Snow '08

Ian coaxed us to gear all three boys up for a snow outing on Thursday night. The boys had a great time making foot prints, snow balls, and sledding down the (very) small slope in our front yard, using Aunt Carrie's clothes bin as a make-shift sled (uh, sorry Carrie).


Ian loves sledding!

Here he is with his big brother in our first snow of 2008:

Mission: Impermissible!

Yesterday morning we awoke to the following scene (re-created for purposes of this photograph -- the bottle cap was still on).

Andy was the only one up, so he was surely the culprit.

The purple object jutting from the bottle of Sprite (left over from the previous night's Church small group) is a plastic Ikea kids straw.

Andy explained that, after trying to open the bottle with the can opener and the pizza cutter, he finally went for pay-dirt via a knife puncture to the bottle. Frightening. It's hard to discipline when you're humored.

Andy and His Peeps

Last week, we had the opportunity to go hear my (Jessica's) dad performing in a Friday Morning Music Club recital. The boys loved hearing Granda sing solo, and even Peter was pretty impressive when it came to sitting attentively through his first classical music recital. Ian and Andy appear to be old pros at this kind of thing by now.

Also on the program was a performance of a Bach piano piece and a Beethoven sonata for piano and violin. The Beethoven was performed by a rather accomplished husband and wife duo named the Suzukis. I don't have their bios in front of me, but if memory serves, the husband (violin) was concert master of the Ontario Symphony for 15 years, and they have multiple recordings on the EMI label. Pretty fancy company for us amateurs! Andy was in his element talking piano, and charmed Zeyda Suzuki (piano) so much that she requested that he be in this picture taken of all the pianists on the program.

Bibliophiles

The kids found a new good use for our hall bookcase. The love of books and bookcases runs in the family.



Yesterday most of the family fell asleep. Don't be fooled though, Andy's faking.



And on Friday night, Andy was so into the guitar playing and singing we did with our church group that we found he had held his own jam session after going to sleep (that's a lyrics sheet by his feet).

More Christmas Photos

Thanks to Danielle Lee, here are a couple more from our New Jersey Christmas:

Andy wants to name the new baby Snoopy. We told him no. He suggested Schroeder as an alternative. See any resemblance? Even a striped shirt!

Speaking of Andy, he woke us up this morning by yelling at Peter to wake him. I marched into Peter's room to remind Andy of the discourteous nature of waking a sibling before the appointed hour, but discovered that he wasn't in there. But I could still hear him yelling. I realized he was next door, in his own room, hollering through the heating vent, "hey, Peter, woo-hoo!" His explanation? "I was talking through the heater, pretending it was a phone!" Fine, but the receiving end is in mommy and daddy's room. Argh.

And here Ian demonstrates that there's no wrong way to eat a PBJ: