Out of Batteries

This week I was determined to potty train Abigail, unfortunately four of my five kids came down with the stomach flu.  Abigail was one of them so potty training seemed like it was not going to happen.  I still tried off and on when I knew we would be home, but I was not successful.  I will start again tomorrow.  Once when Abigail was sitting on the toilet, and nothing was happening she said, Mom, it's not working, I think I need new batteries!  I am hoping this week she can figure it out without batteries!

The Perfect Snow

Today it is snowing again, but this is the kind of snow I love.  This is the snow I remember, when the earth is still and calm and gets covered with a beautiful white covering.  It makes you feel so peaceful to go out side.  This is the way snow is suppose to fall.  I love it, and I love what it does to the dead landscape in my front yard, it makes it beautiful again. 

 

The snow we usually get is not a peaceful thing, it comes with a lot of wind and ice and peace is the last thing you feel inside.  There is some joy in this kind of snow, but it doesn't come until after the storm has settled and the kids can go out and play in it.  This is what my kids built last time we got a big ugly snow storm.

 

  

Sometimes in our life we have those peaceful tender moments that bring us pure joy and are so easy, but other times we have to battle the storm to get to the joy.  I am thankful for both.

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!