New Year's Eve

We decided to ring in the New Year up in Hooper with my family. All my brothers and their families came, so it was a swinging party. There was wayyyyy too much delicious food. And Papa Kerry made up some really fun games for the kids to play early in the evening including Snowman Races, Snowball Toss, and The Ice Relay. The kids had a blast, and it was great because all the little ones could participate too.

Adelia and Ollie and Rue were struggling, so I put them to bed at normal bedtime. I was planning on letting Lincoln and Ivan try staying up all the way to midnight. They played Apples to Apples with everyone really well until about 10:30 and then they started getting overly silly and grouchy and out of control. So I put them to bed. The adults hung out and just sort of chatted. Jackson and Tanner had to go to bed early because they had work in the morning. We made it midnight, but just barely. (Why is that so hard now-a-days?) And then we went to bed as well. Happy New Year!

Christmas Break

Christmas was a hit. Such a hit, that I took zero pictures, and Aaron took two. :) This one of us at the top of the stairs waiting to come down, and the one of Ollie playing his new "tuba" as he calls it, even though in reality it's a trumpet.

Aaron had the whole week between Christmas and New Years off from work, and we used every second of it to our advantage. Aaron's sister Lisa came up for a few days, so we went sledding and roller skating with them.

Spencer, Lincoln, Aneya, Adelia, Aaron, Ollie, and Ivan

Back row: Kelly, Eli, Krystal, Rue, Carter, Spencer
Front Row: Lincoln, Adelia, Ollie, Aaron

Adelia, Lisa, Ollie

I gave Aaron a mitre saw for Christmas. He gave me some wood with the promise to make me a bench over Christmas break. It's been fun working on that together. I can't wait to have it at my kitchen table.

And the kids have been having a great time with their gifts, of course. The basketball hoop will be a bigger hit when it's not so darn cold outside I think. As it is, we've gone over to the church gym to play a few times. 

Christmas Eve 2015

Our Christmas Eve Bethlehem dinner is hands down my favorite thing at Christmas time. I love the mood that it sets for the rest of the holiday. I love that it's different, and simple. And I love that my kids love it. And above everything else, I love that our Christmas Eve is centered on the Savior.

During the day, while I was cleaning and baking pita bread, the kids were running around excitedly discussing which character they wanted to be in the Nativity play. Aaron was setting up the stable, and Adelia brought down all the stuffed animals she thought would be fitting to have gathered around it. One of the animals she brought was a stuffed cat. Ivan was irritated because he didn't think a cat should be at the stable, so it was in a bad mood. Then Adelia brought down her doll Nora, whom we wrap up every year and use as Baby Jesus (when we don't have a real live baby, at least). And Ivan was even more ticked, because the doll was a girl doll, and obviously Jesus is a boy. He angrily informed us that he didn't want to be in a play that wasn't true. It was kind of humorous and kind of not. On one had, it was making me giggle that he was so serious and adamant that the doll be the correct gender. On the other, I really like the kids to participate in the Nativity. But I sat down next to him and told him he didn't have to be in the play if he didn't want to be, that I wouldn't force him. He could be the audience. A little while later, when that had blown over a bit, I went back to Ivan and told him I needed his help. I told him that I had 3 things I wanted to do as part of our after dinner program, but I wanted him to be in charge of what order we did them in. He perked right up, and got excited about being in charge. After thinking it over for a bit, he decided that after dinner, we would first add the Baby Jesus to the Nativity (In Italy, there is a tradition that you don't add Baby Jesus until Christmas Eve, since Lincoln did his report on Italy, he REALLY wanted to do this tradition this year) and tell about some of the fun Christmas traditions from around the world. Second we would have Lincoln, Ivan, and Grandpa Swan play some Christmas songs on the piano while everyone sang along. And third would be the Nativity play.  Once Ivan got all that worked out, he came up to me and told me he guessed he'd be a Shepard in the play if he could have Ruby for a sheep, to which I agreed and did my best to hold in my amused smile until Ivan had left the room. :) I guess he just needed to have a little control over events.

Gathered around singing Christmas songs. I love this so much!

So here we have The Swan Family Circus presenting the Nativity, starring Lincoln as Wiseman, Ivan as a Shepard, Adelia as Cinderella-Mary, Ollie the Angel-Ninja, and Rue the Runaway Sheep. Kid actors are the best. During the middle Ollie was standing on a stool being the angel, and I guess he got a little bored or something, but he just fell straight backwards into the couch, and then he thought that was pretty funny, so he did it over and over and over again for the rest of the play. 

After all the kids went to bed and everyone went home. Aaron and I (mostly Aaron) got to work putting the basketball hoop together. We don't do Santa at our house, but the hoop was too big to wrap, so we set it up and hung the stalkings from it. I spent a peaceful few minutes sitting in the lights of the Christmas tree, thinking about the wonderful evening we just had, and about how grateful I am for my Savior who has given me so much.  MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Whirlwind December

 December has been a whirlwind. The many comings and goings, activities, events, Christmas preparations, etc. have been squeezed in and around and on top of all of our usual hustle and bustle. I'm attempting to reconstruct it briefly here, in one large post. Forgive me if I get the order wrong.

Ornaments. So when I was a kid, my parents Mom bought us each an ornament every year to hang on the Christmas tree. When I got married I got to take them all with me to hang on my own tree. (And it's too bad they are all breakable, because I haven't been able to use them since I had kids.) I loved this idea, and when Lincoln was born we started this tradition. But as kids kept coming and the budget never got any bigger, we sort of let it peter out for a few years. Also, of the ones we do have, we can't remember whose are whose or what year they represent. Ya, I know, we're awesome.

But I put a huge dent in remedying that this year! I decided to take small wooden blocks, and make one ornament per child per year using pictures of things they had done throughout the year. So, kind of like a year in review on a Christmas ornament. I did one for our family too, so that my tree isn't empty once all my kids grow up and take their ornaments. I'm pretty pleased with how these turned out. I only made it back about 4 years before I ran out of blocks, but eventually I'll get all the way back to 2006.

Know any two-year-olds? Two-year-olds have a reputation. Here's why:

This was lunch. Ollie won't eat them all, and now nobody else will either. *sigh* "Why would you give him so many if you knew he wouldn't eat them?" you ask. I didn't. I gave him four, and then I turned my back for a few minutes, which was my ultimate mistake. He grabbed more chicken nuggets off the pan, proceeded to take a single bite out of each one, then hopped down and refused to eat any more. Of course none of the other kids would touch them because "Ew, Ollie germs!" And I didn't really feel right about feeding them to the chickens...

But as ornery as two-year-olds can be sometimes, I wouldn't trade mine for the world. I'm so grateful for my little shadow. He is my sunshine. There are a lot of intense personalities at my house, and I love them all, but I think Heavenly Father sent me this one as a tender mercy-- to be a loving, easy-going, peace-maker. I've always called him my angel baby because he is such a sweet, tender-heart. And sometimes, for no particular reason, I'm just glad he's mine.

We've been having a lot of fun with our writing. One of the things we've been learning about are the Literary Elements. Recently we learned about homonyms. I wrote several up on the board and asked the kids to list a few they could think of, then I challenged us to keep our ears and eyes open for a week so see how many more we could come up with. The kids took the challenge seriously and came up with so many! I wish I would have take a picture of the list. At the end of the week, I had them each pick a few homonyms and draw pictures to show the differences, It turned out to be a cool project.

We also listened to The Mouse and the Motorcycle on audio book and did our copy work exercises from it. I spy an Ollie who thinks he's big and doing copy work like the big boys. And we had a Poetry Tea-Time with a Christmas Theme. I got out all our Christmas books and we read them while we sipped our hot chocolate, it turns out that a lot of them were written in rhyme, so there was poetry after all. :)

For their Harmony class Lincoln and Ivan had to give reports on the Christmas traditions of other countries. Lincoln chose Italy and Ivan chose Russia. This turned out to be a lot of fun, and we spent a good deal of our school time in December working on these. Then we got to go and listen while the boys presented their reports to the class.

One of the days, I was feeling like doing an art project, but not feeling up to coming up with one. So I went through the different projects in our At Home Art Studio curriculum and found this oil pastel and watercolor tiger. Not Christmasy at all, but I figured we could add a Santa hat in and call it good. They turned out really cute. I helped Ollie do his. He got bored pretty quickly so it was mostly just me. I called it Jungle Cat Christmas.

Adelia's Kindergarten class combined with the preschool class at her school and had a Christmas music program. It was really cute. She was wearing reindeer antler on her head and she was so distracted by them, haha! She kept wiggling her head up and down to try and shake the jingle bell attached to the antlers. Adelia is in the back row in the middle.

Our other Christmas activities include watching the First Presidency Christmas Devotional, attending the High School Girl's Basketball Team's Christmas Breakfast, hanging out with Kelly and Esther, going to see Kyle graduate from Weber State with his Bachelor's Degree, and trying to get a decent picture for the Christmas Card.

I had this brilliant idea to make the Christmas Devotional fun....eat in front of the computer while we watched. I was hoping that would keep the kids' interest, because it's unusual for us to eat in front of the screen, and also that it would keep them quiet. Neither of things things happened. And honestly, we ended up just turning it off and putting the whole slew of rowdy kids to bed, because we couldn't hear the broadcast over their racket. It was depressing.

My friend Mandi has a daughter on the high school basketball team and every year the team does a Christmas breakfast as a fundraiser. Mandi had an extra ticket this year, and gave it to us. My kids were thrilled. We ate breakfast, saw Santa, and got to shoot some free-throws with the team. This is Lincoln shooting. He's pretty short compared to that hoop! ;)

One Saturday we went up to American Fork to spend an afternoon and evening with Kelly and Esther and their family. Aaron helped Kelly paint a bedroom, while Esther and the kids and I watched The Best Christmas Pageant Ever. We had pizza and cookies, and enjoyed spending time together. The kids had so much fun that 3 our of 5 of them crashed on the way home.

My little brother Kyle graduated with his Bachelor's degree in English from Weber State University, and I got to attend. He's totally living my dream! I'm proud of him and the hard work he has put in to get where he is. To celebrate Kyle we all went out to dinner at Good Wood BBQ after. 

We tried really hard to get a decent picture to stick on our Christmas cards this year. Except that we didn't ask anyone to take them for us. We just set up the tripod on the front porch. The picture turned out just ok, but was zoomed out so far that you couldn't see our faces. By the time I cropped it and zoomed in the resolution was poor. I was slightly miffed, but it was too late to do anything about it. I had to scrap my original idea for the Christmas card and come up with a college instead. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't wonderful either. Better luck next year.

It was plenty snowy leading up to Christmas. We even had a mini blizzard, but it blew itself out after about an hour, just long enough to reek havoc on everyone's morning commute. And no, I'm still not tired of this view.

Thanks to the snow, we've had a lot of shoveling to do. And this kid right here has been my main man. I was shoveling our driveway, our single, older neighbor's driveway, and the driveway of a lady I visit teach. This kid came right out and helped without being asked, he never complained, and he stuck with me until all the work was done, even though he was tired and cold. You made me proud that day Linc. I think I'll keep ya.

On a different m orning, I was out shoveling by myself, and when I came inside the kids had put up "The Hall of Snow" all by themselves with the cutout snowflakes we've been making all month. It made me laugh. It was so festive and awesome. I left it up for the entire Christmas break. And I would have left it up longer, but Aaron took it down. :(

Of course our December wasn't all fun and games either. It's been so cold we haven't gone out much, which tends to leave me feeling a tad on the claustrophobic side. And we've had the rounds of sibling rivalry too. Particularly this instance of Ivan trying to keep Ollie from leaving the driveway on his trike. And lets not forget slave labor, because that house has to be clean for Christmas, you know?