Glimpses of Christmas

Christmas is the best. I love it. LOVE it. Here are some of the things I want to remember from Christmas 2009.

Decorating

B's turn to put the star on the top

W and Dad in front of the finished product

A new addition--hanging ornaments above our kitchen island

I love snowglobes

The stockings were hung over the doorway with care...

This was my first year attempting to put lights in our tree.
As you can tell, I stunk.
I would crack up every time we drove home to this.
Maybe next year, I'll just do the trunk.

B's "holiday" music program at school.

Caroline's first time painting ornaments with us.
She thought the paint looked yummy.
She found out it wasn't.

Peanut butter blossoms
Mmmm....I wish I was eating some right now...

Lego advent calendar
The kids LOVED putting this together each night.

Driving around to look at lights.
Some friends told us about this home that choreographs
their lights to music. It was so fun.

I wanted to stay all night. I think we stayed for four songs.
Sorry about Caroline's screech in the middle.
That is the way our life sounds all the time.
When we are losing our hearing in our 50's, you'll know why.

Making gingerbread houses

Andrew went with a camping motif.

I love my little snowman.

Our gingerbread village

Artichokes with Christmas Eve dinner.

Merry Christmas!
Just before bed on Christmas Eve

The BIG day!

Whit got a zhu zhu pet.
She called it "Gray" for the first day.
And now she calls it Num Nums.
Tomorrow she may change her mind again.
It's a girl's prerogative!

Brandon got a Nintendo DS.
I have never seen a kid so excited about a gift.
There went a few more decibels off our hearing level.

Care Bear's favorite gift is this stroller.
She has already gnawed through the foam padding on the handle.
(We think she might be part goat.)
She gets very frustrated when she runs into obstacles
while pushing her baby, but still plays with it almost nonstop.

Hope you all had as much fun this Christmas as we did.

He shoots...and he scores!

Brandon's new basketball season is off to an exciting start. His team won their first game by two points and the second game ended in a tie, even after allowing all 10 players on the floor to shoot a free throw in lieu of overtime. He loves playing and we're having a blast watching him. Here are a couple highlights from his last game. He's #10, wearing red shorts.



Go, B-train!

You know you're from NC when...

a boogie board
is the closest thing you own to a sled.

And when you get a couple of inches of snow,
that's what your kids use to sled down the driveway.
Weee!

After a couple of tries on their bellies,
They tried snow surfing.

I was relieved when no bones were broken.

Caroline was SO excited for her try.
B is such a good big brother.
She kept asking for "More! More!"

After B went in for hot cocoa, I pulled her
up and down the street. Who needs a sled?
We're into multi-purpose toys around here.

We're staying in town for Christmas this year.

My kids were SO sad that they were
going to miss out on the Utah snow.
(Not to mention our family!)
But looks like they might have a White Christmas anyway.

I would have preferred a nice balmy 60+ degree holiday,

but I have to admit that the snow sure is beautiful.

So....sleepy....

You gotta love it when sleepiness trumps hunger.

Think I should move her nap time earlier?

Clever marketing

I was shopping at Ikea and had an overwhelming desire to buy a little chest of drawers. So I did. Brandon's had seen better days and it seemed like a good time to replace it. When I got home, I wondered if subliminal messaging was involved in my decision. Check out the name:

What's next? A table called Jakob?
Hmmmm...all of sudden I feel like I need a new table.

Christmas concert

OK, first off I gotta give props to Paul and Daneen. They kicked our booties on the dance-off. I loved their dance. Thanks for the idea, Daneen. Let's do it again next year. The rest of our siblings as well as my parents are forewarned to start practicing now. :)

In other exciting news, I turned in the last writing portfolio for my persuasive writing class yesterday. Agh! I can't believe I did it. I had spent so many hours on that thing and I don't know if it was exactly ready, but just wanted to be done. So I hit submit. And now I'm wondering if I made a mistake. We'll see in two weeks when I get my grade back. I still have a 25 multiple-choice question final left, but am not too stressed about it.

We had the funnest time on Friday night. One of our good friends watched Caroline and we took the big kids down to Concord (near Charlotte). We attended a concert called "You're All I Want For Christmas." Marvin Goldstein, Kirby Heyborne, and a vocalist named Sarah Morgann performed. When I told the kids we were going to a concert, they wanted to know if anyone was famous was going to be there. Since they don't know any of those performers, they were completely unimpressed. Brandon even asked, "Do I have to go?"

It didn't take long for Kirby and Marvin to win them over.
They were hilarious. Seriously, we were laughing out loud.
I think Brandon laughed more than anyone in the audience.

It was a great combination of beautiful, uplifting
Christmas music and silly comedy.
Hugely entertaining.
The time went by too fast.

I feel so lucky that they came to Concord.
It was about an hour and a half drive.
And SO worth it.
They're performing in Mesa and Tucson
later this week. If you have the
chance to go, we highly recommend it.

I think Brandon is one of Kirby's biggest fans now.
We bought a CD and B has listened to it
constantly since we've been home.

I'm already marking my calendar for next year's performance.

Maybe Caroline will be old enough to join us by then.

Family Dance-Off

So, my family might live all the way across the country, but that doesn't stop the fun from happening. My SIL threw down the gauntlet and challenged Andrew and I to a cross-country dance throw down.

Here's how it's gonna work. We each came up with a 1 1/2 minute dance routine. You can watch mine and Andrew's below and then check out Paul and Daneen's.



I hope you're laughing and that you know we're laughing WITH you.

Now for YOUR JOB: Leave a comment on one of our sites voting for your favorite. May the best dancers win!

Out of the mouths of babes--November

11/1--Whitney totally made up for her anti-mom note last month. I found this envelope on my bed tonight.

She's off the naughty list.

11/3--Whit's obsession with Disney characters is growing up. I think she has graduated from princesses (although she hasn't given them up completely). Using her dreamiest voice today, she said, "Hannah Montana is the greatest star on earth."

What's next? Pirates of the Caribbean?

11/5--Brandon talks like an educated adult. It cracks me up. Two examples from today:

We were listening to an audio book in the car. One of the characters said, "Mom, she's torturing me!" Brandon corrected it, "No, she's antagonizing him."

He saw a Lego set in a magazine that he has never seen in a store. He said, "That Lego set in the Toys R Us catalog is as phony as a three-dollar bill!" Who talks like that?

11/5--Follow-up on the boy who has a crush on Whitney: I guess his mom volunteers in their classroom. This afternoon, Whit said, "Since Isaiah's Mom was in our room today, I wrote down my phone number on a piece of paper and gave it to her. You know, so we could have a play date."

11/11--Whit was adding lines to the children's book, I love you as much....
Here's what she said, "I love you as much as a lion loves his babies. I love you as much as Zeus loves Hades."

Future poet?

11/15--Whit at the dinner table: "Garbage trucks are so lucky. They come and take the trash away and I never see it again."
B: "Why is THAT lucky?"
Whit, after pondering for a minute: "Well, I guess I'm lucky because the trash is gone."

11/17--Brandon's in third grade. He has started asking me school questions that stump me. Thank goodness for Google. I can just look up the answers. (What did OUR parents do?) Today he asked, "Mom, is the point at the end of a cone a vertex?" Just wait till he's in high school, huh?

If we're rotating at .76 miles per hour, how long
many revolutions will we complete before we
all fall down?

11/22--Brandon was reading a little bio on NFL player Julius Peppers and decided, "Mom, I'm just like Julius Peppers! Neither of us likes mayo or mustard and we both like iPhones."

I can barely tell the difference.

Poor Caroline got the shaft this month. I didn't take any good pics of her. Here are the three best ones.

Not sure where she came up with this pose.

She looked SO cute in this dress Grandma Cuca
got her, but did NOT want her pic taken before church.

Trimming the tree

Gratitude

Like most of you, I've been thinking a lot about gratitude this week. In June, when I was still teaching the Young Women at church, we had a lesson on being grateful. It included a challenge to keep a gratitude journal. It's not a new idea. I've heard of them before and thought they sounded great, but had never actually tried one myself.

I decided to accept the challenge. I got a cute little notebook and kept it on my night stand. Each night I would jot down a sentence or two about what I was grateful for. I'm not a good daily journal keeper, but since it only took a minute, I found that I could keep up with it. It even made the cross-country trek with me this summer. I've written in it every night except for two weeks when I misplaced it.

As I read through some of the entries last night, I was uplifted. I have so much to be thankful for. The process was especially helpful on bad days. Days when I just felt like having a pity party. I forced myself to write down at least one thing that I could be grateful for. And it helped. Tremendously.

The resounding themes of the past six months were family, friends, the gospel, and food. Sounds about right. I found myself reading about them over and over. I hope I tell all of you how much I appreciate you and I don't just keep it secretly in my little journal.

One of the more touching entries, something I don't want to forget:

June 17, 2009 I'm grateful to have a roof over my head. Tonight I talked with an acquaintance who has been living in a homeless shelter for the past few weeks. When I asked her how she was doing, she said, "Well, I'm alive and I'm not in pain, so that's a blessing." What an amazing attitude! So grateful for her example.

Here are some of the more random things I recorded.

I AM GRATEFUL FOR:

*Sunday afternoon naps

*Access to dental care

*The internet

*Long phone conversations

*Fireflies

*My van


*Baseball

*Date nights

*Museums

*Nights spent around a table playing games with loved ones

*Air conditioning

*BYU

*Cell phones

*Joe, the Autozone employee who installed my new battery

*Our garden

*Tall trees that shade us on morning walks

*Book club

*Fantasy football

*Personal prayer

*Music

*Washing machine & dryer

*Sand

*Retail therapy

*Grapefruit

*So You Think You Can Dance

*Hot tub

*Legos

We were ready for some FOOTBALL!

I had a new experience last week.

A first.

Andrew and I went to an NFL game--Panthers and Dolphins in Charlotte on a Thursday night.

Go, Panthers!

We joined 75,000 other fans to cheer for the home team.
Actually, sometimes it felt like we were the visiting team.
There were SO many Dolphins fans.
And they were LOUD.

It was a really exciting game and came down to a
last second attempt at the end zone, but the Panthers lost.
Boo.

The game gave me lots of opportunities to reflect
on the psychology of sport.
Fascinating.

What makes a person act like this?
Is it the intensity of the crowd?
The importance of each NFL game to the outcome of the season?
Or is it just the drinking?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that we're
watching grown men pound on each other.
And we like it.

Whatever it is, we had an exciting time.
It was fun people-watching.
It was even more fun cheering for Andrew's favorite team.
Great date night.