Fa La La La La

Cody sang with our local Valley Voices for their Christmas concert.  He only went to practice a few times but he still sang beautifully!  (December 15, 2010)

I Think These Photos Speak For Themselves

Up On the Housetop

When we got home from Thanksgiving the first thing Cayden wanted to do was decorate the outside of the house.  We let him get out a bunch of stuff to decorate the porch but Don did not have time until December 5th to get the stuff up on the roof.  He really does not like dealing with my twinkle-icicle lights that twinkle when they feel like it and then they might blink instead of twinkle or flash or even do the wave across the top of my house just for spite.  That Saturday afternoon we jumped in the car about 3:30 and ran to Walmart in Mesquite for the sole purpose of rectifying this yearly stress-fest.  I lowered my standards to the basic multi-colored non twinkle, non-blink lightbulbs.  Don likes to go all Griswold but those twinkle lights are about his undoing.  I love my Christmas lights and my sweet husband who makes sure that the Christmas Nazi and his mom have a very merry and bright holiday season.

Jars of Plenty

My mom gave me my Christmas present-a Food Saver with lots of accessories-earlier at Thanksgiving and ever since then we have been bottling things like mad!  We've bottled the essentials like Goldfish and Swedish Fish and MandM's plus some other important things like Grits and brown sugar.  We also used the actual vacuum packing part and sealed asparagus and spinach that we have put in the freezer.  Thank goodness that we will be prepared.  I think my goldfish and Girl Scout cookies will be a hot commodity when we are all living on the 1000 pounds of wheat under the stairs.

Another Turkey Day

On Tuesday November 23 we left for Provo for Thanksgiving.  There was supposed to be this H.U.G.E. storm coming in on Wednesday so we took the safe route, pulled the kids out of school and packed up the suburban.  The storm did not happen as expected but the kids still wanted to play in the snow-what little there was of it.  Since we do not live in the northern climate, we do not have winter weather gear.  My mom has had these coats up at her house that we just leave up there and use when we come up.  The red one on Caleb is about 4 sizes too small but hey when in Provo!

I can't remember what we did Wednesday other than get ready for Thanksgiving Day.  I know there was Sonic involved and probably Chic-Fil-A.  Thanksgiving was held at Grandma Penny's at 1pm.  Lots of the cuzzies came and we ate ourselves ill and watched lots of Back to the Future and football-there is always football. There was also a Phase 10 marathon that lasted about 3 hours that was fantastic.  Sonic is not open on Thanksgiving Day, a point that we found out personally one year when we drove over there and saw someone inside and then waited in the drive through for 5 minutes with many other people in need of liquid sustenance.  We have learned to settle for Will's Pitstop which is open every day of the year and has chocolate donuts that help ease our Sonic sorrows.  Will's makes a darn fine drink in comparison to what Logandale calls Dr. Pepper.  My darling husband got up around 6:30 and put the turkey in the roaster so that it would have plenty of time to cook.  That was a 26 pound bird and since we needed oven space we used the roaster on the counter.  It worked beautifully and they turkey was done like 2 hours earlier than we needed! 

We had lots of delicious food and enough potatoes to feed 10 more families.  My personal favorite is the Jello Pretzel salad.  It's more like dessert but we call it a salad.  We are not Black Friday shoppers so we just stayed home and did nothing-my favorite.  Saturday was the big BYU game and then we went home Sunday.  We have so much to be thankful for and it is always nice to be with family.

The Eagle has Landed

So I am getting around to this really slowly because I am so far behind and it just seems such a daunting task to go back almost 2 months and catch up but alas it must be done.
Cody finally decided on an Eagle project and got it approved in September.  With all the work he had to put in for the play and the fact that they were practicing practically everyday he had no time to get the project going.  The play was over the first week of November so the only thing standing in his way of getting it done was
a.  himself
b.  the weather
c. the approaching holidays.
His project was to paint and repaint some circles that the kids line up on on the playground at the elementary school and add some more circles for the PE class and add and touch up some of the four square courts.  He thought that we could get it done all in one day but the weather did not cooperate.  For weeks it had been getting cooler but that morning of November 20 it was downright freezing.  We started about 8am and had about 12 people there on and off until about 12ish.  I ran back and forth to the house and the school and then the hardware store and then Lin's for donuts while Cody and 3-4 of his good friends, 6-7 scouts, his theater teacher Ms. Dalley and me and his dad.  It was sooooo cold and soooooo windy.  Cody had spent a few days prior before making circle stencils and getting paint.  He did get some great donations prior to purchasing the needed items so that was helpful.  After getting most of the circles painted and the PE circles lined out they stenciled numbers on some of the cirlces but by then it was just too cold or windy to continue.

 

We had to wait a few more weeks to find time to finish the project.  There was Thanksgiving, then Cody had an audition in Vegas so it ended up being December 11 before we could get it finished.  We had alot more adult help this time so that was awesome because we had to line out a grid of 63 circles that needed to be painted.  It was so much warmer that morning and Cody had some die hard friends come back to help him finish.  In total it took aver 70 man hours to complete this project.  Thank goodness it is done!

Expecto Patronum

On Friday November 19-well I guess it was Thursday November 18 we left the house at about 9pm to go to Harry Potter #6-the midnight showing in LasVegas.  I did not feel great about sending Cody out with the sole responsibility of getting everyone safely (in the car) into Vegas and then getting home around 3am. Again, SAFELY was the main issue. We picked up a few of his friends and headed to the theater to wait in line for an hour and then wait in the theater for the movie to start for 2 hours.  Cody and his friend went to Capriatti's and got sandwiches and then Caleb and I went to TGIFridays.  Connor and Cayden stayed at Grandma Dottie's house overnight because Don was in Dallas.  Caleb got to go because he is a night owl anyway and loves going to the movies. The theater was in a big casino, Aliante Station, that had multiple restaurants and we had lots of time to kill so there was no better thing to do than eat!  The movie was AWESOME and everyone loved it. There were all sorts of people there dressed up in costumes and wearing all sorts of Harry Potter shirts.  Too bad we did not get our's made that we had talked about during the summer.  We had to drop Cody's friends off at their homes and so we did not get home until around 4am.  Needless to say Cody and Caleb did not make it to school that day and we were all out cold until around 11.