Valentines Day 2012

I hope everyone had a great valentines day, we sure did! I woke up extra early to make the kids these special crepes. They are red velvet with a raspberry and sweet cream filling topped with chocolate and whipped cream. They were so yummy and so rich you could only eat one! (normally we eat 4-5 crapes in a sitting!)

Deric and I gave the kids a small box of chocolates. Roy got a new bib!!
Everyone wore pinks and reds. I also did Carrie's hair in hearts!
That morning I finished making all the cookies for the parties at school. I haven't made sugar cookies much before this so I spent a lot of time trying them out before hand. If you notice in earlier posts the kids decorated cookies for their birthday parties. I think I got the hang of it. I made just over 9 dozen of these and sent them to school for the kids to decorate with frosting and candies!
Nelson helped me make them!
I also put together this small craft for Carrie's class to do at their party.
Before hand Carrie and Sarah made valentine boxes to take to school.



Sam made her box at school, but all three girls put together homemade valentines to give out.Whew, it was a busy day full of fun!

Cupcake crazyness!!

In January I decided to let the kids decorate their own cupcakes. You see, I am a bit of a perfectionist and so I never let them help me when I am making cupcakes for parties or classes etc.. So, I decided to be nice and I let all the kids invite a friend over. I made 48 cupcakes (chocolate and yellow), lots of frosting, and laid out a TON of candy, sprinkles, and other decorations. Then I said... Have fun. I think that they did!!

Here are some of the results....

MMMM.... yummy cupcakes!

The Night Before Christmas PJ's!!

It is a family tradition for us to open one gift on Christmas eve. The gift is always the same thing. The kids still get excited about it though. Here is the anticipation shot...
The "Yeah, PJ's" shot...
Everyone after showers in the new PJ's
Boys
Girls

I also made them all eye covers. If you know our family you would know why this was such a huge hit, and why it meant so much to the kids!

The whole event really wore some people out!!!

"The Christmas Eve Show"

On Christmas Eve this year our children gave us a wonderful gift. They put on a performance of a few different Christmas songs. They had been practicing for weeks. Part of the gift (for me) was the cooperation that they had been displaying for the entire month of December as they prepared for the "big night!" Here are a few snapshots of our show...

Sam, Jess and Sarah singing "Away in a Manger," "We wish you a Merry Christmas," and "Silent night" all of which Samantha hand wrote into their own song books.

Here is Jessica "helping" the boys sing "Jingle bells." Can you tell Wally is really into it!!
This was the main performance, the one practiced over and over (not that I overheard). The girls preformed "Rudolf the red nose Reindeer." Can you guess who Rudolf was played by? It was really cute and you could tell that they had so much fun doing it.
The final song was done by Jessica on her baritone. Sam makes a wonderful music stand don't you think!

Deric and I really enjoyed our show. It was indeed one of my favorite Christmas gifts. Having my children work together and have fun working to create a gift is such a wonderful thing. We are truly blessed!

Thanksgiving

I LOVE Thanksgiving! I love the food, family, fun,... (it goes right along with my love of Fall!!) This year we celebrated the holiday at Deric's brother Ben's house. We had to bring some of the meal. This year Sam and Jess helped me by making their own deserts. It was fun to watch them do it all by themselves.

Sammy made this... a Maple Pumpkin Torte. It was OK but we agreed we'd make it differently or not at all next year.
Here are the kids at their own table!!
Younger kids table. I love the look on Chewy's face!! He did just get staples in his head!!
This is Jessica's desert. White chocolate strawberry tart. It was OK too, again not a keeper.
This desert was super fun and a keeper!! Sarah found it in a book at the library and Jess put it all together! It was a huge hit with the kids. The cheese went so fast, who would have thought!!
Gobble Gobble! Hope you had a Happy Day too!

A little of this, a little of that!

I went to do a new post tonight and I am having problems getting my main computer going. So I am using Deric's laptop and I happen to have put these pictures in a few weeks ago. So this post is exactly what it is titled... a little of this, and a little of that!

Here is our little Wally Golly, or Wally the menace! He loves to get into my pots and pans and decided that this one makes a great hat. He wore it around for the entire afternoon.

I found Carrie and Nelson like this the other day. Wally was taking a nap and I was cleaning my room. They were being very quiet so I went to investigate. This is what I found. It was a proud mom moment, and I was lucky enough to have my camera close by. They didn't even know I took their picture.
Carrie made this cute little butterfly during her first few weeks of Kindergarten.


Jess asked us over and over to hook the bike trailer up to her bike so that she could pull Wally when they were out riding. I found a spare attachment piece and was able to do it for her. She was so excited! Then Sammy wanted in on the action. For a while she would ride Jessica's bike but then we got her an attachment piece and now she can hook the trailer to her own bike. They love to give the other little kids rides!
More randomness... the kids had a "Walk to School Day" early in October. The Snow College cheerleaders and Badger were there to greet them. You can see Sam, Sarah and Carrie in their school shirts. Nelson is also standing with them.
That is not blood! I went to give the children ketchup the other night and I opened the bottle and spilt it all over Nelson and the table. He thought it was pretty funny.
Sorry for all the randomness. Hope you enjoyed it though!

LA Zoo!

While we were in California last month we were invited (thanks a bunch) to go to the zoo with the cousins! It was a really fun afternoon filled with neat animals and crazy kids.

I took a few pictures of the animals, but mostly of the kids.... here is Jessica waiting for us to get moving to the next animal.
Sarah, smiling in between wines about how much walking we were doing.

Checking out the flamingos.
Group shot? Here are all the kids looking at the crocodile or was it an alligator...?
Sammy with her favorite animal!

Carrie had to have her picture taken with the gorilla.
Which meant that Nelson did too!
We tried to get a group shot of all the kids before we left, we will just say that this is the best shot we got!!
On our way out! Wally with proof of where we were!
Looking at animals is exhausting work!!

Happy Easter!

We had a really fun Easter this year and hope you did to. Here are some of the Easter crafts that we did. The wash cloth bunny was made at story time... this one is Wally's and he pulled the eyes off! The basket and small toilet paper rabbit we made at Sarah's birthday party. We decorated the eggs all together for family home evening!

On Saturday we had our Meme egg hunt, unfortunately it was raining/snowin and our house is way to small, fortunately we were able to do it at our church building. It was so much fun, thank you Meme for all of the awesome little goodies!
We also went to the Lions club egg hunt Saturday but due to the rain each child was just given a large handful of candy in their basket and sent on their way! We were able to get a quick picture with the Easter bunny though.

On Sunday we focused on the true meaning of Easter and went to church with Deric's brother who lives just about two hours away. It was bright when we were taking pictures!! The blog title picture shows our solution to that!! Also notice poor Wally is sleeping!!

We had a wonderful afternoon at Ben and Rachel's house. The dinner was good, and the kids had a ball playing with each other!




We hope you had a wonderful holiday and that you remember that the true meaning is in remembering that Jesus died for us and that he rose again that we to may conquer death.