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!