The Best of 2013

Here's some linky love for my top picks of 2013 and the most memorable firsts/accomplishments for the family.  Happy New Year, everyone!  Here's to another great year of blogging about the adventures (and misadventures) of the Berad clan!

Both kids learned to ride bikes...Reese on training wheels and Carter a 2-wheeler.

Carter learned to swim

Sienna learned to crawl, then walk, and now is starting to talk

Carter started playing basketball and soccer this year.

Best new canning adventure: Canned Peaches...they are amazing!  Maybe we'll pick 200 lbs next year!

Best date with the hubby:  Go Ape...challenging physically and mentally and just plain fun!

My fav new recipe: granola bars... could eat them any time of the day.

Visited Kennywood, Idlewile, the idyllic Longwood Gardens, the Outer Banks, and Disney World.

The giant Rubber Ducky came to Pittsburgh!

Some of the great books I read (and finished) this year:  Uncle Tom's Cabin, Drop Dead Healthy, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Disappointment with God, America the Beautiful, Killing Lincoln, Prayer, the Ultimate Conversation, and reading right now The Secrets of Happy Families.

Major Homeschool accomplishments: Carter is doing basic reading, both kids can identify all 50 states, both kids can say all the books of the Bible, Carter knows the Continents and major oceans.

Best new workout I've tried: Jillian Michaels Hard Body DVD...yes the DJ is cheesy but it's KICK BUTT!

Completed my first 5K Foam Fest race. Waaaay outside my comfort zone but a lot of fun.  I'd rename it the 5K Mud Fest thought.  Also ran my first 5K with the kids in May...well they did a 200 meter dash...but it was so fun that they competed!

This year we did Pick-Your-Own: strawberries, sugar snap peas, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, apples, peaches, nectarines, oranges, lemons, limes, grapefruit, pumpkins.  Hmmm, what should we try next year???

The best advice I received this year was to make time to talk to God every day.  I'm very much still working on this, but trying to make my prayer life more of a priority.  Someone said it's really good to start the morning down on your hands and knees with face to the ground...and truly I would like to make this more of a goal for 2014.  The Lord has been so good to us in 2013 and I want 2014 to be more about deepening my relationship with Him than anything else.

And so as I think back on all the fun times of 2013, I wish it a fond farewell and look forward to creating many more memories, trying many new recipes, and stretching myself more physically and mentally and spiritually in the year to come.

The year comes to a close

 The last present has finally been opened, the last Christmas cookie put away in a tin, the last family gathering has come to a close.  Christmas 2013 was a busy and fun time...and now I'm ready to collapse on the couch for about the next month!  haha  The kids enjoyed celebrating more yesterday with their cousins.  They LOVED seeing their new puppy too.  Puppies and cute kids...what more can you ask for?

We enjoyed having Nani and Pop Pop stay with us for the past week too and going bowling with them.  The kids enjoyed going to see Frozen with Derrick and I too...it was Reese's first movie in a theater and she barely moved the entire time...she asked as soon as we left the theater when we could go and see it again.  

   

 We watched a very "interesting" and eclectic kind of documentary the other night called Encounters at the End of the Earth (Werner Herzog).  All about Antarctica and the people who live there.  There were certainly some unique characters!  I particularly liked this physicist's explanation of neutrinos...a reminder of the vastness and complexity of the universe.  And to me a strong message of God's presence in Creation.


A statement the pastor made at church this morning struck a chord with me, especially after Christmas and the season of gift-giving.  He said " The more I focus on the gifts and not the giver, I lose sight of what this life is actually about."  This perspective is valuable on so many levels, both in a materialistic sense of appreciating what we have and relationships with people over the "stuff" we receive, and in a spiritual sense of appreciating God and who He is and the relationship He desires over any prayers He may answer or things He does in our lives.  All good things to consider as we wrap up another year...

Christmas 2013

Well, we survived another whirlwind of a day yesterday and the kids really had fun opening all the gifts.  Reese LOVED her Pennsylvania t-shirt and Pennsylvania monkey although she is slightly dismayed she can't hug him at night without being awakened by his obnoxious screeching.  Hopefully the battery, like every other toy they own, will die quickly.  I'm not sure I'm qualified to do surgery on a Pennsylvania Monkey to remove it.

Carter's favorites were, of course, Legos, as well as a new game we got him on Ebay called Catapults and Crossbows.  He's enjoyed setting up many battlegrounds in the family room since yesterday.

Sienna's favorites were her baby doll and some new sippy cups.  haha...yea she's pretty easy to please!

The opening of the PA Monkey

We got photo books for the grandparents with all our Disney pictures in them.

PA shirt and monkey

A Crossbows and Catapults battle

Christmas is in the air...

 Carter got a big surprise today when Pop Pop showed up with a Lego castle he spent the last two weeks building for Carter.  He was absolutely thrilled!

 Reese keeps saying Santa is bringing her a Pennsylvania monkey and a Pink Pennsylvania t-shirt.  I had to take action today...found a t-shirt at Target for $4.50 and painted it tonight.  Think it turned out pretty darn good.



Ahhh, yes, Christmas is in the air...or is that the pot o' pine needles Derrick has bubbling on the stovetop?  Yep, his own version of potpourri ...classy, I know.  ;)

The tale of a naughty toddler

The sun FINALLY peeked out yesterday afternoon and I thought...maybe I could get a few cute pictures of the girls.  Carter has been sick all week so he was out of the question...Reese got sidetracked when he started watching her favorite show, so I figured, how hard could it be to get a good picture with just one kid?
Well when it's the "bad one" the answer is...very hard!





She was constantly in motion, making goofy faces, trying to rip the flowers off my plant, the ornaments off my tree, and the tail off the cat.

She was screaming because she couldn't get the ball

She got it and was trying to eat it.

Poor kitty

Signature Sienna face...mad that kitty didn't want her pulling his tail

Have a Happy Semi-Automatic-Ping-Pong-Ball-Gun-Filled Christmas!

Cookie Monster

How should I even caption this.  One cookie can do so much damage!  Well, at least she seemed to REALLY enjoy it.

When asked by her gymnastics teacher today what she wanted for Christmas, Reese replied, "A Pennsylvania monkey."  I'm guessing the teacher hadn't heard that one before.

Winter Wonderland

My two little snow bunnies.  It's a good thing they are so cute...getting them bundled up to go outside is such a job!

 Reese wanted to make a snowman today, and in spite of the fact that there's plenty of snow outside, we did this little experiment I found on Pinterest.  They enjoyed making him melt!  The kids do love to do experiments.  They are really doing well with school.  We've mastered all 50 states and we're onto the continents and oceans now.  Even Reese can do them all.

Just another typical Saturday night in the Berad home...

Ahhh, those idyllic moments of hanging ornaments on the freshly cut tree while listening to Christmas carols...interrupted by the occasional ornament ball being thrown across the room by a devious little baby.  Yes, things never quite go as planned, and after tonight, I may just be an artificial tree convert.

Derrick and I got the kids to bed nice and early and were planning to exercise and actually have a few minutes to spend together before crashing.  We were about 10 minutes into our workouts when suddenly both the dog and cat started freaking out.  Yes, it actually turns out that the lovely bird's nest we vacuumed out of the tree last night was not indeed the home of a sweet little birdy...but that of a mouse!  How this mouse lasted through dragging the tree several hundred feet across frozen ground, tossing it into a wagon, riding back to the farm to pay, placing the tree on a "shaker" machine to shake off all the dead needles, running it through the rope machine to tie it up, slinging it up on top of the van where we lashed it to the roof, and driving back home at 70 mph down the highway for 30 minutes.  Well, that mouse deserves some major kudos for literally hanging in there.  And he was not going down without a fight.

My initial thought was to keep the cat nearby so he could help us catch the mouse, but as soon as we got the room blocked off, he took off and wanted nothing to do with us.  Every other night he is hanging around...but no, when there's a juicy little rodent nearby, he's not interested.  It was his moment to finally prove his worth, and he fell short.  But perhaps....perhaps he caught six other mice last night and has a belly full of mice and we'll just never know it.  I think I'll just stick to that scenario so I'm not tempted to kick his sorry butt to the curb for making me catch it.

When Derrick saw both pets with eyes glued to the couch, he knew something was amiss.  We got flashlights and sure enough, the little guy was hunkered down under the couch.  And so, our quiet and relaxing evening together was interrupted by a one hour mouse hunt, where we used a bucket and three of the kids butterfly nets to catch, and chase and re-catch and chase and finally catch again that wily little rodent.  The last catching finally stunned him pretty good, and I sat there watching him lying on his back on my living room floor, down on my stomach with the net firmly pressed over him thinking...this is a great way to spend my Saturday night.



Moral: Never assume it's a bird's nest.

Oh Christmas Tree

 Well, we finally got our act together and went out to cut down our Christmas tree today.  It was nice and cold and muddy...but we managed to find a pretty nice one and now the kids are DYING to get it decorated.








After setting it up in the family room Derrick discovered a rather large bird nest of some kind in the middle of the tree...he spent a good 10 minutes with the vacuum hose sucking out chunks of feathers, fur and twigs.  Not sure how we missed that when we picked it out but it certainly added to the excitement of setting up the tree...haha.

Sienna has been a force to be reckoned with this past week.  She is getting into SO much trouble, constantly climbing the chairs, stairs and table.  She breaks into the pantry to feed herself chips, she makes a really goofy frowny face when we tell her "No."  She loves to carry a baby doll around and says "baby."  She learned how much fun it is to splash in the bathtub and to throw all her bath toys out on the floor, preferably with as much water in them as possible.  Her new word for banana is something like balalalalalala... Whenever she overhears us talking about going out she runs right over to the bin where we keep all the shoes and grabs hers and then to the closet where her coat is and points to it.  And the highlight of her newest accomplishments is that she knows the cabinet where we keep a bag of chocolate chips and M&Ms and screams whenever it is opened and points wildly until she gets one.  (She knows what's good!)

Waiting for the tractor to come pick us up with our 2013 Tree!