Season's Greetings!

It's that best time of the year again, isn't it? The season of appetizers, stockings, twinkling lights, vast arrays of cookies, listening to Tran Siberian orchestra on repeat for an entire month, laying around on the couch for days at a time with your family members the weekend after Christmas. The tree at our house fell down a total of three times, two of the times were on top of our own dear Paisley. Luckily she was never hurt, and would only shout in surprise from underneath the tree, "OH NO! Christmas tree fall down AGAIN!!!"

Our Christmas has been lovely. We've been spending time with family, playing new games, eating too much food, watching It's a Wonderful Life, and fighting over who gets to snuggle with my mom's new kitten.

And so here we are, Merry Christmas from us! Here's a few pictures of our festivities. If you were wondering where Paisley got her extremely adorable Christmas outfit, my own dear mother made it. Including the little black velvet jacket!



And here's the Christmas post from last year! Fuzzy memories, and the like.

Thanksgiving with the Pointses

In my true, regular, Liz Points fashion I am just now posting our Thanksgiving pictures. Since Christmas is a week away. Being timely is my extremely large talent! It was a very special Thanksgiving this year, as Brian's brother and his wife and family were on leave from Japan. We hadn't seen them in two years!!! And Paisley got to meet her one year old cousin, Cally, which was amazing and adorable. She calls her CAH-EEE, and still asks about her every day.

We of course had to get some snow pictures, since those are the best types. The brothers took turns tossing their children in the air, and Grandpa made multiple trips up and down the driveway with the sled.

If you are getting a little bit of a deja vu feeling, it's because there were Thanksgiving with the Pointses snow pictures last year too! Which I also posted several weeks after the fact in true, regular, Liz Points fashion.

And here's all of us! It's a framer.

Weekend happy times!

I have some photos to share from our Labor Day family getaway a couple of weekends ago. And is it crazy to anyone else how long ago Labor Day weekend already was?

My family on my mom's side escapes up to a lovely resort on a lake at the end of each summer, with the activities generally including relaxing, playing games, eating far more than our share of delicious food, watching old nineties music videos, pontooning, talking about things that matter, talking about things that probably don't matter, licking ice cream cones, you get the general idea.

Our family has rallied around and supported each other in new and important ways within the past few years. I couldn't be more in love with them all.

Look at me, so lovey dovey!

This dude I'm particularly in love with. Ooo la la!

And now. I give you the big kahuna of surprised face pictures. The great bambino of surprised face pictures! I don't think I will ever find another picture that I enjoy looking at more than this one. The end bye bye.

Other Labor Day weekends previously documented here and here!

Birthday birthday birthday birthday

Here I am, reporting faithfully from Cloquet! Where it's cold. The high was like, low forties today. Expardon me? Our house is frozen, we're covered with blankets, stubbornly refusing to turn on the heat this early in the season. Plus, we're not quite ready to start poking around and trying our luck with all these radiators yet.

It's nights like this that call for a rich hot pan of brownies. You know? So I would have made them tonight, except for we're doing this new thing where we don't really eat any snacks and when we DO eat snacks, it's stuff like pistachios and low fat pretzels. It's just that time of life. You know? The time where you realize that the best thing to do is make good eating choices, however sad and drab that might be.

But sometimes life is just more manageable with a big chunk of brownie in your mouth. You know?!?

Anyways.

Birthday pictures! I have birthday pictures. There's a lot of August birthdays in our family. Sometimes we like to combine most of them together for a large conglomerate of birthday party. In this case the conglomeration celebrated the births of myself, my brother, my cousin, and my daughter. And this is how it went - my brother, cousin and I opened a few cards and then we all watched as Paisley opened what was probably an unruly amount of gifts. Unruly! But it was delightful, it really was. She opened them all ever so carefully, and sweetly enjoyed and said thank you for each one. Even when she pulled clothes out of the gift bags (clothes, typically the boring gift until you get to about....say the 13 or 14 year mark), she was thrilled and immediately started pulling them on at her feet.

I'm sure my girl will always be this polite and wonderful and gracious. Always. Forever and ever amen.

I also am including some pics of a little celebration we had just for Paisley a week later with Brian's parents. The way you can tell the difference between the two events is by the varying length of Paisley's bangs. Also by the cake pictures expressions. She certainly knew what to do with the birthday cake the second time around! Her new favorite song is the "happy birthday" one, I sing it to her when I'm trying to get her to behave or be quiet in the grocery store.

Or in Target. Or Old Navy. Or a restaurant. Or our house. Our somebody else's house.

I'm glad we had this talk.

Yes I am wearing the same shirt for both birthday parties. I'll address it. I guess it might be turning out to be my birthday party shirt, or something else to that effect. 

Until next time, sweet dreams! Many, many thanks to all you folks out there who shower lots of love on us and our girl.

Trip number two.

So! I'm working on preparing a post with photos of the new place but don't have all my ducks quite in a row yet. They just keep wandering all around and I just can't get them to stand still. C'MON, ducks. So in the meantime, here are some pictures from our recent 1 1/2 week trip out to North Dakota!

The first few days we were out visiting Brian's sister Beth in Hettinger, ND. She had a garage to build and lots of delicious vegetables to be eaten from her garden. Paisley loved picking all the veggies and eating them fresh out of the dirt, but had to be coerced and bribed into eating the same veggies as soon as they were cleaned and cut up on her plate at the kitchen table. Typical, child.

Brian's parents were out there with us, and we had a grand ol' time exploring Hettinger and the nearby towns and the nearby playgrounds and the blow up pool in Beth's yard. We ate lots of tasty fresh veggies and salads and Paisley supervised all the garage building with a heavy hand.

Other destinations on our adventure were Cavalier, ND where the hubs was standing in a dear friend's wedding and Detroit Lakes, MN to stop at Castaway Club, a camp that we will be frequently involved with through Brian's work. It was all a blast and so fun and simply marvelous, except for the very darkly looming fact that I developed some horrible case of the stomach flu amidst it all.

And that's why there are tons of pictures in Hettinger, two pictures from the wedding, and only one picture from Castaway which features Paisley rolling in the grass. Something about having to spend most of your time in the bathroom makes trying to take lots of beautiful and lasting pictures seem super unimportant.

So now we're back! My stomach no longer hates my guts (pun INtended, heh heh heh), our bags are unpacked, and the cats did indeed survive our longer than usual absence. Hallelujah, praise be.

Thanks for reading folks! Tune in next time, and all that.