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?