Christmas Downers and Procrastinated Work

I hope everyone enjoyed the Christmas time! My family certainly did! We started out the week by waiting for Clint to get home. He worked an overtime shift on Monday before he started his week off. Because of the way his company schedules things, everyone gets a week off every three weeks. Of course it rotates between groups. So he was one of the lucky one that were able to take the entire Christmas week off! It was fun! On Tuesday we went to his parents' house to do pre-Christmas celebrating. We really just opened some presents and ended up watching movies. Although Haden did have a lot of fun playing in the snow with his cousin, Jess. We got home late that night and started to clean the house for Christmas Eve.

On Wednesday we went to my parents' house for constant fun! We started out by making a gingerbread house and a train. Now don't go thinking we were that creative! Mom is really good at finding kits for these kind of things. The kits this year even had a little tray for the walls to stand up in. No falling walls at our house! Afterward, Mom had a great book called "Snowmen at Night". She got white hats and gloves for the kids and Clint to wear and to pretend to be snowmen. They then acted out the book while Mom read to all of us. The best part was definitely the snowball fight! We had socks that were balled up and we all threw them at each other. Haden is really good at dying when he gets hit! Of course we had to do the nativity. Where I was the only one able to come (Kim is on her mission in Ohio and Phil and his family opted to make this their first Christmas at home in Boston), my kids got the role of Mary and Joseph. I tell you, Shay loved holding the little doll we had for Baby Jesus! Enough so that she would leave that night without it!

We had a great dinner and a fun treasure hunt to find the stockings and wound down for the night. After leaving the Santa key on the door (we don't have a chimney, so we have a magic key that only works for Santa), the kids were finally willing to go to bed. It really didn't take them long to fall asleep, making it better for "Santa" to get the presents out and get to bed early. The kids woke up at about seven and immediately woke us up. It was so much fun to watch them open up their presents and see how excited they were for everything! I later make my first turkey and Christmas dinner for my parents, Clint's parents, and my little family.

Friday got to be the "put all the toys together at Nana's house" day. Clint and I spend the day putting together a Bowflex for my dad, a doll house for my mom, and cleaning out one of the bedrooms to make it an exercise room. So again, nothing was done at my house. Today is our sixth anniversary, and Clint had a typical high school marathon date planned. Thank you, Clint! Now everything is over, and that kind of makes me sad! I guess all of the 'go go go' can make me crash when it is all done.

It was a lot of fun, but no laundry got done. So that is what I am doing today: 15 loads of laundry! I hope everyone else's' weeks have been great and fun, and thank you for listening to me ramble about my week. Love to all!

This is really great!

My brother found this for all of your listening pleasures. You will love it!Be sure to pause the playlist first. It is awesome!

Little Pleasures

I'm not sure why, but I have really enjoyed looking at the little pleasures in life today. We are having quite the snow downfall today (it has been snowing for about five hours and 'doesn't show signs of stopping')! After I shoveled out the first foot of snow, I got the kids ready to play outside. They had a lot of fun with the neighbor kids throwing snow (the snow is too dry for snowballs) and making snow angels. Of course Shay wanted to come in quite a bit sooner than Haden, and I put her in the bath to warm her up. She was so cold! Haden came in about ten minutes later and was just as cold, so I got him into a bath. As soon as he got out of the bath he said he needed a cup of hot chocolate to warm up his hair. What that has to do with his hair, I don't know, but I was quick to oblige his need for a warm treat! I then started to take out the garbage. It seems that the garbage gets full so fast that we wait until we can't stuff anything else into it before we take it out. I just now realized how much I love an empty garbage can! I know! What is really going through my mind right now? What really happened to make me look at the trash in such a way? I'm not sure, but I am glad that I have an empty garbage can right now. So here is to the little things in life that make it worth living: to hot chocolate and warm baths when we are cold, to empty garbage cans, to a loving family, shelter from the elements, a call or e-mail from a friend we haven't seen in a while, and anything else anyone can think of. Love it all!

Did someone ask for a dull week?

This week has been quite uneventful. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or not. On one hand it means that nothing bad happened, and on the other it says that nothing exciting happened. I guess you can decide for yourself. Anyway, finals are over for the semester! I actually got done on Monday only because I took one final early, one was a take home final, and the third was held on Monday. It makes it really nice when you get done about a week before everyone else. I highly suggest it to anyone considering taking finals! This now means that I have one semester left in my school going career. I guess I can handle having a final on Friday for my last semester. I just have a feeling that things are really going to drag because I am so excited.

Clint came home from drill this last weekend and informed me that he has gotten all of the needed paperwork to volunteer to go overseas. All he needs now is the right signatures and he is golden. He claims that if he can't find a teaching job this next school year, then he will be leaving for a year to serve. We will have to hold our breath and see what happens. I have a feeling he will be going no matter what. He stated that he would like to volunteer as much as possible in addition to his required deployment. I think his cousin Mark (who is in the Marines) has some sort of influence on his decision.

Anyway, the kids are great and I am adjusting to being a stay-at-home mom for the next few weeks. I forget, what do you do with kids all day? Mine are old enough that they play fairly well together. I guess we will see how it goes, and I will try to keep everyone updated! Until next time.

Picture a Christmas

Every year my mom does the twelve days of Christmas to a Christmas song. This year the song is from the primary book. It is called "Picture a Christmas". She links her gifts to the phrases of this song. Needless to say, one of the first gifts my children received was kid cameras. So here I am showing you the pictures my kids have taken. Haden has a lot of fun with it, but knows how to delete the pictures. So most of his pictures are deemed "bad" and, unfortunately, deleted. He had a lot of good pictures from the park that he got rid of. The ones closer to the end were pictures he took from the car of the Christmas lights outside. Shay isn't real sure about the whole thing, and took a lot of pictures of her eye (holding the camera backwards). So a lot of her pictures we helped her with and took ourselves.

These are not the greatest quality cameras, but it is really fun to see what the kids see. I hope you enjoy them as much as we have!

Haden's slideshow

Shay's slideshow

Oh, Christmas Tree!

Okay, so I was quite anxious to get the tree and decorations up this year. Everything was up the Saturday after Thanksgiving. That is actually still November! But now I am done and the rest of you aren't! Hahahaha! It also gives me more time to enjoy the season without worrying too much about my home. My mom made a comment I have to say is very true: In order to get the decorations up, you have to make a bigger mess! Of course then it gets cleaned up, but Clint and I brought up enough decoration boxes from the basement to fill up Mom's entire front room! I don't know how she was able to get through. The kids had a blast decorating the tree. I would give them ornaments and they would put them on the tree. The only issue is that they insisted on putting most of the ornaments on the same branch. So Shay would put five on one branch, and Haden put five on another branch, and so on. Needless to say, they kept falling off! Seeing as some of them could have broken, as the kids put the ornaments on, Clint moved the ones that doubled up. I don't think they really noticed, but we did keep mentioning to them to spread it out. It is an old proverb (or another Mother comment) that the kids grow by where they put the ornaments on the tree. When they are little, all of the decorations are near the bottom. As they get bigger, the bottom gets ignored. Thanks, Mom, for all of your wisdom. We did have an issue with the lights for the tree. We only had blue lights leftover from outside, and we didn't really want blue on the tree. So Clint went to reliable Wal-Mart and got some red and green strands. He came home and realized that although the box said there were 300 lights in each box, they were the garland style and didn't even make it all the way around the tree! So he continued back to Wal-Mart and exchanged them for more boxes of fewer lights. We now have six strands of lights on our tree and it looks great! Thank you Clint for your efforts! The kids were able to get new Chirstmas clothes for church and they looked great! I just hope they always want to look that good. Of course, I don't look near that good all of the time, so why should I expect them to? Have a wonderful holiday season and a great New Year!