Our Christmas Season

Merry Christmas everyone! Or perhaps I should be saying Happy New Year, as today is already New Year's Eve! This holiday season has been a fast one! We started off by celebrating with Darren's family the first weekend of December in Fargo. Darren's mom rented us all rooms at the Holiday Inn. The kids had a great time in the pool...so did the dads! Landon loved to splash in the pool. It took him awhile to get used to the water, but he soon realized how fun it is and was having a wonderful time!

Landon with his cousins Bailey, Sam, Isaac, and Conner.

We visited with Darren's dad and Deanna the weekend before Christmas. They came out to watch Landon so that Darren and I could go on a date. We saw our first movie since Landon has been born and enjoyed a meal out alone. Landon got a very cool new "house" toy from his Grandparents that he loves to play with, especially the balls that go with it. We received a FLIP camera that I am thrilled about! I have been wanting a new digital video camera for a long time.

On Christmas Eve we headed to Annandale to celebrate at my mom and dad's house with both sides of our family. It's getting be be pretty tight quarters with all the new kiddos running around! Pretty soon we will have to start renting a hall! Here's a picture of my sisters and their families. Our families just keep growing. Next year there will be more in the picture!!!

On Christmas Day morning, Landon had fun exploring his Santa gifts. Santa was very good to him this year, but that's because he's such a good boy! He especially loves his new sled and likes to sit in it and get pulled around the house. We haven't tried it out yet in the snow as it's been soooo cold!

We went to Auntie Susan's for Christmas Day lunch and got to visit with my mom's side of the family a little more. Landon wasn't so thrilled about getting dressed up for the day!

We had a wonderful holiday season! I just had to throw this picture in as well because it's so darn cute! Darren has spent many hours shoveling snow the past week. He was shoveling a path for the dogs off the back patio when Landon happened to be playing near the door. He was very excited when he saw Daddy out there!!! (I think Daddy was a little excited too!)

O' Christmas Tree

I finally convinced Darren that it was time to start a tradition of getting a real Christmas tree since it's Landon first Christmas! Yay! As you can see from the first picture, he was not too thrilled about the idea and complained about it all the way there! Once we got to the tree farm, it was even worse!

Turns out that Darren totally got into finding the "perfect" tree for our new house! In fact, he's already talking about what kind of tree and what size to get for next year.

Here's Landon and me standing by our first Glur Family Christmas Tree!
Darren had to cut it down of course. It was quite a funny sight!

Here we are getting ready to leave the tree farm with our tree strapped to the top of the "PT Loser."

What a great time we had...all three of us!!!

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! We're still being lazy and digesting the yummy food from yesterday's holiday! We have so much to be thankful for this year:

...Our wonderful little boy, Landon. He has truly been a blessing to us this year! We can't imagine life any other way now.

...Our new house. We are so blessed to have moved into our gorgeous new house this year. What an unexpected surprise for us and we enjoy it every day!

...Our super supportive family. We have been blessed with huge amounts of help from our family throughout this year. From living with Darren's Dad and Deanna for the month of August, to Darren's Mom watching Landon for us the month of May, to the whole Hegle family helping out with the big move! We can't tell everyone enough how much their love and support means to us!

...Our friends, both near and far. We cherish the times we are able to spend with our friends, even more so now that we see them few and far between!

Enough of the sappy stuff! So, yesterday at Lorie and Tim's we decided to take a few family pics outside by the pond. I must say that Ashley is a much better photographer than the ones we had a JCPenney lately! Here's the one we chose for our Christmas card:

Another 5 generation picture! Landon is much bigger this time around. We are so thankful to have so many Grandparents in our lives!
Here's to another great Thanksgiving! Looking forward to Christmas and all the craziness in the weeks ahead!

Just Call Him "Fang!"

We just have to laugh at how funny Landon's newest tooth looks! He's got two on the bottom, which he's had for about three months now, but he's got a new one on top that came through a few weeks ago! It's not one of the middle two, which is kind of odd! Dr. Fandel says it's very common. He looks like a little vampire! We're hoping for some new ones to pop through soon.

9 Months of Joy!!!

Landon turned 9 months old this past week, and it's still hard for us to come to grips with the fact that our little man is growing up! We went to see Dr. Fandel last Wednesday and here's what we found out:
Weight 21# 10 oz. 69th %
Height 29 3/4 in. 91st %
Head 47 3/4 cm 97th %
So, basically we have a really tall kid with a big head. Dr. Fandel told us not to worry about his drop in weight percentile. She said it's very common once they start moving around!
Boy has he started moving around a lot! His army crawl has evolved from a sort of side to side flopping motion to a full on army crawl over the past two weeks. He will get up on his hands and knees but hasn't figured out how to make that work quite yet. Landon also loves to pull himself up on anything he can find, especially people. I'm so glad that he hasn't figured out how to do that in the crib yet! We are really enjoying seeing Landon's personality develop...he's quite the funny guy! He loves to play "I'm gonna get you!" with Daddy. He screams with excitement when Daddy starts to come towards him. He just learned how to clap his hands on his own and loves to play patty cake with his feet! We just can't put into words how much we love our Little Landon Barry!

Skol Vikings!

Last Sunday we celebrated another Vikes victory with some of Darren's Hamline Law School buddies! Landon was a good boy, sporting his Adrian Peterson jersey!

Happy Halloween!

We had a wonderful time celebrating Landon's first Halloween! On Friday night I took Landon trick-or-treating around to the Annandale businesses with Jess, Chad, Lilly, Loren, Ashley, and Jackson. Landon seemed to think he was really a monkey and tried to hang upside down the whole time we walked Main Street! My arm was so sore afterwards! Notice him in the picture...

Jackson the Lion, Lilly the Pumpkin, and Landon the Monkey!

Landon's First Halloween!

Carving pumpkins. Landon dug his hands in a few times, but lost interest right away. All he wanted to do was chew on the top of the pumpkin.


Carving his first pumpkin

Landon and Daddy heading out trick-or-treating!

The Grossman's stopped by for a treat. so here's Grady the Dinosaur, Landon the Monkey, and Quinn aka Bugs Bunny

Landon and Mommy

Our pumpkins! The monster one on the right is Darren's very first pumpkin he's ever carved...pretty impressive!

Landon and Daddy sitting on the front step waiting for trick-or-treaters.

We had 128 kids stop by!

Our 8 Month Old Little Big Man!

We just can't believe that Landon is 8 months old already! This has been the fastest 8 months of our lives! We have been so busy with our new house and me going back to work that we feel like we've missed the last month of Landon's life! He has two teeth, rolling and scooting everywhere, and so much fun! He loves to laugh, talk, and play with everything in sight. He's so curious and interested in everything he can get his hands on. His next dr appt isn't until next month, so I am excited for that to see what his growth has been. Out of curiousity sake I stepped on the scale with him today and it looks like he is about 22 lbs!!! That's the average size of a 12 month old, according to my books. (Grandma Rita tells me to throw all those books out the window...she gets so annoyed by them.) He loves daycare and the kids that go there and especially Jenny, his daycare provider. That makes me feel so much better knowing that he loves her and is happy there. Landon and I go to an ECFE class every Tuesday night at Discovery Elementary and we have met some very fun and nice families there as well. We look forward to seeing Peyton, Owen and Eli every week! We have just been keeping busy, trying to stay healthy, and enjoying each and every day that we are blessed with our little man!

Our new house...some of it anyway!

So I finally have some pics of the new house to share! We're not quite done getting everything unpacked and put in place, but we're making progress. I keep telling everyone that I lost that initial motivation and excitement once school started, so it has been slow going ever since!
So, here's a start...

This is our family room. This was a bright yellow color, but we went with a safe beige color and we really like it.

Landon's "toy room" which is just part of the family room. We'd like to get some shelving to put there to organize the toy mess! You can see the kitchen through the railing at the top. I love that I can see down into the family room from the kitchen...one of the selling points for me!

Another view from the family room looking towards the kitchen level. The doorway goes down to one more level that is yet to be finished. Someday maybe another bedroom and a rec room. For now, LOTS of storage!

Spare bedroom. The bright yellow has GOT to go. That's my project for over MEA break...get that room painted. You practically need sunglasses to go in there right now!

Master bedroom. We have a walk-in closet and our own bathroom attached.



Landon's room. Same color blue as was in his room in the old place, but you can actually see wall space now! Amazing.

Landon's bathroom. Monkeys! Our nickname for him is our little monkey, so thus the monkey bathroom. Needs to be painted...add that on to my list of to-do's.

Kitchen. We painted the red and I love how it turned out.

Informal dining room that attaches to the kitchen. We have a deck off that door and goes down to the yard where the patio comes off the family room. We have a formal dining room, but no table yet.

Bathroom #3- by the family room. Also needs to be painted.

Our office...still getting used to the color! It's a little bright for my taste.

Laundry room, which looked huge until we got our new washer and dryer delivered. Now it looks tiny!

So, sometime soon I will post pics of the rest of the house...our bathroom, bathroom #4, living room, dining room, basement, etc. Just a warning...it could be awhile! A LONG while!

Back to School

Well, summer is over and back to school we go! It's been almost one full week and so far Landon is doing great at daycare! He got his first tooth...too bad the daycare lady had to be the one to notice! I felt like a horrible mother. We moved into our new house over Labor Day weekend and hopefully soon I will have pictures to share. We still have a few boxes to unpack and decorating to do...
Check back soon!

Our Trip to Michigan

To sum up our trip in three words...LOTS OF DRIVING! 12 hours there and 12 hours back in three days was definitely a LOT of time in the car, but we made it! Landon was such a little trooper and did wonderfully in the car. We had to climb in the back seat with him a few times, but he was great! Here are some highlights from our trip:

We decided that since we were going to be driving right through Green Bay that we would stop and check out Lambeau Field. We ended up doing the official tour, and we are so glad that we did! It was fun and very informative. The tour guides only gave us a hard time about being Viking fans a few times! Here's Landon and I "pretending" to be Cheeseheads! The Packer Pro Shop had everything and anything you could possibly want in green and gold.

During the tour we got to walk down on the field and check out the tunnel.

Darren thought he'd be funny and pretend to do a "Lambeau Leap." The wall was actually WAY shorter than it looks on tv.

Here we are with the Mackinac Bridge in the background. Yes, we went over it twice...once on the way to the Lower Peninsula and once on the way back. It was pretty freaky! It's five miles long and over 200 feet about the water at it's highest point. It connects the two peninsulas of Michigan with Lake Huron on one side and Lake Michigan on the other.

We actually found about an hour of time on Saturday when it DIDN'T rain, so we thought we'd take advantage and get some pictures in the lake. So, here we are enjoying Lake Huron!

Lake Huron...what a beautiful day, huh?

This was our cottage. Definitely "rustic." Let's just say we didn't stay in a four star resort!

Jeanine and Burgess' wedding was an outdoor ceremony by the lake near the Sturgeon Point Lighthouse. It was pouring rain and everyone was soaked! They had a tent set up for the ceremony. It's a good thing Jeanine is so laid back! It still ended up being a beautiful ceremony.

Jeanine and I at the reception, which was held under a huge tent at her cabin on the lake. It was a great time!

Overall, a wonderful trip...just too much driving! We were so glad to finally be back on Sunday night after 13 hours in the car!

Circle Us Bert!

Even though we tried VERY hard, Bert didn't circle us at last night's Twins game, despite our big yellow sign! It was Landon's first ever Twins game, which also means his last ever Twins game at the Metrodome. Next year we'll be watching the games at Target Field! We all had a great time and stayed until the bottom of the 9th inning when Landon let us know that it was WAYYYYY past his bedtime!

Proudly displaying our sign

Landon and Daddy...we moved out to left field after the first inning so that we could have room to spread out- much better!


Landon and Mommy...Landon's favorite part of the game was people-watching all night!

Grandpa Eddie was at the game as well so he joined us at the end of the game and surprised Landon with a TC Bear stuffed animal! He loves it! I just love this picture...it's a framer!

Oh, and this crazy (probably drunk) guy jumped the fence and walked out onto the field right in front of us...he didn't make it very far before he was tackled by security and ushered off the field!

We are off to Michigan as soon as Darren gets home from work. We are heading out there for my friend Jeanine's wedding on Lake Huron on Saturday! It should be a fun trip! We'll be back on Sunday with lots of pictures and stories I'm sure. Stay tuned...