Merry Christmas

We had a nice, quiet Christmas this year. I tried to keep things as simple as possible and we've all enjoyed just being together at home the last couple of days.

We finally got our Christmas cookies frosted on Christmas Eve (and of course, I always end up eating way more than my share of them!)


But we managed to save out a couple to leave for Santa too...


The kids were excited to hang up stockings on Christmas Eve. We just taped them to the mantel (Brian wasn't sure how strong it was) and McKay left a note for Santa to leave the filled stockings on the couch.


Santa did manage to find our new house this year.


One of the things I tried this year was an idea I borrowed from my friend. I decided that rather than take the kids shopping to get presents for each other, I would help them make something. I chose some fairly simple proejcts and they were excited about it. Hayley helped me pick out felt and buttons to make some very basic cases for the kid's MP3 players.

Courtney picked out fleece and helped to sew some hats.


Hannah picked out flannel and made rice heating bags for everyone's feet at night (you fill the bags with rice and heat them in the microwave just before bed).


McKay picked out some fabric to sew some new pillowcases for the girls.


The kids enjoyed their presents and I felt good about not going too overboard this year. One of my favorite presents (from my sweet hubby) was an iPod Touch -- I'm having fun with it! And here's the dashing guy himself in his new leather jacket:


The family room afterward was a disaster zone, as usual! (And it still is -- we've all been too busy playing to clean up yet!)


We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas too!

Live Nativity

Last weekend, our ward participated in a live nativity at a ward member's home. Their neighborhood is well-known in this area for Christmas lights -- it is a favorite spot for people to drive through and several homes go all out with the decorating. (They even have little signs with arrows directing traffic through the neighborhood.) They got permission to have the live nativity for 3 nights. It was really neat and exciting to be a part of!

They built a stable, got some animals, made some great costumes and lots of people helped by wrapping up little bags of Hershey's Kisses attached to a pass-along card for the "Joy to the World" DVD.

Brian and McKay signed up to be shepherds on Saturday night. They had two groups for each night so they could trade off after 30-45 minutes and come inside to warm up!

(Brian had a little trouble with the rope tie on his head scarf...) Brian also said he ended up taking his gloves off later.

I took the girls over for a bit and took some pictures. The wise men would "travel" back and forth from their "camel" on the house to present their gifts. The missionaries were there where the cars passed by to hand out the pass-along cards and treats. It was a busy weekend -- I think they handed out over 2,000 cards!

The hosting ward member (who is also in our bishopric) wrote up a little article for the Church News web site. Read it here! What a neat experience.

Trim the Tree

Believe it or not, we have actually had our tree up for a little while now. It's just taking me a long time to get the blog updated (thanks in part, to a certain series of vampire books that I finally decided I needed to read -- yeah, couldn't have picked a busier time of year for that!)

It was a little tricky finding a spot for the tree in our new house, but we found one that seems to work okay with a little furniture rearrangement. The kids always love decorating the tree. We have one of those "kid-friendly" trees with all the handmade, school-project, non-matching ornaments. I love it!

We did have a slight problem this year with a middle section of lights not working. What's the point of a pre-lit tree if the lights won't work? Brian couldn't figure out what the problem was, so we ended up just stringing on a regular strand over that section. Kind of a pain, but hopefully it's not too noticeable. (We also ended up with some missing piece for the base that holds the tree up straight, so I had to improvise that with some piece of cardboard.)

Last year, I decided to start an ornament tradition in the kids that I heard about. Each year, I pick out a special ornament for each of them. At some point when they leave home, they will get to take the box of "their" ornaments with them. We started late last year, so they didn't get their ornaments until Christmas Eve. This year, I was prepared and had them for the tree-decorating night.

McKay got a "Cowboy Santa" ornament (you can pull on the string to make his arms and legs go up and down).

Courtney got an angel doll:

Hayley got a sparkly girl and puppy on a sled:

And then there's Hannah. I was a little worried about Hannah's ornament this year -- wanted to make sure I picked out the right one for her. Fortunately, she was quite happy with her snowman sled:

The reason for my worry was what happened last year (some of you might remember this). I was excited to start this tradition and spent quite a bit of time choosing their ornaments. I picked out some musical notes for Hannah, because she had recently started piano lessons and was doing really well with them, and also because she loves to sing and is the best singer of all the kids. I thought she would be thrilled with it. Boy, was I wrong. When I gave it to her, she burst into tears (this was on Christmas Eve, remember). For whatever reason (that I still don't understand), she just really did not like it. I took a picture of each kid with their ornament, and this was Hannah's:

She would hardly even hold it. (Oh, the drama in Hannah's life!) The rest of Christmas Eve, she was still teary-eyed and upset. (On a positive note, this year she told me that she was finally okay now with that ornament.)

Fire and Ice

Okay, so it was more snow than ice, but the title just didn't work as well that way. :-)

We saw our first snowfall here in Amarillo this past week. I don't know how much snow we'll see this winter, but the kids were excited to see even a little bit! We probably only got 1-2 inches.

The roads got a little icy (we heard about a big pile-up on the freeway just outside of town) and I had to grab a spatula to scrape the windshield off, but we survived. :-) I have since bought an official windshield scraper and my wonderful husband cleared out the garage so I could park the van there and not have to scrape it so much.

The weather is definitely a little colder than we're all used to --especially when that cold wind blows (it feelsl ike it will blow right through to your bones). Brian built our very first fire in the fireplace the other night. We had a fireplace in The Woodlands, but never once built an actual fire. We made some hot chocolate to sip and the kids thought it was so great. They've asked every night for another fire and hot chocolate.

Tonight is looking like it will be our coldest night yet -- it's about 11 degrees outside right now and is supposed to get down to about 8 degrees. Yikes! We'll see how well our house keeps warm!

Family Pictures

I tried a little photo-shoot with the kids the other day, hoping to get some decent "birthday" pictures (that we always used to go to the JC Penney studio for) and also one of the kids for our Christmas card.

Overall, I think they turned out good. I ran into a few issues -- like not having quite enough space in the sitting area where we had the backdrop draped on and getting bad reflections off McKay's glasses. I tweaked the color a bit in Photoshop -- sometimes it's hard to tell if your changes are better or worse!

So here you go!

Mr. McKay...

Hannah with those killer blue eyes...

Cute Courtney (I'm really liking the shorter hair on her)...

And little Miss Hayley...

Had to throw in this one too. Love the cooperation of a 4-year-old. :-)

All the kids together (very squished!)...

A couple of days later just before church, I wanted to try taking a family picture with the tripod. We couldn't use the same location (not enough room) so we tried our main room with the front door open for light. I was disappointed with how badly the glasses reflections showed up, and also wished we had moved a little farther back so there were more cropping options. It didn't make the cut for the Christmas card as a result, but you get to see it here anyway!

And I thought this was a cute one of the girls as I was testing the camera settings.

I've ordered some prints and am anxious to see how they turn out!

Thanksgiving Part IV - Snowy Mountain

It's a tradition in Brian's family to go up into the mountains the day after Thanksgiving and cut down Christmas trees. While we weren't getting a tree for ourselves, we went along for the fun and especially the snow! Since there was no snow yet down at Grandma's house, the kids were so excited to see some. There wasn't even a lot of snow up in the mountains yet this year, but enough to have a little fun in! (And thankfully, Grandma has a big bag of different sizes of boots, etc. to borrow!)

There were several snowballs thrown and the kids tried to build snow "stuff," but there just wasn't quite enough snow for too much building this year.

We built a big bonfire and roasted hot dogs for lunch.

There was one small sled there, and the kids had a grand time taking turns sliding down a small hill. (And I had a very hard time getting them to keep their gloves on!)

And you'll never know how much effort it took to pull the kids away from their fun long enough to snap a family picture...