Gingerbread houses 2011

We decided to make gingerbread houses while Grandma Bundy was here. We spoiled ourselves with ridiculous amounts of candy and let our/the kids imaginations run wild. I'm never real good at making the gingerbread, I always make too little, so this year our roofs (rooves? roofes?) are made out of cardboard. 'cause we're cool/ghetto like that. :) My favorite part was the fisherman that Tony and Liam created (pictured below). Liam worked with Tony, Emma worked with me, and Fox ate candy while Grandma worked on theirs.

Oh, Christmas Tree

Blogger is being extra dumb today, so I hope this works. We decided to wait until Grandma came to get a Christmas tree. We didn't get one until the 7th of December! It took all my will power to wait that long, but it was worth it! We went in the middle of the day on Wednesday and realized that many Christmas tree lots weren't open. But it worked out to our advantage! We found a "cut your own Christmas tree" place, a town over. It was perfect! They had a forest of Christmas trees to choose from so we walked around trying to choose the best one for us. Then Tony and the kids cut it down :). After they had a little building that we could wait in while they shook and bundled our tree (they even tied it down to the top of the van!). Inside there was hot chocolate, candy canes, and a cozy fire. It was awesome!! And so fun!

Grandma Bundy Comes!-Chicago

Thanks to Jon buying two tickets last year and not using them both, Grandma Bundy got to come and spend a week with us this holiday season! We were super excited! We took Liam out of school and Tony took off work and we headed to Chicago to pick Grandma up from the airport.

And really, you can't go to Chicago without doing some type of sight seeing. So we took Grandma to Willis (use to be Sears) tower.

Inside they had a huge Christmas tree. It was fake...;)

Afterwords we when to Giordano's for some of their famous Chicago style pizza. mmmm, delicious...drool...drool

And a word to the wise. Make sure that if you park in Chicago you read all the signs and the ticket thing that you get from the pay meter. Because unbeknownst to us, you can't park in places after 4:00. We got there at 3:30-ish and thought we were good, but came back to a fancy new parking ticket. Wahoo? But at least I can scratch another thing off my bucket list. Get a parking ticket in Chicago-check.