One Landes Place

Being away from my actual house at Christmas isn't exactly how I would pick to spend my holiday. I'm not really a "home body" but I've always loved just spending Christmas at my "home" with family. This year is our year to spend Christmas with Matt's family in Arkansas. I love his family and always enjoy being with them and watching Sarabeth play with her cousins, but nothing is the same as being at home. It becomes stressful to get all the shopping, cooking, and packing done early so we can head out in time to be the Christmas traffic rush to get to Arkansas before Christmas day. This year we left a few days earlier than planned to be able to spend some time with Matt's dad at the hospital and to help around the farm before the rest of the family arrived. We usually stop at my parent's house in Longview on the way to spend the day with them exchanging gifts and eating lunch. This year we just drove straight through and made plans to dr...

I did this last year and it was so much fun! I really enjoyed reading everyone's decorating ideas. I didn't take many pictures this time but here are a few that Matt took last week. Merry Christmas!

Tonight Sarabeth and I made gingerbread boys and girls. I had never made them before so I was hopeful that they tasted ok. Matt loves gingerbread so I knew he would eat them regardless. Here's a little picture story of our evening. How much longer mommy? Daddy the perfectionist (his was the best one) Icing Fight! Sharing a Twizzler Lady and The Tramp style Our finished masterpieces! We had so much fun! Matt really took 20 minutes to make just one Santa Gingerbread man! Just typical of my hubby-one more reason why I love him. :) Sarabeth had a ball! I let her get as messy as she wanted. I think she only ended up making one and the rest she ate!

I have no idea why, but this time I am stressing out about how to decorate the new baby's nursery. With Sarabeth, we didn't have a lot of options since we were in a smaller place and would be moving within 2 months after she was born. I didn't do much in her room, we didn't even put up her crib until we moved. This time we have plenty of space and are planning on staying put for a while. So here lies the dilemma. What should I do for crib bedding. We want something bright, not muted-which is hard to find in boy's bedding. Most everything is tan and light blue, blah. We originally thought we would do an outdoors theme, but couldn't find anything that we liked. We then decided on some cute sports themed bedding. Matt played college football and his dad was his coach so football runs in the blood around here. We thought it would be fun to decorate with Matt's jerseys and some of his dad's football paraphernalia from his coaching days. Then I foun...

Matt and I took a quick trip to Arkansas this weekend to visit his mom and dad. His dad finished round 5 of his chemo and radiation treatments and had scans done on Monday to see how the cancer has been effected. No more cancer activity in the brain, lungs or lymph system, however they did find a spot on his liver that they started radiation on immediately. We are still praying for complete healing and more energy for him during his treatments. The weather was awesome while we were there so we spent as much time outside as possible. We took Sarabeth on a walk and Ma took her on several golf cart rides. Eating s'mores for lunch! Sarabeth still learning how to cross the cattle guard without falling in. Sarabeth found a lady bug and would not let it get away. She finally dropped it and it's wing broke and later it died. Poor lady bug!

The last few months around the Landes home have been kinda funky. We've been faced with some challenges and big decisions that have left us just tired. Anyway, a few weeks ago I came home to a sparkling kitchen and this: If you aren't sure what you are seeing, it is a note from my hubby along with some home made construction paper flowers-melt my heart. Click on the note to enlarge so you can read it. It was the sweetest thing in the world. I think Matt finally realizes that it's the little things he does that make the biggest impact on my heart. This is just one of the many.

Things around here are starting to get back to normal somewhat. I feel so bad that I haven't documented much about this pregnancy but who really wants to see belly pictures of what was leftover from the last one combined with all the other glamorous things that came along with that. I do have an ultrasound picture of our baby Landes #2. This was at 8 weeks. Unless you are a mom, you probably don't recognize the baby in this picture but it's there! It was actually more interesting this go around, knowing what I was looking at. We are still as excited this time as we were the last, just much busier and we forget sometimes that come March we will have 2 kiddos! I'm just not going to overwhelm myself or you with a million posts about our summer. I'll just highlight a few and then get on with the new stuff and try to keep up. A little goofing off A dip in the pool via the slide 4th of July fireworks with Daddy A little bathroom reading Sampling the red velvet batt...