{pretty, happy, funny, real}

Capturing the context of contentment in everyday life.

{pretty}

Don't you just want to squeeze those adorable chubby cheeks?

I love the sight of the girls happily celebrating Advent each night.  They're coloring their Jesse tree ornament for the day in this picture.  I think Advent is one of my favorite times of the year.

{happy}

Happy baby!

When there's chocolate involved you don't have to ask Ellie to smile.

Can you believe she came home from school with pipe cleaner "antlers"?  And, she wonders why my nickname for her is Dorkish.

{funny}

Madeline lost the privilege of using her cell phone for all of last week because she hadn't been doing her chores even when reminded enough times to inch me towards the brink of insanity.  On Sunday, Bryan and I made a deal with her.  If she wore this awesome paper hat from Buffalo Wild Wings while we dined at the restaurant, and then when we went to Old Navy, we would let her have her phone back.  I then decided that she also needed to pose for this picture while Bryan took a video of her enthusiastically saying "I'm on fire!"  She got her phone back.  Being a parent is awesome, but I'm sure I'm going to do some serious time in purgatory for having so much fun embarrassing my children at every opportunity.  Some parents get upset when their kids go through that stage where they're embarrassed to be seen with their parent, but we will totally understand why our kids feel that way and we'll just ramp up the level of mortification for them.

{real}

Madeline clearly had a long day last Thursday.  After going to school and religious ed, she also had soccer practice.  She "forgot" her glasses in Bryan's car so she went out to look for them.  After her second trip out to his car to look for them, Bryan and I couldn't contain our laughter any longer and she discovered her glasses were on her face all along.  Awesome parents that we are, we played along and made a big deal about her being so careless and not knowing what she did with her glasses.  She was totally freaking out seconds before I snapped this picture.

Oscar is seriously a pain in my rear.  He annoys me and he smells, but he does have some redeeming qualities.  One of them is that he loves pancakes or panny-cakes as I like to call them.  He is willing to jump in the air and twist to catch bits of pancake.  He is also willing to let us stack pancakes on his snout and head and patiently wait for us to tell him he can flip them into his mouth.  Just look at the level of concentration and self control he's exhibiting in this picture.  Now if we could just train him to not bark and be calm when we have visitors I might admit that I like him.