Cayden Loves Christmas

Friday, December 17 was the last day of school before our 2 week Christmas break.  Cayden's class had their Christmas party that afternoon.  They decorated gingerbread houses, and decorated little foam houses with stickers and ate lots of junk. I made these snowman cupcakes.  They were quite tasty.

Caleb and His Creativity

Caleb spent probably an hour and 24 pictures making a stop-motion movie on my camera with 2 plastic bugs.  I spared you the misery of seeing each picture.  Maybe one day he will get rich and buy me a new camera.

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.