we love our best friends!!

let me just start by saying how thankful i am for our best friends. we're blessed to have AMAZING friends. for their companionship, yes... but mostly because they are all just good people. we get to have tons of great role models for our children to look up to, and great kids for our boys to be best buddies with. ginna, justin, austin, scotty, lizzie, and brookie, tif, john, keira, scharae, jojo, jess, i love you guys. thank you for loving us unconditionally and being our friends. we are so grateful for you all!

the following pics are from our 6th annual ornament exchange tonight bear with me, i had to get one of each person with their ornament. this year we GAVE from youngest to oldest


some are obvious from the photos, but here's the breakdown for this year...
brookie to jess-nativity
boomer to mama-kitty gymnast(picked it out THOUGHTFULLY on his own!)
scharae to john-handcrafted complete with alphabet noodle to and from names
keira to scharae-same, but different names and of course keira made hers with green!
jax to daddy-"bot barker" (quarter sized clay robot dressed like bob barker-jason's idol)
lizzie to jax-letter to santa (love having the year on it)
jess to boomer- thomas and friends
scotty to keira-jack skellington (keira was SO in love with it!)
jojo to brookie-giraffe bank "second christmas"
me to tif-froggie in a pond
tif to lizzie-christmas tree globe (she flew all the way to holland just for it!)
jason to jojo-a globe for the globetrotter
john to scotty-a sock monkey

it was lots of fun this year. we went out to birch bay to the calder's amazing resort hotel condo for our party. we had lots of good food, conversation,giftgiving, wrestling matches, dessert,dances and giggles!! i'm really sad that we only have one more day with the calders, but i'm so glad we've had a jam-packed week of memory making times with them! it will probably be 5 more months until the next time we see them!

NOVEMBER

jax found his halloween costume from a few years ago and wore it for 2 weeks after halloween! and yes, i AM the type of mother that totally let him wear it in public.

we decorated our porch in all things autumn. pumpkins, gourds, and window-cling leaves. it was so cute.


we cheated and started decorating for christmas by calling our paper snowflakes "winter decorations". how could a daddy say no to a craft project?!

boomer turned 3!!! we had lots of friends and family come over to celebrate. he chose a fireman theme, we had pizza and cupcakes and this year we got him a big-boy scooter. the next day we went to ocean shores for some clam digging, a first for all of us but jason. all in all he had a really great birthday weekend.



this year we went to jason's sister's house in oregon for thanksgiving. it was lots of fun and there was only a tiny bit of family drama! i would say it was a great success. we got to play with our nieces and their kitties, and best of all, i got to rub a preggo belly all weekend!! yeah, i'm one of those peolple, too!!


we meant to go black friday shopping, but didn't sleep too well the night before and needed our rest for the long drive back home. we hit up a target but all we bought was some SANITY for $88. seriously... there were NO fights or fits on the way home!!

the morning after we got home from our trip we got to see our adopted parents roy and heidi alcorn. (they're a lot of people's "parents" because they're so great). visits with them have become few and far between but that makes it even better when we do. we really love those guys.

and speaking of other guys we love...forget santa claus, the calder crew is coming to town!! i'm so excited to see them all and have all of us friends reunited all together again. we are planning to have a girl's night one night and a boy's night another. we will also be getting together for our 5th? annual ornament exchange. i'm really excited for it this year WOOHOO!!

we are putting up christmas lights today, and we'll get our tree next weekend. i'm even excited for snow this year. which is way out of character for me. i'm so filled with christmas spirit already. HAPPY HOLIDAYS EVERYONE!!!

Insane Clown Posse

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!


we had a blast today trick or treating! first we went downtown bellingham and walked up and down the streets to all the shops with candy. there were TONS of people in costume, so we had a great time people watching, too! we got a free professional pic taken which will be sent by mail soon. i thought that was pretty cool of that photographer to do for the community! i'd give him props, but i forgot his name. oops! and that wasn't the only photo that was taken of us, random people took our pics as we walked by. one of them even asked us to stop and pose for her camera phone. that was a pretty neat feeling since i planned our costumes in such detail this year (we even had a dry-run on the face painting!) after downtown, we hit up grandma's, nana's, nana's best neighbor jo's, auntie kim's and austin's houses. then went over to meet up with the cunninghams at the trunkortreat.

here are some highlights of the day...

We have a new addition to the backyard, a homemade swingset. The park in our 'hood has a swingset, but it's fairly dilapidated, and not located in our backyard, so we thought we'd just build our own. We also needed to move the sandbox because it was back in the corner that had chickens and bunnies just over the fence. Chickens and bunnies stink. And we had a corkscrew willow tree that needed to be planted before it started freezing, and we wanted to put it where the sandbox was. Those three things combined with no other plans for the weekend led us to Lowe's....and Home Depot, and OSO lumber, and Ace Hardware. We shopped around to find the best prices/quality. And Ace was the only place in Ferndale open on Sunday that had what we needed. We finished late Sunday and had to let the concrete set up, so the boys couldn't play on it right away. Crystal being the considerate wife that she is thought that I'd want to be there when the boys got set loose on it, so she kept them off of it ALL DAY! What a mean mama. Needless to say, I arrived home to some anxious boys. And pulling in the driveway almost right behind me was Scotty, Liz, and Brooklie. So they got to break it in too. It's got some tweaks to be made (what home improvement project doesn't?) but it is WAAAYYY fun, and Jax only fell off 3 times in the 30 minutes he played on it.


My hope is to eventually add on a playhouse above the sandbox with a slide coming out of it, but Crystal is trying to keep it simple. Why won't she just let me complicate things? I think we both have the same vision of a backyard fortress with fire pole and monkey bars and twisty slide, we just have different feelings about that fortress. We'll save that "discussion" for later.

i love my neighbors

so... i love all my neighbors. in our cul-de-dac of 8 houses alone we have 31 kids. my favorites, though are sisters katia and chickie (her name is actually nadia, but i didn't know that at first, so now she's chickie to me). their 6 brothers are pretty great, too. everytime we open our garage door or are outside, they flock to us to help with whatever we're working on. well... in one of those instances, chickie came and hung out with me while i did a craft project and we got onto the subject of birthdays. we found out our birthdays are only 10 days apart. flash forward to sept.20th (my birthday)...

the doorbell rings. wierd. shouldn't be. but is. we weren't expecting anyone and people don't usually just pop in. anyway... it was sweet katia and chickie wiht a homemade (from scratch) birthday cake for me! complete with "28" made of blueberries!! i totally MELTED!! wouldn't you?









so for 9 days i went back and forth about what to do for them. finally, i decided on making their family of 10 a platter of sweet treats. peanut butter balls, chocolate chip and nobake cookies and rice krispy treats. this pic is NOT the gigantic platter i sent over today for chickie's birthday, just some of the leftover goodies for my boys. i totally spaced taking a pic of the beautiful platter-full.

boomer gets a haricut...

for real this time!! all summer this poor little man has been sweaty-headed, and here we are a full week into fall, and decide it's time to give the kid a break! we went back and forth whether to cut it short and then if so, who should do it. i have always been the designated dahlstrom clipper cutter. but i don't trust myself with the scissors ever since i cut jaxon's ear during his very first haircut as a baby! boomer has the most beautiful hair, but it constantly needs to be tamed. we'll get it wet and comb it out before we leave, but as soon as it hits the carseat, FRIZZ! anyway... back to the point... finally i decided i will be brave and try to give him a cute cut with the clippers AND the scissors. so he can have it short in the back and still long enough on top for mama to run her fingers through. plus, he has been working on those sun-bleached little surfer highlights all summer long, and i couldn't bear to snip those! turns out he was a big boy under all that hair! when did that happen?!


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I've taken over!

So, you probably noticed that our blog page is actually updated!! Well, that's because I've taken over! I finally decided that I've been a voyeur for a bit too long. Now is time to give back. I love reading random bits and pieces of other blogger's lives, even if we've never met! I am more than qualified to rant randomly so, maybe someone will be interested in reading about us. Be forewarned, though. I will not take the time to capitalize where "necessary". Patience is not really my best virtue, and I try to use it all where it really counts!