Project Warm-Up and visit with the great grandparents.

At the beginning of December we took a trip to Sioux Falls to help John's sister, Tracy with Project Warm-Up.  Our niece, Kaitlin started Project Warm-Up in 2006 when she was a senior in high school and after she graduated Tracy took over. There are over 1,000 homeless children in the Sioux Falls area so with the help of many volunteers they get together and make fleece blankets so that the kids have something to call their own for the holiday season. It is a great time making the blankets and knowing that they are going to very deserving children. This year there were 1, 385 blankets made. It was such an honor to be a part of it!

Me (and baby Devyn) sorting through the mountains of fleece.

After leaving Sioux Falls, we stopped at my grandparent's house in Chamberlain. I always love seeing them and wish we could spend more time together. My grandma made us a wonderful lunch and we spent a couple of hours with them just chatting and catching up. Taylor loves them and had fun playing with the toys in the cabinet. The same ones were in there when I was little and it always brings back fun memories of playing with my cousins when I see them :)

Taylor and my beautiful grandma

Taylor and Grandpa Great :)  How sweet is this pic?

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas...

Our Christmas tree (not without a rather humorous struggle) is up and Jack (our Elf on the Shelf) has come back to visit. It's looking and feeling like Christmas around here.
We decided to put up our tree the weekend after Thanksgiving. Our tree is getting kind of old but it's so pretty that we keep putting off buying a new one. Well, this year it gave out on us. We got it up and I put all the lights on it (which I tend to go a little overboard with, but it's so pretty.) John got underneath it and attempted to slide it back into the corner and the truck decided to not hold any more and the tree collapsed on top of John. So, picture John and I laughing hysterically and me being 8 months pregnant trying to pull an 8 foot tree off of him and Taylor crying because it scared her so bad and she thought John was hurt. It was quite the scene. :) Anyways we got it up (with the help of my dad and some pvc pipe) and decorated and it's beautiful.

Jack the Elf came back to visit us this year and Taylor was super excited. She's really into it this year. She loves getting up in the morning and trying to find him. We've been reading the story about him and there was a movie on tv about the Elf on the Shelf so we've been watching that too. 

 

She did have one little incident where she touched him. John and I had to scramble and figure out a way to teach her that you have to follow the rules. The story says that if you touch your Elf he will lose his magic and won't be able to return to the North Pole every night and tell Santa whether the child has been good or not. She felt horrible and cried and cried. I told her that we could send Santa an email apologizing and asking if he could fix Jack. We got a response from Santa saying that he knew Taylor was very sorry and that he would send some magic dust that we could sprinkle on Jack and make him all better. :) While we were sitting at the table, the doorbell rang and we heard a "Ho Ho Ho" from outside. Taylor's eyes lit up and she ran to the door. On the step was an envelope addressed to Taylor from Santa and Mrs. Claus. Inside was a small pouch of Magic Elf Dust (glitter) so we went and sprinkled it on Jack and healed him right up. All was good and we knew Jack was able to go back to the North Pole because he was in a different spot the next morning. Taylor was excited and vowed to never touch him again. :)

Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving from the Ainsworth's! We had a very relaxed and enjoyable holiday. We had my parents over to our house and cooked an amazing meal. It was so nice to be able to stay home and relax in our new home.

(FYI...this is John's plate of food. Not mine!)

September & October Randoms

Sweet Sadie

Waiting for John to come home :)

 

 

 

 

After Taylor's bday party we went out for dinner with the Duncan's and some other friends. Taylor and Evan decided to entertain ust by singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". They actually got an applause from the rest of the restaurant when they were finished. LOVE!

 

 

Check out these dance moves...

 

Sadie waiting for us to get home

Sick little girl :(

Posing with her baby

Crazy hair

The Wheels on the Bus.....

Happy Halloween!

Yeeehawww! Happy Halloween from the cutest cowgirl around.
Taylor had a blast with Halloween this year. She was so excited to be a cowgirl and loved trick-or-treating. She was so sweet and said, "thank you, have a nice day" to everyone who gave her candy. Melt my heart. She's such a sweet girl!

Trick-or-treating at Grandpa & Grandma Greats house :)

It's a........

We had our 20 week ultrasound on October 27th and IT'S A GIRL!!!! She looks absolutely perfect. It was so fun to watch her move around. She scratched her head which was super cool to see. We watching her making sucking motions and could see her eyes moving around. She kept putting her little hands in front of her face and putting her feet over her head. She was very active! :)
Here's a few pics from the ultrasound. Some of them are 3-D which was pretty neat too.
Enjoy. We're pretty excited to meet this little girl. :)

 

Home Sweet Home!

We've been looking for a house ever since we moved from CO and haven't had any luck. The prices in Spearfish are very high so everything in our price range was old or very small. After living in a fully-furnished condo for 6 months and not finding anything that we were happy with, we decided to just rent for a year and hope that we could find something then. Well, that was last October so when September of this year rolled around and we still hadn't found anything we were pretty discouraged. We were kind of at the point that we were just going to have to rent again. Well, apparently God had a different plan for us because this house completely fell in our laps. It was a couple that we knew and it never even went on the market. They gave us a super great deal and we're in love! It's everything we could hope for right now. It is outside of town but still in a small neighborhood. That's something we couldn't decide on. Whether we wanted to live out of town or in a neighborhood for our kids to grow up in. Now we have both! We have a huge double lot (almost an acre) so we have lots of room with some pretty great views. We can lay in bed and watch the horses in the pasture behind us. It's in an older established neighborhood but our house is newer (built in 2007) so we really have the best of all worlds. We're very happy and feel like we can finally settle here. Ahhh...that's a pretty good feeling. :)

The front of our house. Sorry for the horrible quality but it will give you an idea.

The back yard. We have a huge deck which will be great for entertaining this summer.