Christmas Eve with the Walkers

In my opinion Christmas Eve is just as exciting at Christmas day. This year Scott's parents were in town to join us as was Scott's sister and her family (who recently moved to Seattle). We started out the fun night with pizza for dinner. Thankyou Dominoes Pizza! Everyone was happy after eating their favorite meal. Here are my girls with their girl cousins.
And Nathan had a boy cousin to join him at the little table.

Holly and Emily got to sit at the table with the adults.

After dinner and visiting we all changed into costumes to act out the nativity story. My parents usually join us on Christmas Eve for this tradition but since we had the Walkers over this year they made other plans. Luckily they dropped off a box of handmade nativity costumes for us to wear, a gift I have been asking my mom to make for years. Thanks so much mom!

The angels and shepherds

Shepherds visit the baby Jesus

Wisemen en route to Bethlehem, Narrator Scott behind

Wisemen visit

A picture of the whole gang. Nathan wanted to be a tiger and when we told him there were no tigers he refused to participate. Silly boy!

Today I am thankful for:

*Lots of great family to spend the holidays with

*a morning of after Christmas shopping by myself

*Jesus and the chance to we get to celebrate his birth each year

Christmas break adventures

All month I have been seeing commercials for a big Christmas store in Lynnwood called Wights. I invited my mom to go there with me and my kids that were interested. Nathan and Holly came while Emily stayed home with Melissa and Megan. The store was amazing! There were beautiful themed trees around every corner. Nathan loved all of the life sized stuffed animals. Here he is posing with some bears while wearing a bear hat.
And here he is with the polar bears.

Nathan likes nutcrackers. He has two of them at home one is a basketball player and the other is a fireman nutcracker. To him they are the "super heros" of Christmas decorations. Nathan was so excited to find this nutcracker that was taller than him and that had a sword.

This was our favorite tree. It was pink and covered with candy decorations. Fortunately we didn't buy anything at the store, we just looked.

We also went on our Christmas light drive recently. Our favorite house is in the neighborhood called Heritage Hills. The house has over 40,000 lights and we love getting out and posing with the decorations. Sadly the man who does this display recently died from cancer so this will probubly be the last year his house is decorated so well.

These pictures are both from his house.

Merry Christmas! If you are one of those people who sent us a Christmas card or gave us Christmas treats thankyou so much. The treats were gobbled up immediately but we hung up the cards and are enjoying them all month.

The gingerbread house tradition continues

On the first day of winter break we pulled out graham crackers and candy and I whipped up a batch of royal icing. The kids all look forward to our annual tradition of making individual gingerbread houses. Here is Melissa with her house.
Nathan and his Dad worked together on this one.

Megan's house is a beauty.

Here is Holly's house with Santa in the chimney.

And last but not least Emily's house with Santa and his sleigh on the roof.

Here are the girls' four houses together. Nathan's isn't pictured because he ate the candy off his house immediately after he made it.

Today I am thankful that:

*I was able to update Megan's scrapbook

*Scott has the next 12 days off of work

*The kids are so excited for Christmas

*The YM/YW Caroling activity that I was in charge of last night turned out well. We drove 2 motorhomes around and got out and caroled to 6 families in our ward. Then we had hot chocolate and donuts for refreshments at the church.

Performances

At the beginning of December we had our ward Christmas party. The primary acted out the nativity story Silhouette style. Since Emily is one of the oldest girls in primary she was asked to be Mary.

You can see her behind the sheet seated on the right.

Here she is again below the really cool looking star.

Last night Holly was in a performance too. Each December her school has an all school dance concert. The 90 students at her school get in small groups, select a song and choreograph a dance to go with it. Then they decide on their own costumes and choose the color they want the stage lights to be. Holly was in a group with two other girls and they danced to the Pink Pather song. It was pretty great! We are so proud of her.

She's the one on the right.

Now for a little more exciting news: Emily tried out for her school musical "Beauty and the Beast" this week and she just found out she was selected to be Belle. This is like a dream come true for Emily. She is super excited and we are excited for her too.

I'll leave you with a simple craft project I did. I found the idea on the pinterest website.

*Take a white fridge

*clean off all the clutter on it

*cut out shapes from paper and tape them on to transform your white fridge into a snowman.

I think this looks AWESOME!

It's all Christmasy at our house!

On the day after Thanksgiving we pulled out all the Christmas decorations and started decorating. My kids would not let me wait another day--they were so excited! Here they are looking at their ornaments. They pick out a new one every year and store them in a bag with their name on it.

And here is our decorated tree.
An up close picture-Christmas light make it look magical.
This year Scott bought this fun Christmas Lego set for us to add to our Christmas decorations.
All the kids were very excited to help make it but Holly and Emily were actually the builders.
We put the completed set on this wooden tray so we won't lose any of the pieces this month as we play with it. When Christms is over we'll put it all back in the box and save it for next Christmas--at least that is the plan.
Here is my mantel and gingerbread tree. I love collecting Christmasy houses and anything with gingerbread boys and and girls.
Today I am thankful that

*We have a washing machine and dryer, today is laundry day and I'd hate to wash all of it by hand.

*December has finally arrived. My kids are anxious to start counting down to Christmas, let's just hope our advent charts don't cause a lot of contention, like in past years.

*There are so many cheesy (Hallmark style) Christmas shows on. So far I have watched Christmas Engagement, November Christmas (sad), Elf, Decorating wars, and Trading Christmas. The kids will watch them with me so it's a win win.

Thanksgiving Fun

I started off Thanksgiving day by taking a walk with Scott. I love walks, being outside and being with my fun husband so that was a great start to my day. Once we returned home the kids watched the Thanksgiving day parade. We tape it on our DVR machine and then start watching it an hour after it starts so we can fast forward through all the commercials. Holly and Emily enjoyed coloring Thanksgiving pictures while they watched the parade.
Then at noon we went to my parents house for our Thanksgiving meal. Everything was delicious but as always the kids just ate a little and then ran off to play. The kids were excited to decorate ice cream snowmen with candy after the adults finished eating.
Here is the sample picture and the candy that we used to decorate with.And here are some of the finished snowmen.
Scott helped Nathan with his snowman.
I think this one belonged to our cousin Grant.
These just turned out so cute.
A group shot with the snowmen eaten up. Notice all the adults visiting in the family room behind.
I got this nice picture of me with my mom and Dad.
I had a great day and I hope you did too. Now onto Christmas. I can't wait to have Christmas lights inside and outside my house, it has been so dark here lately. Plus Christmas lights just make everything seem magical.

A pre-Christmas craft and messes at our house

After several rainy days we got a sun break and Nathan and I went to find some leaves to play in. Unfortunately the leaves were quite wet. After taking a picture and throwing a couple in the air we headed home. We love playing with dry leaves on the ground...maybe next year.I bought some cinnamon scented pinecones and some tiny pompoms and Melissa made us some fun pinecone trees.Megan made some too. I really like them becuase they are tiny and cute and they smell good.I had my two new snowmen pose among the trees. Then I put the snowmen and trees away for another week. We don't decorate for Christmas here until after Thanksgiving.These are everyday messes at our house. Backpacks and binders on the bench, lots of shoes underneath and handmade art on the wall.Lots of colorful coats on the coat rack.Water bottles by the sink, waiting to be filled for another day of school.Lunch boxes on top of the microwave. I'm really glad for these messes. They show that I have lots of children, which are my greatest creations. I think I will miss these messes when my kids are all grownup and moved away.Here are two of my favorite kids, Sweet Megan and my little buddy Nathan.

Happy Thanksgiving! Thanks for being my friends and reading my blog. :)