An Ice Time Downtown

This past weekend was the annual fire and ice festival in St. Joseph. They start the weekend with a bonfire on Friday night, where apparently, they put a huge slab of ice in the fire. Supposedly, it's amazing. While we didn't make it to the bonfire, we did manage to scoot down on Sunday after church, and see the final results of the ice carving contest. Of course by then, temps had warmed up and the ice was dripping away. But we still got to see some cool stuff!


My monkeys!


Say cheese!


A horse carving.



A groovy dragon outside the Chocolate Cafe was just about one of the last sculptures still intact in the warming weather.


Gabe, hamming it up.

Winter on Lake Michigan

My hubby trekked out on the snow and ice the other evening and caught these awesome shots of the North Pier Light encased in ice and snow. Just gorgeous! Winter might be harsh in Michigan, but it's a beautiful kind of harsh!

Birthday Celebrations

Gabe had a fantastic 9th birthday. He had his very first sleep over. This was an educational experience for us as parents as well! He picked his two friends from baseball and Trinity, Max and Zane, to come over. The boys went sledding, made their own pizza, (both of which, at least one of our guests had never done before!) played their Nintendo DS's, ate TONS of snacks, watched Harry Potter IV, and stayed up till at least 1 a.m. Gabe had an absolute BLAST!
For his actual birthday, he got lots of goodies from us, including a Toothless the Dragon figure from the movie "How to Train your Dragon" that has a three-foot wingspan. He also got a "bone-napper" dragon to go with it. We also got him Boggle, and and ipod shuffle, which ended up being not compatible with our computer, so we took it back and exchanged it for Madden NFL 2011 for the Wii, which he loves.

The Dog that Wasn't

Well, we came SOOO close to buying a second dog recently.
We found a cute little white mutt up for adoption at PetsMart and got to keep him for a week. During the week we realized that our older dog, Roxie, was not keen on having a puppy on her turf. It was really sad, because he was the cutest, most well-behaved puppy you could imagine. We were all kinda broken up about it. But here are some photos ... so that you can see for yourself how cute little "Wyatt" was.

Snow Play

These are just a bunch of photos from our family playing in all the winter snow we've gotten over the past month or two.
We like to all go out and monkey around, as you can tell! One afternoon, we utilized our sand castle making skills and used buckets to create a snow fort. It was incredible!