Merry Christmas 2011

Christmas Cookies

It's good to know people who bake and people who will take you and your three kids and bake with you. These are brave, loving people. We were blessed to have a cookie fest at our friends house this week-end. She had prepared the dough already and all the kids had to do was sprinkle, roll, squish, and stamp. With a lot of energy and patience from all of us we got the cookies done and even were sent home with a box. Thanks friend!

Fort Tamra

I have a very creative friend who gave the girls one of the best gifts. A fort pack. Included were self charging flashlight, clamps, one large sheet and a fun book. The girls made a fort immediately and are constantly looking out for new places to make forts in our home. This was a sleeping fort, shelter for the night.

Thankful Tree

Happy Thanksgiving!

This year I saw this tree idea at a friends and it was so easy, we had to do it. We made leaves and the idea is to write something down when it comes to you that you are thankful for and you'll see your tree with more and more leaves on it. You can read the leaves on Thanksgiving and recall your thankfulness later. I admit I had a hard time stopping myself from the busyness of life to put leaves on the trees (I've got to get better at that!) but the kids enjoyed it and stopped to write on them. I'm going to re-purpose this as a Jesse Tree for our lead up to Christmas.

Pumpkins

Poppy helped out with the pumpkin carving this year. Actually he basically did it all so I was free to help with kids clean out their pumpkins and harvest the seeds. The kids made their own designs, I think they did an excellent job! We soaked our seeds and Poppy made a delicious sugar and spice coated roasted pumpkin seed recipe. Next year we may do a few more pumpkins just to make the seeds!

Treats!

This year we did a different kind of Halloween. We stayed in our neighborhood and went early before dark. The kids still had a great time running from house to house and were polite. Since we were in our neighborhood, they were able to meet their friends all dressed up and meet some of our other neighbors we don't normally see. We were back home in time to catch trick or treaters and Carys stayed outside with Poppy to hand out candy. It was very relaxing and fun for all.

Happy Fathers Day

It's been a busy June. We celebrated Fathers Day in low key fashion with a SUPER homemade wall hanging and favorite photos, church fellowship and Cullen fried oysters for himself. It was full day and reminded me how thankful I am for my heavenly Father, and our earthly fathers. I have been provided for abundantly and probably this year, I realize it the most.

Happy Valentines Day

I got my little sweeties a few gifts. Scratch n sniff stickers (I think I'll have to take a few of these for my journal for old times sake), glitter nail polish (will be a HUGE hit since I don't let them have it normally), Hershey Kisses chapstick (one can never have enough yummy flavored chapsticks). Walker got a cute video, Prayer Bear, the kids already love it.

Happy Valentines Day!

Snowman

Carys wanted to build a snowman. It's hard to get me to leave my warm home, even though I love my children dearly. I managed to get all of us dressed and out the door for our second attempt at the snowman. We had tried the day before but the snow was not sticky enough. Even thought this snow was more cooperative, it was still a challenge to build the snowman. Especially with Walker kicking it. But we managed to layer the snow on and Poppy showed up just in time to finish the head and arms and add hair. What a great treat to the end of the day.

Christmas Crafts!

A friend of mine introduced me to cardboard crafts. These ornaments were made by cutting cardboard, wrapping in aluminum, and attaching the string. The rest is glitter glue by kids and the decorating possibilities are endless.


I know this is an old craft but new to us this year. This wreath is made from all the kids hands. It turned out so well, I want to do it again with felt for a wreath we can pull out many Christmases from now.


These are spiced hang ups, another craft from a homemaker blog. What a fun thing these are and great smelling too.

Where did Winter Go?

We got i-phones in November and fast forward to April. We have a video function on the i-phone and now mostly send videos to our families via e-mail. It's quick and instantly updates everyone on our goings on. I like this but I'm starting to miss dragging out the camera for those cute shots. It's convenient to take photos and video with the i-phone but the picture quality is better on our big camera. So for a trade off, I guess this has been a bit of an experiment. I can pay to put video here but I'm not sure I want to.

So, I was not sure if I should continue with the blog since we were updating family with video, which was the original reason I created this blog. But I have used this to update old friends and introduce new friends to my family. And as a record for the children, the blog is valuable, since their baby books are hidden in some box somewhere in the basement.

This brings me to updating 4 months. There as been so much activity. Christmas, Walker, Cullen and Carys' birthdays, visits and visitors and Resurrection Day (Easter). Not to mention all the mundane but wonderful growings of Walker and the girls.

So I'll try to slowly catch this blog up to date and continue on for the children who may one day look back at this fondly and share this with their children.

The photos are of Christmas, and Carys and Helen's school Christmas pageants.

Happy New Year 2009

We had a very relaxing New Year's Eve just the 5 of us. We were snuggled at home watching movies and enjoying the last evening of 2008.

We hope this year brings blessing to you and your family. God bless.

Santa at Our House

Santa visited our house for Christmas. Luckily he was a little lighter this year. We are running out of space in the house with three kids now. The girls have plenty and next year hopefully I can find some volunteer opportunity so the kids can start learning how to give back.

Santa

Santa made his second consecutive appearance at the holiday party. The girls managed to keep it together to sit in his lap. Shortly after he left, we had to leave too. (See post below).

Merry Christmas 2008

Tiffany invited the gang to her house for a Christmas celebration. She had a craft table set up downstairs and we were going to make our traditional graham cracker houses at her house since we were unable to do it earlier.

We had a great time but I underestimated the craziness of organizing the kids at her house. Usually we have it here and that's all we do. The kids were super energized to be at Tiffany's house and were bouncing around like crazy. Plus I thought we'd be able to manage making the houses like we did last year but I think with more kids added, we will need to premake houses. It was still fun and I'm not sure the kids were disapppointed, I did not hear anyone complain.

We did have to make an early exit though. After ALL the excitement, Carys threw up twice and the final straw was Helen pooping in her pants. It could have been worse I guess but that was pretty much the end of the party for us.

Faking Holiday Baking

I'm trying to push past the extreme exhaustion of taking care of a newborn 24/7 and give the girls some holiday fun. I'm taking shortcuts this time and not trying to bake from scratch (which is a huge challenge for me even when I'm fully alert). We've done sugar cookies from the package, icing from the container and we do have sprinkles to make it fun.

The best part is the girls don't know the difference right now, the cookies are actually edible and we enjoy eating them as much as making them.

We did also make these delicious buttermilk cinnamon muffins from scratch. The girls love the muffin tops (they were basically bathed in butter and cinnamon sugar- who wouldn't love it) but the rest of the muffin went uneaten. Poppy and I love these muffins and as soon as I start getting more rest, I will be trying more baking recipes from scratch.

Halloween 2008

Carys and Helen had a great Halloween (these pics are from their Walkathon parade last week- pre surgery). Helen was a trooper and went trick or treating and did not fuss when I told her she had to wait to eat her candy. I did bring some hershey kisses to ease the candy moratorium.

We had the usual clan there with the little kids getting bigger and ready to trick or treat too, Silas, Kerala and Claire. It was a kids chaotic paradise. Carys totally got away with eating some candy I would not normally allow. I have a feeling once we have three, she'll try to take advantage of the chaos a little more as little kid would. I'll have to work with her on that.

In the end, we went home with a smaller amount of candy than we have had in past years (I was happy about that).

Bunnies!

I know I'm probably going too far back but I wanted to share some pics and moments with you. The easter baskets were mainly craft material; stamps, paint, play doh, pens etc. There were a few Cadbury eggs for the chocolate enthusiasts in our house, which now equals ALL of us. Poppy shared his love of chocolate with the girls from the time they could chew. Carys has developed a respectable sweet tooth.

Holiday Pageant

Carys's class put on another little play for their Holiday show. Carys played a monkey in the story of Momotodo, Peach Boy. She enjoyed being on stage with her friends and singing holiday songs. It was one of those moments, she looked so cute, I almost cried.

Graham Cracker Houses

Carys prepared all the twizzlers, mini kisses, gummies, jelly beans, chocolate covered raisins, gumdrops and dried cranberries we had for our graham cracker houses this year. Almost every picture I took captured someone chewing on candy or licking fingers. Tamra came up with the idea to use graham crackers and this year she made royal icing. We did not eat our houses but the kids decorated some graham crackers which were eaten after dinner with milk days later.