Snow Day, Cookie Day

I was so excited Thursday to hear that school had been canceled on Friday because of the snow.  We got to spend the day making cookies.  This is something I like to do with the kids at least once or twice a year.  Each kid gets to pick out what kind of cookies they want to make and then they each take a turn making the dough and rolling it into balls.  Then we freeze it and I have a bunch of cookie dough ready to be baked whenever we feel the need for cookies.  We have a freezer full of chocolate chip, oatmeal chocolate chip, chocolate white chocolate chip, and ginger snap cookies.

 

  

We also baked a few! Yummy!!

I also let the kids each paint something while they were waiting.  Here are a few pictures of the creations they made.  Emily is making paper mache' beads, this is a two day process so we don't have pictures yet.

 

  

You can see the cookie mess in the background, but it really cleans up pretty fast.

 

It seems silly to me that they cancel school for snow, but it sure is fun to have the kids home for a day!

A Clean Room

Ryan and Abigail's room has been a nightmare lately.  A lot of the stuff they got from Christmas I put in their room instead of the basement.  They have also decided their favorite thing to play is "moving".  This is where they pack all of their clothes in suitcases, gather all of their belongings and move to another room in the house.  As you can guess this makes a huge mess.  I have told them they are not allowed to pull down their clothes or take clothes out of their drawers for this game, but yesterday they did again!  I told Ryan he was going to have to clean up the mess in his room.  When he got home from preschool he went to his room to start cleaning.  He came to me about five minutes later very excited because he had cleaned his whole room all by himself.  He had me hurry and come and see the great job he had done.  Here is a picture of how he cleaned his room so fast!  There was nothing left on the floor, and therefore the room was clean!

Abigail and Her Doll

Here is a picture of Abigail with her doll before church on Sunday.  She loves having a matching dress with her doll, unfortunately Abigail's dress is not going to fit her for much longer!

 

Abigail is all girl until someone does something she doesn't like, then she becomes very violent!

What I have been up to

With Christmas over, I decided I needed to start some projects around the house.  I have been wanting to put a shelf around the top of Justin and Tyson's bedroom for over a year now because they needed a place for all of their trophies.  I put the shelf on three of the four walls.  It ended up being a lot harder than I thought, in the middle of it I was thinking to myself, "Why didn't I hire someone to do this!"  Here is a picture of part of it. 

Christmas

We had a wonderful Christmas.  It started with Christmas Eve.  We all went to a movie together and then we went out to eat.  We normally have people over for dinner and have Mexican food, but our guests were coming on Saturday so we decided to save our traditional dinner for then.  When we got home we acted out the Nativity, had hot chocolate with special "sleeping powder",  fed the reindeer and watched a Christmas movie on TV.   It was a long night with not much sleep,  Tyson had been asking for a dog from Santa, and he was so anxious and excited to see if he got it that he didn't get too sleep until 5:00 a.m.  He was in our bed a lot of the time so Jeff and I didn't get sleep either.  At 6:30 when they all got up Tyson was very excited to see Santa had come through for him and he had finally gotten a dog.  It truly was a Christmas miracle since Jeff has always let them know they could not have a dog.

Emily, Tyson, and Justin are loving the dog.  Ryan and Abigail have not been outside to see it yet.  They do enjoy talking to it from inside the window.

Everyone got just what they asked for this year.  They were all very excited about their gifts.  Here are a few pictures of them with their gifts.

 

 

 

In the afternoon it had warmed up enough we could build a snowman.  Everyone enjoyed helping us build it.

 

I hope you all had a Merry Christmas!

I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas

One thing I have always hated about Christmas here in Texas is the lack of snow.  I love the fact that my kids can play outside, etc. but it just doesn't feel like Christmas.  This year to my surprise we woke up to a ton of snow.  The kids were so excited to go out and play in it.  The bad part about snow here is it usually comes with lots of cold wind and ice and this was no exception so there are lots of drifts and it won't stick together to make a snowman, but they enjoyed making some snow angels.  I am hoping tomorrow it will be warm enough that they can build a snowman! 

As you can see, Emily needs a coat for Christmas!

 

Notice the woman in the background with the nice purple snowsuit, that is my friend Ellen.  Rich got this snowsuit for her from his boss when he was moving.  Doesn't she look nice!

After about 15 minutes out in the 17 degree weather with a wind chill that made it feel like 8 degrees, this is what Ryan looked like, but when I asked him if he liked the snow he said through his tears.
"Yes."

Abigail enjoyed it a little more.  She discovered immediately how good it tastes to eat it.  I am amazed how it is such a natural instinct to eat snow.

I hope you all have a very Merry Christmas!!!

Events Leading up to Christmas

The thing that seems to help get the Christmas season going the most for us is the decorating of the tree. We had a great time decorating it.

What I love more than decorating the tree is putting up all of our nativities. In our formal living room I only have nativities and a formal tree. I let every child pick a different nativity to set up how ever they want it. I am always amazed at the time they will put into making it look just right. This is a picture of Abigail playing with one of the toy ones we have on the ground.

Ryan's preschool got into the Christmas spirit by going to an assisted living area and singing a few songs and passing out cookies and cards that they had made.  It was a little scary for them, but the old people sure did enjoy seeing them.

One of my children's favorite traditions is pulling our a different activity to do each day until Christmas.  The quilt that is hanging on the wall behind the children is the quilt used to pull out the different activities.  We keep these simple, and I have my calendar while making it so when we have something already scheduled for the day like a ward party or piano recital, that is our activity!

Here area  few pictures of Tyson and Emily at their piano recital.  They both did a great job.  Emily also got to play the organ at church for the opening and closing song Sunday while the normal organist played a different variation of the song on the piano.  Emily only had a chance to practice twice.  We were very proud of her considering she had never played the organ before.

 

Another fun thing we did is have the Hardy's over and the kids built sleighs out of a hershy bar, two candy canes, some candy to build a santa with, and a roll of tape.  When they were done building them we raced them down a table.  Tyson's was the winner.

Here is a picture of the kids in their Christmas Sunday outfits.  I always make them coordinate for Christmas.  The kids all hate this tradition, but I love it!