She's in love.

Grace loves dogs. I mean she really loves them. She loves to play with her stuffed dogs, virtual dogs, my brother's dogs. She is a dog person. So one of her favorite parts of Christmas break was dogsitting for our friends the Haye family while they traveled for the holidays. Grace loved every minute that we had with Libby. At night when we were all sitting around watching tv and the kids were playing she would want Libby to sit with her so badly. So we would tell her to sit very still and put a blanket on her lap. Libby finally snuggled in with her. Grace kept giving us the thumbs up sign. I think we were all a bit sad to give her back. Now the question is how long we can stay a dog sitting family before we commit to one on a more full time basis. We shall see.

The Humistone Family Christmas

While we are blessed to be near our families we still miss having "in town" family. The Whetstone family has become our Hannibal family. Paul will jokingly call us the Humistone's a combination of our last names. We are so thankful for this precious family and the blessing they are to our lives. In December we had a two part "family" Christmas. For part one they invited us over for a fancy dinner. It was delicious! Then they surprised us with gifts and took a family photo for us in our fancy duds. It was a great night.

I love their huge real tree.
For part 2 of our family Christmas we watched the boys while Paul and Karen went out on a date night for Mr. Paul's birthday. When they got home we got to share the birthday dessert complete with candles.


After dessert we surprised their family with our gifts for them. We love doing this crazy young children season side by side with the Whetstones and their boys.

Train Town

One of the fun things we went to do over Christmas break was to check out a place downtown called Train Town with Karen, Wyatt, Logan, & Micah. After seeing it I'm kind of surprised we never went before it was really cool. It had lots of trains and buttons the kids could push to make things happen. Like turn on lights or make the train go.

The Christmas village and train.


It also had lots of cool old train related signs and memorabilia all over the walls.

Titus climbs on a bench out of an old train station. Would love to have that.

Grace loved the purple train.
Titus pulls the train whistle.

Jeremy and I were just talking the other day about how we love to go downtown to go out to eat or walk and window shop or go the coffee shop. It kind of feels like you've left Hannibal and are on "vacation" without going anywhere. We were pondering why we don't do it more often. But I guess then maybe it wouldn't feel like vacation. Its definitely fun to be a tourist in your own town every once in awhile, thats part of the charm of living in Hannibal.