Merry Christmas!

We had a great Christmas! The kids were very happy with their presents. Santa brought Nate a tricycle. As soon as he saw it, he wiggled down out of my arms, ran over to it and grunted until we moved the bow that was on the seat. Then he climbed on and didn't get off until we pulled out the TicTacs. After that, he wasn't interested in any other presents, he was only interested in the candy and his tricycle. (His feet barely reach the pedals).
Adam was very happy to finally get a Nintendo DS. He asked Santa last year, but Mommy told Santa she thought he was too young for it. He also got quite a bit of Legos. He was very excited, and it was fun to see him so happy.

Ellie got her babies a cradle and lots of other girlie things. She got a few Legos (she is only partly interested in them) and spent some time Christmas morning putting them together.

Michael got a remote control car that needed a lot of assembly. Joe thought they would enjoy putting it together, but after he pulled it out of the box he realized that it was so detailed that maybe even he wouldn't "love" to put it together. Maybe Santa forgot that Michael is only 6. He got some more Legos (how many legos does one family need?) too.Nate spent the morning terrorizing the pieces of peoples presents and eating any candy that he could find. I'd like to say it was cute, but...

Joe's favorite present was his Carhartt jacket that my folks gave him. He also got some more tools because apparently you can never have enough.
Joe put a 22 handgun in my stocking. I asked him if he was disappointed that I wasn't really excited about it. He said he was surprised I wasn't more pissed off about it. Hmm, glad your goal was to tick your wife off for Christmas.

I really tried to get presents this year that the kids would like, and not spend any money on useless "filler" items for them to open. During garage sale season I got a lot of things that I was able to give them for Christmas (Legos, books, polly pockets). Still, before we knew it there were a ton of gifts under the tree. How do you keep it more under control...I really don't know.

Holiday Traditions

We have all been so sick here, that I have meant to post this for a while, but I haven't felt like it. I took Ellie and Nate to the doctor yesterday and got antibiotics for both of them (bronchitis) so hopefully we will be over the sickness soon.

When the Christmas season comes around, often the question gets asked, "What are the traditions that your family does for Christmas?" I think about it and come up with nothing. I think the simple things are the traditions that everyone remembers, so upon further reflection, I realized that we do have some traditions in our family. For the past few years, every year we have made a gingerbread house. This is simply from a kit I buy at Michaels, but then I go and find some other candy to spruce it up. We do it as a family home evening, but it ends up me doing 98% of the house and occasionally the kids stick a piece of candy on. They do get very excited about it, however. Here's the finished product:

We also have 3 advent calendars that we do. The kids get all excited about the calendars and negotiate who gets to do which one and what day. They have some sort of rotation set up. The first thing they do when they come downstairs in the morning is their advent calendar. This is the first year they have gotten every day without falling behind (since I wasn't involved at all...I usually forget). I guess I will have to find another one when Nate starts to recognize he is being left out. I made this one when Adam was a baby. I would never have the time to do it now. They pull the ornaments off and stick them on the fake tree, when they are done it is all decorated.Aunt Kayti gave us the lollipop tree. It is quite a favorite. The other one I made in RS one year.

We also have one more tradition. Every year for neighbor gifts, we make homemade freezer jam. This year it was persimmon since we had a tree full of the fruit and nothing else to do with it. I have never made persimmon jelly before (before we bought the property with the persimmon on it, I had never even seen one before), and I think I might need to tweak the recipe a little since it isn't quite as sweet as I would like. The fruit next to the jars is persimmon.

Ellie's Dance Recital

Ellie has been in Miss Michelle's dance class since August with five of her friends. Miss Michelle teaches at her house in the garage and so she doesn't allow us to stay and watch (it gets too crowded). It was very fun to see Ellie show all of the things that she had learned. She had a cute little pinecone fairy leotard and tutu.
Here's Ellie with her classmates Ellie, Emi, Teia and Sidney.

Here she is waiting for her turn to dance.

Miss Michelle combined two classes in the performance and so they got to dance their dance twice once with Ellie's class in front, once with the other class in front.

The first time Ellie was a little shy about dancing, but she did a great job! The second time she was no longer shy.

It was very gratifying to see our sweet Ellie dressed so cute and dancing such a cute dance...we love you Ellie!

Go Kart

As if four-wheelers aren't enough, we have recently added a Go Kart to the toys that we have at our property. Joe says it is exactly the same as one he had when he was a kid. Apparently he is reliving his childhood.
The boys are so funny riding it, they will ride for a couple of minutes, get stuck and then one will get out while the other yells at him and they push themselves out and then the drive for a while more and do it again. With their helmets on they look like the 2 stooges. Very cute.

Nate loves it too. Before we took it to the land, it was parked in the garage and he would go out there any chance he could get and pretend to drive it. It is unusual that he is naked so I'm not sure when this happened:

Yaa, Nursery!

Guess who's old enough for nursery?
I can start bringing my scriptures to church again. When I went to leave for church and Michael saw I had scriptures in my hand he said, "what do you have those for, Mom?" Obviously its been a long time.

Santa!

The kids went and visited Santa this afternoon...well they informed me that it wasn't the "real" Santa, it was just one of his elves dressed up like Santa.

Adam still wants what he wanted last year, so he asked Santa again for a Nintendo DS. Santa said he would try his best, but can't always get everything.
Michael had a whole list of things he asked for from Santa, the ones I remember are Legos and a remote control flying thing.
(and I feel soooo bad, I wet his hair down and had it all combed but when we got to the place to see Santa, he wasn't there yet so we went ahead and played on the bouncy house while we waited. When Michael reemerged his hair was sticking straight up....it never does that, but it was now dry and not willing to do anything for me...Sorry Michael).

Ellie asked for another doll, or maybe for a cradle for her doll.
Nate wanted nothing to do with Santa. He would {mostly} let me hold him and get kind of close to Santa. That's okay, Nate has so many toys he doesn't need anymore from Santa.

He did however have no problem smiling and waving to the man dressed up like a grocery bag with food sticking out of it advertising HEB. I guess he sees grocery bags a lot more than Santa.

Well, I hope Santa comes through for us. Adam keeps telling me that we should ask Santa for the expensive things because Santa doesn't have to pay for them and then we can save money and Mom and Dad will be able to spend less money on them! Sounds like good reasoning to me!

Decorating the Christmas Tree

For FHE last night, we decorated our tree. We have a lovely fake tree that, unfortunately, is not prelit. I worked really hard last Friday trying to get a deal on a prelit tree, but I did not beat the 5 million other crazed shoppers out and about and I didn't get one. As a result, I spent an hour and a half on Saturday stringing lights along the tree. Then I put the ribbons where I wanted them on the tree, and then we let the kids decorate. They were excited all day, thinking about decorating the tree. Once I let them go, it took about 15 minutes and they were done.
I reminded them that they would need to put the breakable ornaments above Nate's reach. That is why they are climbing on chairs to get to top. While we were decorating the tree, Nate found a couple of ball ornaments (that weren't breakable thankfully) and went to the kitchen and spent the time throwing them, retrieving them and doing it again.

The finished tree...if you look closely, you can see that there is one branch that the kids really favored.

...and yes, as soon as the kids went to bed I redecorated the tree. Unfortunately, the kids have gotten smarter in the past year, and this morning I found them moving the ornaments back to where they had first put them!

All I Want for Christmas is My Two Front Teeth

For my very faithful followers, you may remember last year when Adam lost his two bottom front teeth. Well, we have the two top teeth gone this year. His front teeth have been lose for several months now, but recently we noticed that one had moved over from the tooth next to it, and it was really lose. We encouraged Adam to wiggle it, and he did, a little. One night, Joe decided to see how attached it really was, so he got a piece of dental floss and put it up underneath the tooth and moved it across. Problem was, then the dental floss became stuck and he couldn't get it out. Without telling Adam he was going to, he pulled really hard to get the floss out and out came the tooth. There was a fair amount of blood and a lot of tears and wails. Since Grandpa and Grammie were coming the next day, Adam kept his tooth so the tooth fairy wouldn't get it. Unfortunately, the tooth fairy got busy and didn't come for 2 more days!!! Anyway, a week or so later, we noticed that the second top tooth had moved over and started sticking out to the front. It really looked like a red-neck tooth. We started to encourage Adam to wiggle it out. After his experience with the last one, he didn't want anyone near that tooth. Finally, on Thanksgiving morning, after had been complaining about his tooth hurting, Joe gave him an ultimatum- get it out by noon or I will pull it. Adam went to work, and rotated the tooth 180 degrees, but it still wasn't coming out. He then started whining about it hurting. Finally, Joe pinned him down and pulled it out. There was no blood. Joe asked Adam, did it hurt? His answer... "no..." little sob, ..."thanks, Dad!" So now he can sing the song again...."All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth!"

Storybook Parade

The boy's school has an annual storybook parade. It is their replacement for dressing up for Halloween. The kids are supposed to pick their favorite storybook character and dress like them, then they make a parade through the school (playing the most obnoxious music very loudly) and they each hold up the book showing their character. In the past we have picked a costume we had on hand and find a book that matches. Michael was very happy to do this, and he picked the red Power Ranger.


Adam, however, was concerned that he pick a character from his FAVORITE book like the directions state. His current favorite book is Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and the character looks like this:
I tried to recreate the look, complete with the three strands of hair sticking up in the back: (which, unfortunately, is hard to see with the light coming through the door)

As you can probably tell, Adam was unsure about the hairdo. I suggested he wear it and I would comb it down after the parade. By the time the parade came around, he was very upset about it and he slunk along....

I pulled him aside, and combed it down, and then he was starting to feel a little better..with his teacher and friend Jack...

Ahhh...there's the smile...with Jack, Bryce and Blaine.

I wish that I could take all of that social anxiety away from him, and help him to realize that people don't notice as much as he thinks they do....one of those life's lessons he will just have to learn as he grows up....

Laundry Room Makeover

...Aka why my husband ROCKS!!!

This is what my laundry room looked like for the first year that we lived here. It is a great laundry room because not only can you walk in and shut the door, but there is also a lot of space in the back so that we could store the bulk of our food storage in it...so we did...in a big..unorganized pile.

I don't want to even hear about how easy it is to store your food storage when you live in Utah and have a big basement...here in Texas we don't have basements (the water table is amazingly high) and it is too hot and humid to store your food in the garage. We have to come up with creative places to store our food. I have several beds with cans of wheat underneath them...and I have a couple of friends who have taken a whole room and made it into a food storage room.

I am actually embarrassed of this picture because this was by far the messiest room in my house...we started by taking all these boxes and moving them to our bedroom.



Joe built these all by himself, at night when the kids were asleep. Occasionally I would help...or worse...supervise!

When the cabinets got to this stage, we took all of the food we had (we had more by the time they were done) and we organized it. I had wanted shelves so that I could rotate my food storage and use it. When we went through our foods, however, we labeled the expiration dates on all of the boxes of food. Most of our food doesn't expire for 15+ years. For the amount of effort it takes to go to the cannery and can food into a #10 can, it makes sense NOT to rotate the basics....just go to the store and buy it as we need it...and then as we near the expiration date we can rotate it then.
The shelves on the left hold the super pails, and the ones in the back hold the boxes of #10 cans. I also have room for one of those pantry can rotators, and a place to store my canned meat... and waxed cheese (if I can figure out how to get it to work). I even got doors and molding on my cupboards. Joe found a website that made the doors for about $20 shipped. That's not a lot more than making them himself!

Didn't he do a fantastic job?

Bunny Babies (Joe's version)

So you may all know I've been trying to breed my female Californian rabbit. Rabbits are supposed to be pretty predictable. You put a doe in with a buck, he jumps her bones immediately, groans and falls off her back. BANG, babies come out exactly 31 days later.

Well, On October 4 I bred my rabbits about 4 times (just to be sure).

On Nobember 2 I put a nest in my rabbit's cage and she commenced organizing the hay and even carried hay around in her mouth, just like the book said she would.

On November 4, 31 days after breeding, I ran out to the rabbit cage and....nothing. Nothing the next day and the next day either. UNBELIEVABLE. I'm the only man alive who can't get rabbits to have sex and make babies! It shook may faith in life.

It also really pissed me off.

So on Thursday, November 5 I mated my rabbits again. I left them together for 2.5 hours while we went to dinner with Austin to celebrate his Bar passage. Then, an hour later I mated them again for 30 minutes. Then, the next morning, I mated them again for 30 minutes. No way my ego could handle another failure.

According to the calculator, I should have babies on Sunday, December 6.

So last night, ony 12 days after mating, I went out to feed the rabbits and my doe had 6 kits laying on the cage floor that she had presumably delivered that morning. They had been laying bare on the wire all day. They were all cold and motionless. So I gathered them up, took them inside and put them in a towel on top of a heating pad for an hour to warm up. Four ded. Two are undecide, but are probably dead. But that's not the point.

The point is, that somehow my rabbits found a way to sneak in a quickie without me knowing about it AND that quickie got them knocked up.

So this is the Lesson: RABBITS ARE LIKE TEENAGERS. THEY'LL SNEAK IN SEX ANY TIME YOU AREN'T LOOKING FOR IT AND ITS 100% SURE TO GET THEM PREGNANT.






(Now you'll have to wonder why I ever post at all when he has all the creativity of the family.)

Bunny Babies

The rabbit that we thought was going to have babies 2 weeks ago, and we remated a few days later...had babies yesterday. SURPRISE! (rabbit gestation is about 31 days) Unfortunately, the mom didn't have a nest in her cage and the weather took a plunge yesterday, so they all died :( Looks like we have much to learn about breeding rabbits.
Good news is that we have another rabbit we think is pregnant, and rabbits reproduce very quickly....
This picture is of some boy bunnies we got last week. We are turning into a rabbit farm over here.

Grandpa and Grammie's Visit

My folks came to visit last weekend and stayed until Wednesday. It was a very busy trip, and I feel like I am just now recovering. We spent the first two days working at our house on our property. My dad is an electrician, so he helped Joe figure out what wires went to what upstairs, and they moved a few electrical boxes and installed several lights. My mom helped me to paint and clean all of the cupboards in the kitchen. I had started that job a couple of weeks before and was already overwhelmed by it...they were so dirty and needed so much work. By the time they left, though, it was pretty much done, and they look so much better (plus I feel like if I put a clean dish into one, it will come out clean).
My dad with Ellie and Nate.
Joe and my Dad installing lights in the metal building.

My mom helping me clean out the drawers from the kitchen:

While we worked, the boys rode their 4-wheelers. There is a pile of dirt there that was for some project that never got done, and the boys love to ride over it really quickly.
That works really well until a midget decides to stand on the top:

...in fact, that is Nate's favorite place to play out there. He will stand there until the boys come right up to him on their 4-wheelers then he giggles and walks out of the way.

Ellie found another use for the 4-wheeler:

We had a good time with my parents. After I dropped them off at the airport, Ellie cried the whole way home because she wanted to spend more time "playing" with grandpa and grammie.