'Tis the Season!

We are enjoying our last day of the Thanksgiving holiday break today. It has been wonderful being home. Other than Thanksgiving day, we made sure not to have any plans, which was WONDERFUL! We just got to relax and spend time with each other and have had a blast. We are dreading going back to the grind tomorrow, but at least Christmas break will be here before we know it. We really are fortunate to have the work schedules that we do!

Ethan has been pretty hilarious this week. Here is a sampling of a conversation he had with my mom while they were playing with his new tool set (courtesy of my cousin Tami and her boys!):

Ethan: Make a boat, Grandma.

Grandma: I don't think that's possible, Ethan.

Ethan: Make it possible.

Seriously. What two year old says that? He is now obsessed with his tool bench. He runs around with a hammer asking if he can pound something. Great.

He also started a new trick. I don't know where he picked it up; he just started doing it on Sunday morning. He turns his head so he looks at you out of the corner of his eye, makes a model face, then looks away. He thinks he's pretty funny, and he's right :-)

Post-model-gazing at Daddy

We started a new tradition with Ethan this year - "Elf on the Shelf". It is so cute! It has a great little book that tells the story of the elf who is sent to kids' homes to watch over them and report back to Santa. The book comes with an actual elf that we hide throughout the house - somewhere new each morning. Ethan loves waking up and searching for the elf! We keep reinforcing that he has to be a good boy or the elf will tell Santa not to bring him a new Thomas :-)

The Elf...

This morning, we got Ethan all GQ'd for his holiday photo shoot in Cranberry. We did a practice run here. He loves saying 'cheese'.

He did very well today and had not one meltdown! The photographers were wonderful with him. He was still a handful and ran all around, but we got some very sweet shots of our boy. He kept mentioning his grandparents this morning, so we told him they would be so excited to see him smile in the pictures. It worked! I'm not sharing our favorites because they will be coming to you via Christmas card or gift!