.

Reeve was almost tall enough to ride on some thrilling rides...but not quite.

Kyle, who was more excited about riding some roller coasters, was just tall enough for the kiddie rides.

We walked the big kids (Ken, Erin & Tommy) up to the no-way-on-earth-would-I-subject-myself-to-such-torture rides.

The kids and I went to The Land of The Dragons to wait for their return

It was full of very tame, almost too tame, kiddie rides. We spent hours in there waiting for the "big kids" to return.

Reeve and Kyle spent hours in the bounce house. They must have gone through that line at least 10 times.
The cool thing about Busch Gardens is that it has great rides and beautiful animals.

We took the safari train around the park and came really close to some rhinos

massive aren't they?

and Kyle's favorite...zebras.