Grandpop Comes to Town

A few days after Christmas Grandpop came to town and took these beautiful pictures of our day. Breakfast:

 

 

 A little home schooling time:

 Play time:

Chores mixed with playtime:

 The puppies are doing amazingly well. They are learning fast and we are doing our best to train them.

Making salad for our dinner (clearly this is not a pro-picture) and is the only one in the series that I took:

 Visiting my brother P's family:

 

December Birthdays

We celebrated big sister A's birthday and brother M's birthday each on their respective days, but with the same cake!  Per their request it was a Costco size cheesecake and even with the two birthdays we only ate about half of it.  Good thing the missionaries came over for dinner a few nights later to help finish it off. 

 

   Presents!

   One of our traditions is unwrapping a Christmas book each night to read together before bed.  This evening was unusual because usually Daddy reads while I am outside finish chores or cleaning the kitchen.

Happy Boy - We call brother M our "Giggle box" because he is usually so happy.

 

 All his wishes were coming true! Thanks Grandparents!

Christmas 2017

Christmas Eve we had our traditional snack food dinner & movie party.  I look like I am asleep in this picture, possibly because I had just eaten about a pound of shrimp cocktail. 

 

Christmas morning the kiddos snuggled under the Christmas blankies and waited excitedly for the stragglers to arrive on the scene.

Then we opened our stockings.

I thought they might feel like they got a lot less than last year, but everyone seemed pleased.

  They were especially pleased that even though they got dogs for Christmas, and I had warned them that their would not be much else, a few large-ish educational type presents were also under the tree.

 

  AND a few hand-made presents also made it under the tree -- this quilt is for A's Kirsten doll's bed and made from antique scraps that a friend gave me.

 They were excited to have presents from each other as well.  It really is amazing what you can find at the Dollar Tree.

 

 

 After the presents the kids presented a magic show that they had been planning for over a week.  it included some disappearing coins, disappearing feet, and a dance routine from the two littlest.

 It was a nice day of relaxed cozy winter celebrations.

T'was the week before Christmas

 It took me a long time to get the tree lit this year. For one thing it is extra tall -- 9ft or so, and secondly I had to get some technical training in electrical engineering in order to light it with these 3,000 beautiful little white lights. I put the first 1000 lights on the tree and off again twice before I realized what the problem was. The short version is that I tried to connect too many strands of lights together and kept blowing fuses in the earlier strands. I learned that no more than 500 lights can be strung together,  to connect everything back to a couple power strips (only way to have enough outlets for that many lights), and how to replace the tiny fuses in the plugs of Christmas lights. Several people have already told me that switching to LEDs would solve my problem, but they are about 5 times as expensive and would have been 400$ for the 3000 bulbs required.  I know. I almost ordered them from Home Depot after the second day of wrestling with this project!  Looking at it every day has made the effort worth it. And now I know what to do for next year.

  I was in charge of decorating for the church Christmas party this year and we had some extra greenery leftover.  I put it to good use on the banisters:

 Christmas in the dining room:

 Freehand copy on on my chalkboard of something that I saw online:

  
We had some rainy days this week-- wet dogs.

 It is fun to play in the rain with puppies:

We made our traditional visit to Brookeside Gardens Christmas train exhibit:

Big sister A had some friends over for a "Late-Nighter" -- everyone has decided that sleepovers are not safe so we just let the kids hang out together until late. They had a lot of fun holding bunnies and crafting.