Merry Christmas from the Roberts family.

Pic for Miss Ellie/School

And the final three for suvivor are: (I vote for the one with PJ's on under her coat)

Happy Birthday Sydney!!

Happy Birthday Sydney! We hope that you had a wonderful 2nd birthday and we can't wait to see you in a couple of weeks!

Love,
Uncle Ryan, Aunt Becky (and Melodie)

Party Pics for Becky

The LaBarge Kids always really get into it. I saw Brendan take a large spoonful of green frosting and slowly bring it over to a cookie to the right of the purple frosting, leaving a 1 inch wide x 1/2 inch deep trail, over the table, through the purple frosting, to the cookie. Daphney loves sprinkles. In fact, when it was over, her plate was an inch thick with frosting and multi-colored sprinkles, and after first using her finger to scoop out the mess to her mouth, she started dipping the cookies in it, which turned out quite nice. Dugan has always been an artist with cookies, what more can I say?

Mallory has an amazing abiltiy to retain a lot of frosting around her mouth. Raleigh always takes longer to decorate, because it's - decorate, eat, decorate, eat. Sydney started out by grabbing the biggest cookie, held it with both hands, and decided after it was half gone to pour on the frosting. And of course, Ellie loves to decorate with a lot of colors, but is not really a cookie eater.

And last, here is a picture of the clean-up elves, gaily dancing to an Evie tune. Missy is hidden because she fell down the stairs while transporting a plateful of just cooked cookies, hurting her bum, and so she needed a little extra protection. Lots of sugar, lots of fun, no fights this year, priceless.

Come On Ring Those Bells

Yesterday, while Raleigh and Sydney were here, I brought this year's Christmas tree into the living room. Grandma LaBarge admired it, but then heard a song, seeming to come from the workroom in the basement. "Move me closer, move me closer, move me closer to the tree". Grandma made her way downstairs, and found the tree top angel that Raleigh had been working on for the last 10 months. "Move me closer, move me closer, move me closer to the tree". Grandma brought the angel up, and asked Raleigh if it would be ok for us to place it at the top our our tree this year. She told Raleigh, "You see, candy canes and tinsel trims, didn't mean a thing to him, if it kept him from his post, atop the tree he loved the most". Raleigh replied that she would be very happy to let us use her angel. "I feel sorry for mom, though". "Why is that?", Grandma asked. "Her angel is not very pretty. There aren't any stickers on it. I love stickers, but my mom doesn't." So this year, we have a very special visitor on top of Grandma and Grandpa's tree. See you all at the Christmas Celebrate Party!

Just a reminder...

Everyone is invited to come. Plus we will be celebrating Sydney's birthday!

Relief

Everything checked out "great" according to the perinatoligst this morning, and we finally have an explanation of why I've been bleeding and cramping for the last couple of weeks. I could see why, and it's a relief to know that Melodie is fine and will be fine and that the scare over Thanksgiving and last weekend shouldn't have any impact on her whatsoever, and that I need to just take it very easy over the next four weeks to allow my uterus to heal up. Praise the LORD! Ryan and I are both very relieved. Here are some pics of Melodie, it's incredible to see her getting so big!

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

Yesterday, Milwaukee had snow/sleet/ice warnings issued from 11am until 6am today. Ryan and I made the decision to stay in and clean/decorate. (Okay, Ryan cleaned, and I decorated :) ) Unfortunately, we're not allowed to have a live Christmas tree at our apartment because of fire department codes. So instead of buying a fake tree, and having to store it, and deal with the chaos of putting it up and down, we decided to put up garland and hang our ornaments and lights off of that. I also had a bunch of Christmas decorations from Aunt Jennifer and Uncle Jim, including a tree skirt, which I wanted to use for decorating, and my ANGEL!

Mom, the angel is AWESOME! We LOVE it! She deserved her own section of pictures! If anyone is interested in coming to visit, we'd love to have you and show off our decorations.