Christmas 2011 Nativity

I love wood.

I love everything about it - the color, the grain, the smell.....

I have always wanted to work with wood so when I saw a scroll saw at a yard sale I bought it!

Here is our first scroll saw project:

Silver helping me glue on the figures

I have wanted a wooden nativity for my kids to be able to play with.

This was so much fun to put together for them and with them!

I loved this project SO much!

I was able to complete it in a week and we have had much fun with it telling the Christmas story!

Christmas 2010

We enjoyed our Christmas!

I like digital pictures...but sometimes there are technical difficulties - I accidentally erased all pictures from our Christmas day :( 

But to focus on the positive - I have 2 cameras, and not all our pictures were deleted.  Some of the week after Christmas were salvaged from being on the other card.

 A new Bathroom Floor!

This looks so much better!  Even when it was clean - being white it always looked dirty.

This has made our bathroom look classy, and quite a bit bigger too :)

Thanks Colt!

We got our girls bunkbeds for Christmas.

We had a lot of fun with the box.

They pretended this was their airplane, and they are waving as they are taking off into the air.

They played for quite awhile here...flying up in the air, and getting in and out of the plane.  

We got a zoo puzzle that is really fun!

River can put most of it together by herself - I was really impressed with her ability to figure it out and stick with it until it was done.

Sometimes little sisters can be quite frustrating - she keeps spreading out all the pieces! 

 Putting together our bunkbeds!

River can touch the ceiling, and Silver's in a big girl bed!!

Oh Happy Day!

Cookies and SNOW!

I did a post earlier on Lebkuchen cookies!

We made another batch, and I grabbed some pics of us making our cookies:

This batch took us many many days to complete. 

The first day it took me 5 hours from start to finish - we started and got all the wet ingredients added together.  With everything that can crop up through the day (I NEVER know what I'll get - it keeps me on my toes - I wonder what we'll run into today?) I didn't get a chance to add all the dry ingredients until after 11 that evening.  I put the dough in the fridge, and it was a couple of days later that we finally got a chance to roll it out. 

I've learned not to preheat the oven until just before we are ready to cook them, even a cake mix can take us a whole lot longer than the oven takes to preheat :) 

 River kept saying that it didn't feel like Christmas because it wasn't a white Christmas - it was a brown/muddy Christmas!   Soooo....I went to change Summer's diaper, and came back to SNOW!

Happy White Christmas!

Hot Chocolate and Christmas Songs

Here's a new tradition that we started this year that we'd like to do each Christmas:

Hot Chocolate and Christmas Songs Family Night

VIDEO:  Silver Singing

VIDEO:  River Singing

Colt came home and put the groceries by the door as he was getting more groceries out of the truck and didn't want to track mud across the carpet. 

River was our big helper and helped carry the groceries to the kitchen - one thing at a time of course :). Unfortunately, the gallon of milk was too much for her.  Silver  had grabbed a gallon and was struggling to get across the front room.  River said "Silver, look, this is how you do it"  She hoisted the gallon up as high as she could get it, and then we watched in slow-motion it seemed as she went over backwards with the gallon of milk.  It hit the carpet and split the jug open with milk gushing everywhere.  We quickly salvaged 1/2 gallon before it too ended up on the carpet, and grabbed towels to soak up the standing milk. 

I then took out the carpet cleaner and slurped up the remaining milk.

Sounds like a good night for hot chocolate to me! 

We sang songs of Christ's birth and of Santa and the Reindeer.   

 FHE Lesson:  How Repentance is like cleaning up the milk.

Sin/Mistakes - Spilling milk on the carpet. 

Towels:  We do what we can to fix it/clean it up and then Carpet Cleaner:  Christ's atonement fixes it the rest of the way.

Definitely a Tradition Worth Keeping!

Ornaments

One of my favorite traditions is an ornament for each child for Chrismtas. 

Colt's family did this for him, and when we got married, we had a whole tree full!

We also do an ornament for the family!

 This year's ornament - I think it's neat that they light up and are under the tapestry that reads:  "In His Light"

 This are very beautiful ...

and extremely fragile!

We had 2 break this season...

The kids have their own Nativity set that they can play with. 

River is always playing with this and rearranges the figures in different ways while telling the story of Christ's Birth.

 This is the Family Ornament from 2 years ago when Silver was a newborn for Christmas.