~ Merry Christmas ~

The S family wishes you a very merry Christmas!

Pre-Chaos Catch-Up

That title is a mouthful! With tomorrow being Christmas and later today being the annual M family Christmas Eve get-together, well, there should be lots of pictures to share this weekend so I really needed to take a break from the wrapping to write about some of the events of the last week.

First, there is the getting-ready-for-Xmas stuff we have been doing - typical things like mailing the cards, buying the presents, attending some parties, decorating the house, etc.  Oh yeah, and in the middle of all this, the kids' school decided that there should be a "Dress as your Favorite Book Character Day" thrown in.  The kids chose their favorites based on what we could throw together without one more trip shopping.

This year we made the kids three kinds of jar gifts for the "teachers" at the school... we put the dry ingredients into jars that they can then use to make brownies, M&M cookies, or Cranberry Hootycreeks (cookies with no chocolate ~ there is a person on the planet who does not like chocolate and she is right here in our small town!). We finished the jars by putting a pretty snowman fabric tied with ribbon around the top, and attached the recipe and a note from the kids (forgot to get a picture of that part).  We made 24 total and 23 headed to school with the kids and one went to Doug's school. While putting them together was pretty, um, messy (we are still skating across the kitchen floor where the flour fell and sticking in the dropped sugar patches, even post-vacuuming and mopping), the kids enjoyed it and we hope the finished products turned out okay but with none left, we didn't get to test them out!

Check out all the white stuff at our house!!!  Almost 20 inches and we have one drift on the back porch taller than Doug!  The kids could hardly wait to sled and play outside so we dragged out all the snow gear and headed out...

I was bummed that my pictures were all a bit fuzzy and though I had done something to my camera until I realized that "the fuzz" is the snow still coming down!  A few pictures need some explanation: Brynn is pouting in the one because she wasn't getting a sledding turn but really the boys were just trying to pack the powder down to make a path, Nyah is pouting because she was miserable but in her defense it was windy and still coming down, kudos to my nephew & Caleb for working to make a decent hill, there were quite a few wipeouts in the process of making a hill, and Price just loved the snow because he could play in it and eat it!

Evan was inside most of the time when I had my camera out because football bowl picks were due and he had to quadruple-check his choices but I did get one picture through the window screen.

The evening after the snowfall we went to a friend's farm to sled down some BIG hills.  What a blast!  Nothing like sledding down a hill under lots of stars and hearing the cows moo at the finish line!  The bonfire at the top of the hill helped take the chill off. All of us but Nyah would have stayed hours longer. I brought my little camera that night and tried to take some pictures while going down the hill.  Picture taking in the pitch dark at high speeds is a bit challenging!  The one of Price coming down the hill happened because the people at the top of the hill didn't know I had a camera and they kept seeing a flashing light so they sent down Price to make sure I was alright and that it wasn't an emergency signal!   Caleb and Doug even conquered the big hill ~ the people who invited us got a good laugh at the fact that very few people went down the big one in the daylight when riders could see what it really looked like; the dark made people brave!

More this weekend!

A tired elf...

Brynn has her dance recital on Saturday.  She is in the Elf group and cannot wait to perform on stage.  She starts asking "When?" the first week of classes. This week we have spend two nights at rehearsals and the first night is always sooo long and she is in the second half of the show.  She didn't find watching the performances entertaining enough.

She got tired of waiting and decided to take a 45 minute rest.

Unfortunately, I did not know the order of the show and had to wake her up when they called her group.  Let's just say she was not really refreshed or loving the stage during the gymnastics performance.

After a trip to the potty and some time to get herself together, she did recover by the hip-hop dance 15 minutes later:

While she may not know the dance as well as others and may have the most crooked legs during the cartwheels, she more than makes up for these things with her enthusiasm, her giggle, and her cuteness! 

I'm lovin' those tights!

Undecided...

Here is Evan's letter to Santa this year; if you ask him what he wants he will say, "I don't know."

So I guess he is leaving it up to Santa to provide a present he will love and it certainly needs to be masculine.

He was mad that morning because he spotted Tommy Z. (the elf watching if they are naughty or nice) at the same time Price did but Price was walking around claiming he alone found it.

He wrote it on a notebook divider because that was the first clean sheet of "paper" he found." Evan is so no-nonense. He cracks me up.

First Snow...

We had the first snow of the season on Saturday. Brynn couldn't wait to get out and build a snowman though after getting all the necessities for outdoor play on and coming in to change gloves 3 times, she probably was only outside for 10 minutes. Eventually she built one with her dad's help though it fell over not much later... I think we need a bit more snow for that.

Probably a little more for snowball fights too.

Price and Evan both love to eat snow. Who said feeding boys would be expensive?

Nyah preferred to stay indoors and eat the left over chocolate chip pancakes from breakfast.

Not sure where Caleb was during all this... probably up in his room enjoying a moment free from siblings pestering him. More snow might be coming next Saturday too!

From one holiday to the next...

Let's do a little catching up.

The week before Thanksgiving the seven of us and my parents headed up to Virginia Tech for a football game. The weather was great and the seats were great, even if we were right next to the opposing team's band... then again maybe the girls were not as whiny as I expected simply because I couldn't hear them! Before the game we stopped by Doug's grandmother's house for a quick visit. It was great to see her.

The day before Thanksgiving the kids were surprised when old friends came back to VA for a visit; they moved from our neighborhood to California in the summer of 2008 and have been missed terribly. What a fun reunion it was and we hope to make it out for a visit sometime in 2010.

Thanksgiving began with the annual Turkey Trot in our neighborhood. This year all three boys ran. Caleb ran and finished first out of our family.

Price ran with Doug and completed the whole race, which is great for Price because while he is a good athlete, running is not really a favorite sport.

I ran with Evan. I was surprised he agreed to run three miles and once he wanted to cut out a part; he is so competitive and I think he realized he couldn't win but I tried explaining to him that it was finishing that mattered, that his dad and I never even finish in the top half of our races, and that this was a long race for a 6 year old, I think he understood. Now Evan and I have very different running styles ~ I am ssslooowww but steady and he likes to mix it up ~ some sprinting, some walking, some hurdling of puddles. I was more sore the next day than I was after the half-marathon! See how foggy it is? Let's just say I don't recommend running up a golf-course driving range in fog. We all got very, very lucky... both the thirty-something runners and the poor lone golfer who was quite surprised to see us all come from the same place he had just hit a ball into. After the race we went home for the Thanksgiving feast, complete with our fried turkey... PaPa once again did a fabulous job! It was a great day, as was the Black Friday shopping the next day.

The house is almost all decorated for Christmas and there are a few ornaments I want to write about and I am starting today with the above because I don't think I talked about it last year and there is a story... in case it is not obvious. Price made this last year. As they were finishing them up I ran into his teacher and she was concerned that we would be upset that he made his snowman black. We laughed. She tends to like things neat and pretty and well, this falls into more of the "interesting" category. Price said he just wanted to make his snowman black and his friend Nick did too.

This year we have been visited by an elf. He visited the Saturday after Thanksgiving for the first time and brought a book with him to explain why he was here. The boys wanted to name him Tommy and Brynn wanted to name him Zart so his name is, drumroll please, Tommy Zart. Every night he reports to Santa what went on here and comes back to a different spot in the house. So far he has done this every night without fail but we will see if he can keep it up; after all this house has so much activity I'm thinking there might be a day or too when he is just too darn tired to move. Evan & Price do not seem the slightest bit concerned about any behavior being reported; they just like to get up 30 minutes earlier now and compete to find him and argue if one gives a hint after finding him. I am not going to quote exactly here but the day T.Z. was straddling the bathroom light, Price's first words were about how he was sure the light was squeezing a certain body part that rhymes with huts. Now, Brynn is more concerned about behavior and reminds her brothers often that they are being watched and now, when she gets in trouble, she is three times as dramatic because she knows that means she is getting no presents even though we tell her that mistakes happen and there is plenty of time to be good between now and Xmas. Caleb really has no interest in T.Z.

Brynn has her dance recital next week. I'm not sure that all the pieces really go well together but she can work any outfit... isn't she cute? Her dance teacher mentioned after class on Monday that she needed to learn how to do a backward roll and today she was so proud to have mastered it!

Tomorrow we attempt our Christmas card picture. I'd use the above if we didn't have four other children. This should be fun.