December

Here are some pictures from our December this year.  We went to see Anna sing with her choir at the Camas tree lighting.  They did a great job and then had fun caroling afterward.  We got some hot cocoa to keep warm.

 

Anna at her school choir concert.  She has had a fun time singing in the choir this year.

We haven't had too many activities going on but Emma has been playing basketball

Grant learned to make these cool large snowflakes in school

We also went to my nephew's baptism early in December but I didn't take any pictures

At the Christmas Tree Farm

We went out one cold, rainy Saturday to get a Christmas tree.  It wasn't very crowded, but kind of wet.

Everyone found trees they loved.

Emma found an Emma sized tree.

Here we are by our chosen tree

Getting some cocoa after being cold out by the trees

Setting Up the Tree

We let the tree dry out for a day before bringing it inside.

The kids helped put the decorations on

Emma got to put on the ceremonial star this year

Hooray!  The Christmas tree is up!!

Gingerbread

I always seem to get sick in early December when its gingerbread time and this year was the same.  I also had a statistics final in early December consuming all my time.  So we did gingerbread houses a little later than I would have liked.  Here is Emma helping me make gingerbread.

Here we are assembling our gingerbread houses.  We spent a lot of time on this this year.

Now some of the older kids can put on the royal icing on their own so that makes it easier on me

Emma's house

This is Grant's heavily decorated house

Matthew's house (left) and Anna's house (right)

Grant's house (left), John's house (middle) and Emma's house (right)

Gingerbread Lane

The house on the far left was made with extra pieces (usually I bake a few extra wall, roof and front/back pieces just in case), but sadly not enough roof pieces.  And we had to put a load bearing gingerbread man in the middle of one wall.  We said maybe it was under construction.

Candies used this year: spree, skittles, m&ms, mini candy canes, starlight mints, red hots, gummy bears, gum drops and gummy lifesavers.  Gummy lifesavers were the most popular candy this year.  The kids ate half of them and then complained that there weren't enough to decorate with.  Grant found they were helpful for getting little candy canes to stand up.

First Snow

A week or so before Christmas break we woke up to a surprise snow.  After driving to church and back in the slush the kids played in the snow.  

Grant made a family of snow people.  The all had cool names like "Admiral Snowflake."  

You can see the snow wasn't going to last long

The next day

One of Admiral Snowflake's children looked kind of like a snow duck the next day.

Goodbye snow.

Scott took Matthew to a movie on the 23rd and I baked cookies all day - six different kinds of cookies.

Christmas Eve

We went to Scott's brother's house in Oregon City for Christmas Eve.  We had a little bit earlier dinner since we weren't quite sure when an expected storm was going to hit - so we went home before it was too late.  We had a lovely dinner and the kids decorated cookies and we even had a visit from Santa.

Matthew looks pretty big there on Santa's lap.  

I guess I didn't get a picture of Anna but she got to talk to Santa too.

I thought we would just go back home on Christmas Eve and chill but the kids said they wanted to do our usual Nativity program.  For years we have done this and I have a program we do with the scripture story and certain songs we sing throughout.  I have links to the songs from a page on my computer so I can click and bring up the different songs, but narrating, keeping kids in line, getting the right song to play and getting the words printed out for everyone feels stressful, plus we have to rummage around and get costumes and stuff.  I was looking forward to not doing it, but I guess that was an unpopular decision.  I have been practicing many Christmas songs on the piano this year and one song I can play pretty well is a simplified version The First Noel, which is the opening song of our program.  So I attempted to play it and got so flustered with people singing while I was playing that I got lost a couple times.  I didn't try to play any other songs on the piano after that.  I guess that's something to work on for next year.  

I also forgot that I had wanted to prep scalloped potatoes and cinnamon rolls the night before so after frantically throwing the nativity program together I went to work on the food.  This is all self imposed stress, but I still feel like if I don't do all the things that are expected its a Christmas failure.  Sigh!

After Christmas I did make a binder with the program script in it, lots of copies of the words for people to look at and the piano music if I choose to play anything.  Apparently it's hard for me to play this pretty simple song, that I have played hundreds of times, while others sing.  I don't know how those church pianists do it.  Amazing!!  Anyway, this should make it easier for next year.

Then we opened Christmas jammies from Ma2

Now we are all ready for Christmas!

We have had these matching shirts for many years and this year Anna decided she couldn't wear hers anymore - it was too small.  Matthew kindly passed his larger shirt down to her and got to graduate to an adult shirt.  I guess some of us are growing up.  And now we don't match so well anymore.

Christmas Day

Christmas morning we have breakfast before we open gifts

Cinnamon rolls, fruit and German pancakes

Scott and I were discussing moving the cinnamon rolls to Christmas Eve because I feel stressed on Christmas day with the cooking.

John waiting for present opening.  He was very concerned about whether we would move the coffee table out of the way.  We eventually did.

Happy Christmas!!

I started buying up shirts that look like the ones Scott and I have.  Maybe we can match again sometime.

Making ham and stuff after the present opening melee.

We had a nice Christmas dinner with both sets fo grandparents over.  It was nice, but we were expecting a possible storm again so we ate kind of early.

The possible snowmageddon didn't come, but we did get a little snow fall after Christmas to play in.

Pretty!

It was not a ton, but enough to sled in

Ready for sledding!!

Anna wore some old snow pants of mine 'cause she has outgrown everything she used to wear.  

Everyone grew tall this year!

Woohoo!!

The snow looks scant here but it was still slippery enough to sled.

And some new snow persons were built

This one has fancy hair

The snowman Emma and I built fell apart pretty quickly so Emma and Anna rebuilt a new one.

Theirs was better looking.

We did lots of Christmas break puzzles

A world map

Puzzle of Portland

Alpine Christmas puzzle

People enjoyed their Christmas gifts

Lego Infinity gauntlet

Megablocks Pikachu (or maybe this is Pichu?)

Emma got this drawing board toy.  We couldn't get it to work at first but eventually got it going.  Maybe some trees will be saved this year by this device - she likes to draw lots of pictures.  Stacks every day.  She's having fun with this so far.

Our car wouldn't start one evening when we wanted to to go over to my parents for a get together with my sister and brother.  Luckily we were able to jump it but it took some doing - not an easy jump.  We determined one of the kids had left a light on in the back seat on Christmas Eve.  So the battery drained over the next few days.  All better now.  And we made it to the party, which I forgot to take any pictures of.  I am terrible and photographing family get togethers.  I just forget.

New Year's Eve

We had a nice New Year's Eve at home.  We had pizza, cookies, Italian sodas and watched Encanto.  Then we played board games and watched My Fair Lady (or rather it was on in the background).  Since the movie is kind of long we ended up staying up later playing games.

As a result, all five kids were awake at midnight.  We have a nice view of fireworks from our second floor so we enjoyed watching all the fireworks and listening to Auld Lang Syne!! 

Happy New Year!!

November

 

Emma has been playing on a co-ed basketball team.  She has some friends on the team and has been having a good time.  She is getting better at making baskets.  On this day she made 8 or 9 baskets in a row.  I kept trying to take a video of her but kept getting started too late.  She is improving and that's great.

I cleared out a space in the other office for me to do work and it has been so great having my own space.

I took a final for my second class so have now completed two classes, both statistics heavy.

Helping John with his math homework - he is learning multiplication this year.  I have a lot of sympathy for feeling completely confused by some math thing - so we've been working through it a lot together.  Anna wants to help him a lot too since she is tutoring math at school.

Grant likes to rearrange these holiday blocks to say different things and then leave it as a surprise for us in the morning.

Grant has also been building a lego tiny town.  You can see the kind of yellow and purple cars in the center bottom of this picture and then a nearby streetlight.  I think people in this town are the little dots.  He keeps expanding his town to have different zones.  He has a business district, a marina, a park, a residential area and an industrial area and has plans for new zones.

Here is more of an overview of tiny town - I don't think that's what he calls it.

Most of us are loving the Pacific Northwest weather.  We had enough sun the other night to have a beautiful sunset.

Emma turned 7 earlier in November.  We went to Olive Garden for a birthday lunch.

And we had a little family birthday party at our house.

Anna dressed up as Anna from Frozen for the Frozen themed party.

Emma was very excited about it.

We did some different games, including dangling donuts.  We did that outside because of the powdered sugar mess and Emma passed on that game because she thought it was too cold outside.  It was cold.  You can see her inside, waiting it out.

We played pin the nose on Olaf

We made marshmallow snowmen

Played some different games throwing these puffy snowball balls we have.

And had cake - store bought obviously.

I think Emma liked it.

Anna knitted a neck warmer thing for Emma using a round loom we have.  It was well received.

Emma picked Ramen for her birthday dinner - one of her favorites.

We celebrated her birthday early because Scott had to go out of town for AF reserve duty on her real birthday.  He often has to go in November and has missed her birthday before so have celebrated it early in the past, but now she is old enough to know what's happening so she was a little annoyed about the real and fake birthday situation.  On her real birthday we went out for frozen yogurt.  It was a lot of fun.

Scott was also gone on Veteran's Day - John drew this picture for him.

Anna got to sing in a choir event at the high school

And then it was Thanksgiving!  We spent a few days preparing.   This year I assigned each kid a Thanksgiving prep task - I haven't done that in the past.  I had Matthew prep and peel sweet potatoes, John made the cranberry sauce (with help from Scott), Grant peeled apples and helped prep some stuffing things, Emma helped make fruit salad and set the table and Anna made a pumpkin pie.  We had some extra filling so Anna and Matthew made some tiny pies too.  We had just made a bunch of homemade applesauce using some apples my sister had given me and we used some of the extra chunky applesauce to make tiny apple pies along with the tiny pumpkin.

Our Thanksgiving feast.

I was also there.

Anna wrote a cute play about Thanksgiving and all the kids performed it after dinner.

It was a nice evening.  Then we had pie!