December catch-up

We started off the month with a combined birthday party for the girls.  I have never combined their party and never will again, it was crazy!  The reason I did combine was because due to our busy July this summer and then August flew by as well, I just never got around to throwing a party for Bree, even though I had a super fun balloon/water one planned.  When Kaylee's birthday came around 4 months later and she asked for a party, I decided to combine.  A friend of mine had dressed her family up as Angry Birds for Halloween, so that's where my idea started.  Here's some of the snacks - they got to build their own Angry Bird Sandwich using bread cut using a circle cookie cutter, lunch meat, different cheeses for the eyes and beak, and olives.  I found the idea HERE thanks to a friend who shared it on facebook.

The kids also decorated their own Angry Birds cupcakes - once again I won't share pics of the kids and their creations for privacy but I loved what they all came up with!  I provided lots of different colored frosting, black licorice ropes, gummy orange slices (that we cut down for beaks), marshmallows, sprinkles, and various other toppings.  We did homemade personal pan pizzas - so yummy!  I didn't get any pics of just my kids, so I won't share them here.  Here is the pinata that the girls helped me make - he's the bomb!

I ordered some slingshots and ping pong balls and we planned this fun game.  Here is Kaylee trying it out a couple weeks before the party.  If you can't tell from the pics, we drew some pig and bird faces on the ping pong balls.  This pic is before we colored the balls - I ended up using spray paint to get different colored balls for all of the different characters.  The kids divided into teams - one would be the pig team and build up a fortress from foam blocks and the other team would be the birds and try to knock it down with their slingshots.  It was a lot of fun.

The next day Bree had a party to go to so she helped me make this quick fleece hat and scarf as a gift for her friend - she had to model it and make sure it would fit!

Here's Brailee and I hanging out at the girls' school Christmas Program.  I think it's great that we live in a community where the public elementary school can still have a Christmas program!

Brailee is in a performance group called Sunshine Generation and December was their performance month.  She loves it - it's totally her thing as she loves to sing and dance - constantly!  Anyway, they had five performances and she got to sing the solo for 'Teddy Bear for Christmas' a few times - I'm so proud of her!  Here she is in her costume - I'm not a fan of it but she loves it and still looks adorable ;-)

We wrote letters to Santa.  I helped Brailee write hers - we sounded out the words together and I helped her with some of the trickier words like 'dear' and 'would'

She got to drop off everybody's letter at the mailbox since she was the only one who wanted to come into town with me!

One morning while the older girls were still in school, we had a tea party in Brailee's room, in our jammies with only the light of her Christmas tree - so fun.  I'm so lucky to get to stay home with my kiddos!

Dracula joined us...

...along with his little sister, Suzy!

Here we are picking up the girls from Activity Days - they had a fun Holiday party and Brailee played with the leftovers.  It was some reindeer antler relay game with panty hose and balloons, she looks too funny!  It was quite entertaining to watch.

Trysten used them as reins and giddy-upped around the room ;-)

I FINALLY got a stocking made for Trysten - he has been using a 'spare' for the past couple of years.  I planned on finally finishing it last year and had all the stuff out but the pajama project consumed me and then I got sick so it never got done.  I am wanting to do something new for our family stockings hopefully by next year, but at least he has one now!  Last year I didn't have anywhere to hang our stockings since we no longer had a mantel, so this year I came up with this.

I covered clothespins with fun paper scraps from all of those German Stars I am always making, they fit perfectly!  Then I used the clothespins to clip the stockings to a string.

This year since all of the kids finally have their own room they got to put up their trees in their room - I loved not having them all out in the living room like they have been for the last few years.  Here is Trysten decorating his while Kaylee watches.  I only got pics of the two younger ones with their trees - next year I will get the other two ;-)  Trysten's is a black tree with red ornaments.  I need to find (or make - if only I had more time) a tree skirt for his, but just haven't had any luck with either so far.

Brailee's tree - hers is pink with pink and silver ornaments.

We did a few crafty projects in December.  Kaylee came up with this idea and luckily I had everything on hand that she needed - she hot glued together stacks of buttons and used pipe cleaners to make rings out of them for her friends.  I think they turned out super cute.

Here's Trysten and Brailee with a gift for their preschool teacher - I made some of these previously, along with some other characters - you can check them out HERE and HERE.  This time we used the fun button punch that my SIL gave me for my birthday a couple years ago for the eyes and mouth - I like the buttons better than the plain circles I used last time.  Inside we put some warm fuzzy socks and some treats.

We did lots of sledding right in our front yard - love it!

Trysten is fearless.  He goes over and over again, the only thing that slows him down is waiting for someone to help him get his sled back up to the top each time.

Brailee likes to ride down on Daddy's back.  I think she's in that hat there somewhere!

We didn't make it to see Santa until the Wednesday before Christmas we finally caught him at the library.  This was the first year every single one of my kids saw Santa and nobody was shy or afraid!  This was a big step for Brailee this year!

My Dad and Shelly gave us this snowmobile this last summer - it just needed some work, most importantly a new rope for the pull start.  So David worked on it and after some outside help we finally got it running.  It's been fun to buzz around our place.

Brianna wanted to make stress balls out of balloons and flour, so that was another simple project we did.  Here is Trysten with his, plus he got into his sister's lip gloss ;-)

We don't do gingerbread houses around here - we prefer graham cracker houses.  Here are the kids with their creations.

We made some yummy new treats this year - Peppermint Oreo Balls (can you tell we like Oreo Balls around here?), and Peanut Butter Cups (I can find the link to the recipe I used if anybody is interested), along with some old favorites, pretzels dipped in white almond bark and sprinkled with yummy Pampered Chef toppings - Caramel and Cinnamon.

That's not all of our December happenings - I'll be back with some pics from Christmas and of a certain birthday girl!

Oops - almost forgot

While browsing through the iPod, I found a few fun pics that I missed for November, so here's a quick add-in ;-)

The two little ones went to the dentist.  Brailee went first...

...while Trysten and I played around with the iPod ;-)

Then it was Trysten's turn - this was his first visit to the dentist and he did awesome!  He usually takes some time to warm up to people but he didn't even hesitate to climb up in the chair, in fact he did so while they were still wiping things down after Brailee.  As soon as she put on the sunglasses and laid back the chair, Trysten opened wide and was ready to go!  He even cooperated perfectly for x-rays, I'm so proud of him!

Love that little belly ;-)

November Catch-up

I haven't done a family post since Halloween so I'm way behind!  Here I am trying to catch up the month of November.  I will keep this as brief as possible, which is not very easy since I take way too many pictures!

Kaylee's Birthday - 10 years old!

I took treats to her class - Mint Oreo Balls dipped in white almond bark and drizzled with melted mint chips - yum!  I left the toothpicks in after I dipped them and decided to dress them up a bit.  I cut the banners using my Cricut and the CTMH Cartridge.  Thanks to my Cricut Design Studio I was able to cut the number 10 directly out of the banner.

It was a beautiful day after school, so we even did a little sledding in our front yard on her birthday.

She requested pumpkin pie for her 'cake' - here is Trysten helping her blow out the candles.

Here are some random goofy kid pics...

...putting on a show...

...ta-da!

The week of Thanksgiving, we went with Kaylee's class on a field trip to Legend Rock.

We had Thanksgiving dinner at our house and some of David's family came over.  I took lots of pics of family but won't post them here for privacy.  I will post a quick project I did that morning - I found these old leaves we had done back in '04 and '05 - I had cut them from foam and each person had written their name, the year, and then what they were thankful for on the back and we hung them on a branch that we stuck in a bucket and called it our thankful tree.  So we laid them out on the tables for everyone to look back on.

I'm not sure why we haven't done it since then, but Thanksgiving morning I decided I wanted to start it up again.  This time I pulled out my handy Cricut so it did all the leaf cutting for me.  I sent Kaylee outside to find a branch and she found a really thorny one, which worked perfectly.  Hopefully we will continue this tradition through the years as it's fun to look back.

Here is Trysten's - he loves to write the letter T and he's working on learning to write the rest.

David's parents brought their Ranger and left it with us that night since they took Grandma back home and stayed the night with her.  So that night after everyone left, we took the kids for a quick ride and Brailee and Trysten fell fast asleep!

We always put our Christmas stuff up after Thanksgiving.  Here's David and Brailee putting up the tree.  We put it in the piano room this year.  Never thought I would have a fake tree, but we got this one on clearance for $25 about 8 years ago, so it's saved us a lot of money!  Now with our vaulted ceilings, we are looking for one a little taller so we're not so limited as to where we put it.  I do miss going up to the mountain and getting our tree like I used to growing up, however.

Trysten was so excited to get our train out - I though he would constantly have it going all season but he left it alone after the first day.  I have to add, this is the first year since I've known David that he hasn't put up ANY outside lights for Christmas - he just didn't have the motivation to do so, maybe it's our country living that's getting to him ;-)  He had put up a bunch for Halloween but after a couple of windy days that we had, most of it had to come down.

I guess I don't have as many pics as I thought I did to sum up this month.  Other things that happened that month - Yukon was giving us fits for a couple weeks and would just randomly die on us - usually as we were slowing down or turning.  So I didn't trust it much and started to take the truck everywhere instead.  Well, just my luck, one evening just 2 miles from home after picking up the girls from an after school activity I hit a deer.  Didn't appear to do much damage to the truck but internally it broke the bracket that holds the light in on both the headlight and marker light. Let me just tell you, if you are looking for car parts, check out amazon.com - we ordered a complete headlight and marker light (with brackets) for less than $60 - we would have spent a couple hundred dollars through our local car part store!  David temporarily wired the lights in place but with our bumpy road we didn't want to drive the truck much until the light was fixed, especially at night.  So while we waited for the parts to arrive I had to trust my luck with the Yukon.  Exactly one week after hitting the deer, in almost the exact same spot, the Yukon started to die, but I could tell it was more serious this time.  Luckily I barely made it into our garage just as it officially died for good.  Turned out we needed a new alternator and battery as well, so there went a nice chunk of change - just glad hubby has the garage and knowledge to fix it himself so we didn't have to pay for labor, too.  So we've had quite the luck with the vehicles lately but in reality very fortunate the way things have worked out.  We will be shopping for a replacement for the Yukon soon, which is really too bad since all vehicles are paid off :-(

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Well, I guess that's November, in a nutshell.  Stay tuned for December, Christmas, and a special little girl's 5th birthday!