A few Christmas Pictures

I painted this for Taylor for Christmas. It was my first painting and since have painted at every opportunity. I just love expressing my self through oils!

Jasmin with her Bubble Gum. We could have only bought her that and she would have been thrilled!

Dale with his goo. You can see I left Taylor in charge of the gifts this year and he had a grand time. Our theme was activity (rip sticks and new knee and elbow pads) and Nerf guns. I was very hesitant about the Nerf, I wasn't sure we would ever use them. Since then we have had multiple "Wars" on the third floor and have had some triple dates at the church for all out battles! They are so much fun, I hate admitting Taylor was right so I will just say I was totally wrong!

Holiday Cheer

These are our kids with our extended family (by choice not blood) the Gerlach's minus Jason. They stayed with us for about 2 months while they were waiting for their house to sell in Utah.

Anyway, every year Santa comes through neighborhood on his sleigh and lets us take pictures and hands out candy canes. It is something our kids look forward to every Christmas.

Papa, Nana, Cami and Ladawna came for Christmas this year. We took our annual trip to Hammond Candy Factory, it always gets our mouths ready for are holiday sweets.

Why is it underlining???

Another tradition of ours is to have hot cocoa on Christmas eve, open a family board game.

And of course get a new pair of .....

P.J.'S!!!

I think they like them, what do you think?

Fall Fun

While the Cornaby's were here for Thanksgiving I was lucky enough to get this picture of Dale and Arianna (there oldest). We have known them since before they had any kids so we are pretty close and the kids feel as close to each other as close cousins. They are always looking forward to the next visit.

Darling Lucas. You can see the football game going, relaxing and the card table up for whatever board games we'd been playing.

Webelos activity. Every year since I have been the Webelos Den Mother, I have taken my group to the studio of a local artist. She lets us use all her supplies and teaches the kids a little about her medium of choice which is oils. And as the post continue you will see how her enthusiasm has rubbed off on me.

Along with the annual art project I do a Christmas party for all the cub scouts at my house each year. These are just my Webelos boys and there creations but each den will get a gingerbread house to decorate and then we have a contest. My kitchen floor gets a good scrubbing the next day after all the sugar icing. But I wouldn't have it any other way. We all have a great time!

I was telling my SIL the other day how I wanted little girls so bad when I just had my two boys. Since I have had daughters (whom I love and adore!) I have to admit that I have realized I would have made a great mother to all boys! Even though a girly girl I am, I have a very hard time understanding the emotions of my daughters. I totally get my boys, I ask, "Jordan, whats wrong?" Answer, "I am Happy, Mad, Sad, or Hungry!" I ask, "Amelia, whats wrong?" Answer, " I don't know!!!, SOB SOB SOB!!!!"

Fall

First snow of the 2010 season. It is just a little, but the kids still wanted to go and play in it.

Thanksgiving!! This is my favorite holiday. Family, food, and no other expectations except it kicks off the count down to Christmas.

This was most of our food, we did have stuffing, green beans "fresh" cranberry sauce and yummy jams we brought back from Alaska for our rolls. It doesn't really look like a lot of food but it fed our family and one other family that came to stay with us for about three days.

We definitely had enough when it came to the pies! Yum-yum! All this food talk is getting my mouth watering. It makes me very excited for this next Thanksgiving. I will remember to take a few pictures of our table and perhaps a few with people in them. :)

Amelia turns 5

Amelia wanted cake with lots of strawberries!!

Taylor's birthday. I bet you can't guess what is inside the boxes...

Just a reminder to everyone

I am playing the catch up game as I have not hardly blogged anything in two years. So now I am officially only one year behind. My goal is in the next two or three weeks I will be caught up on my blogging. And then, as our life is normally very dull you shouldn't hear from me except maybe twice a month. But until then you will get almost daily posts on our life over the last year.

It was going to freeze!

When you have a garden in the fall you learn to watch the weather. It was going to freeze so in the rest of the produce came. Here are some of the baby watermelons I picked right before the freeze, I was fairly certain that they would be white on the inside but no. They were so sweet and delicious! There is nothing like fresh home grown watermelon and cantaloupe and pears and and and and... I should just end that sentence at the phrase "fresh home grown".

Hack Job!!!

I can't even call this a hair cut. Jasmin was truly hacked at. I had a friend tend my girls one day and between her son and Amelia they had at Jasmin's hair. The first couple hours I didn't realize what had happened (my friend told me she found them using detangler) so it just looked like a bunch of something was in her hair making it weird. About know I found globs of hair in Amelia's room on the floor so that is when I investigated. Come to find out, Jasmin had huge chunks of hair missing all around her head. It was more then I could bear there were definitely many tears on my part.

I was so overwhelmed with trying to fix this mess on her head that I took her in to get it cut, this was the very best she could do. You can't tell in the pictures but she didn't cut the hair as short as some of the missing clumps (which is what I would have done) but just tried to cover them up with some of the longish strands that were left. Bravo to her, she did a much better job then I would have done.

You can kind of see one of the missing clumps at her ear, the hair is VERY thin right there. And right above her bangs there is a very short chunk missing. :(

Since Amelia was involved I told her it was not fair that she cut all of Jasmin's hair off and she still gets to keep her long hair so I gave her bangs and bob. No hacking for her, which maybe I should have done. There didn't seem to be a lesson learned, she thought the hair cut was great! Although I will say she hasn't tried to cut Jasmin's hair again.

Colonial Living Days

Once a year a church in Denver puts on a big event where you get to step back in time and see how people once lived. We learn how to make baskets, fresh apple cider, spinning and weaving wool into yarn and fabric and dipping candles. We have a great time when we go.

Boys making muskets.

Candle dipping.