Holiday Fun

 Here are a cute few pictures of Louis and Axel from last Sunday when we took our family photo for our Christmas card. Axel still loves to pretend that he is a doggy at times. 

Louis is such a good sport when it comes to being dressed up or playing with Axel. He takes a lot of abuse and we are lucky to have such a good dog.

Axel had a grand idea of building his train tracks around the Christmas tree. He has one automatic battery operated train, Diesel, that can go around by itself. It has been hours of fun since the tree went up.

On Saturday, Axel went to his friends birthday party. Here he is decorating a cookie, I mean, tasting the frosting. All of the kids decorated a cookie to be a wheel on the 3D train cake that was made for the party.

Here is the master piece with marshmallows and all. Axel really wanted to eat it. He actually ended up taking this one home and making a different one for the train cake.

The week before our neighbor hosted the annual holiday party where all of the neighbors get together to mingle. Here Annika, Axel's babysitter, is holding him and Sophia. Sophia is Max's sister and over the past 6 months or so Annika started babysitting Max and Sophia as well as Axel. She is turning into the neighborhood babysitter. I absolutely loved doing this myself when I was in high school. It is cool to see here really enjoy the kids company.

This weekend we made and decorated sugar cookies for this first time as a family. Axel takes after his daddy and loves this type of thing. I am not sure if it is because he likes the arts and crafts part or the eating of these sweet projects. This was a three day project. One night the dough was made. The second night the cookies were rolled out and cooked.

The next morning was the high light of the project where we all decorated them.

Can you see how meticulous Axel is? This makes me so proud. I would love to take all of the credit for this trait, but when it comes to sweet treats, Keith is just as detailed oriented as I am with everything else :)

Here is the finished product. I have to get better at making the frosting. We hope to have more colors the next time we do this, which is suppose to be this weekend. I have a feeling we might postpone this until next year, but we will see if time permits this fun activity.

Axel has been receiving gifts from all of his grandparents. Grandma Sonia said Axel had one gift that he could open early. He politely called to ask permission to open it "now".  He received the book Rudolf the Red Nosed Reindeer read by Grandma Sonia herself. It has been the hit of the week. We have already gone through a set of batteries. I think he has listened to it over one hundred times. Thank you Grandma Sonia!

We are looking forward to this upcoming weekend. We have Auntie Shannon, Uncle Ryan, Grandma Susan and hopefully Grandpa Brian all visiting to spend an early Christmas with us since I am not sure if I will be able to travel over the holidays. With the baby coming in just a few short weeks we will have to see what the doctor says next week. I really don't want to take the chance of going into labor hours from home. 

It looks like the Szolushas will have a quite Christmas with church on Christmas Eve and present opening on Christmas Day. It will be nice to having a relaxing day since I plan on working Christmas Eve and the day after Christmas.