Kid Trees

Roger and I decided to let the kids have their own trees in their rooms this year.
While our new house does not have a perfect window for the family tree, it does have window seats in the kids' bedrooms that are the perfect place for small trees.
Here is Jaxon's "Bus" tree.*

 I wanted them to make some of the decorations for their trees. Jaxon helped me make a garland for his out of torn strips of checkered fabric. He loves making stuff and did about 1/3 of the garland by himself before I started helping him so we could get it done by bedtime.

I made a couple of checkered flags for the topper. We added shattterproof red balls and then he decorated the rest of it with his own toy cars (and planes lol).

*The Disney Cars movie came out the year that Jaxon was born. He first saw it when he was about a year old and his name for the movie and for the character of  Lightening McQueen was "bus". We have no idea why. I've watched the move a thousand times by now and I still can't figure out why he calls it Bus. Still! And he can't explain why either. He just says there are two names.

Emily is all about bright colors. And I think her tree turned out exactly right for her and for her room.

I helped her make a pom pom ball garland while we watched a movie last night.

And she made a tutu style tulle tree skirt by herself.
Then we just added pink, green and silver shatterproof ornaments. She really wanted some orange ones, but we couldn't find any. Maybe next year.

Her tree is especially pretty at night ...

I'll get the rest of the non-tree decorating done today. I need to get on to that pre-Christmas to do list!

Pumpkins Carved

At the very last minute!
We just did them last night.
It's not what it used to be when there were six kids at home and the pumpkin guts covered the entire kitchen by the time we were done. But it's still fun.
Emily chose an Elmo pattern of course. She is all things Elmo these days. She has taken Elmo as a nickname and even has most of her teachers calling her Elmo.

Jaxon went with a classic jack o lantern pattern.
His description: "Creepy monster eyes and pointy top teeth."

 Think he had fun?

Roger had the camera and apparently got a little distracted by Jaxon's bat finger puppet. I just found these pictures this morning.

So the pumpkins are carved and we're ready for the big night!

The kids and grandkids will come over tonight for chili, corn bread and hot chocolate. Good times will be had by all. :)

Root Beer Floats and Fireworks

Since we went to a big professional fireworks show on 7/2, we decided to stay home and keep it low key on the 4th.
We enjoyed some root beer floats.

 FYI Diet Root Beer foams up a LOT more than regular.

Thanks to some new more lenient fireworks laws in Utah, we didn't miss out at all. There was quite a show to be seen from every direction right from our front porch.
Jaxon did not like the bigger booms of the aerial fireworks at all. He stayed on the porch with me to watch the smaller fireworks that the neighbors across the street were setting off. But he ran inside whenever the loud pops and bangs of the big ones started.
Many of the neighbors got together on the street behind us and coordinated a really impressive show. It went on for almost an hour.
Here's some poor quality, sideways video of the new legal fireworks.
Why do I automatically turn my camera sideways to take pictures? I have no idea. I just think it makes things fit in the frame better. Not so much for shooting video. It just hurts your neck to watch. LOL Oh well, I'll work on that.

Then it was Easter!

Sleepy eyed children seeing what the Easter Bunny left for them.

Coloring eggs...

And giving them a little personality.

Family dinner became Sunday brunch beginning with Easter.
Side note: It's becoming IMPOSSIBLE to plan a weekly meal that everyone can attend. :(
This year Roger and I gave the little ones of each family a gift.

A butterfly garden for Tukker and Maveryk (I hear that their caterpillars are already quite large!)
And one for Emily and Jaxon

Caydance and Athena were at their Dad's house so they opened their butterfly garden when I saw them later in the week.

And Crystal had to work so her boyfriend's son opened his Vegetable Garden kit later in the week too. He's not an official grandbaby yet (whatever that means in this family of flexible boundaries!) but we wanted to include him too since he's with us for family functions so often. I stole this pic from Crystal's Facebook page. hee hee.

We usually hide the eggs we color and let the kids find them. But this year I wanted to do something different. So Roger and I filled plastic eggs with candy and coins and we hid those for the little ones to find. It was so fun that I think we will do that from now on.

Happy little faces looking for colorful eggs.

It was a very HAPPY EASTER!!!

For My Loves...

I was so good  last year. Really good.  Valentine's decorations and everything.
*sigh*
Not so much this year. I didn't even bother to go to the basement and bring up those things from last year. :P
I don't know why. Time just got away from me.

But food is never far from my mind. LOL
So, very early yesterday morning I got inspired to at least add a Valentine-y element to the day's food.
I made the kids pink milk, pink heart shaped pancakes and pink scrambled eggs for breakfast.

Jaxon was weirded out. Not at all impressed. He finally followed Kenzie and Emily's lead and ate his breakfast. In the end, he declared that "Pink milk is the best thing I ever tasted!".
I think I've mentioned that I recently discovered The Sweet Tooth Fairy. mmmmmm....CUPCAKES! Yesterday I also happened to see this post for low fat WW cookies on Tidymom's site. Of course, what REALLY caught my interest was this other recipe that she mentioned within that post. MORE CUPCAKES! Faced with all that inspiration, my course was set for the day!
My Valentine's gift to the family was a delicious dessert of Devil's Food Cupcakes with Raspberry Cream Filling and Chocolate Cream Cheese Frosting.
Plus 1 dozen "cake bites" with the leftover frosting and cake crumbs.

They were so delicious that it was hard to eat dinner first.
They were so delicious that, immediately after we had dessert, I started sending them out to the neighbors. I knew they'd be too dangerous to have around.
I made the raspberry cream with the raspberries we picked with a neighbor friend last Fall .
My piping skills need some work. A denser chocolate cake would have been a little better. And I really must learn to stop overfilling the cupcake liners. (More cake in a cupcake isn't always practical.) But all in all, my mouth was happy with the results! No disrespect to the Fairy.
Incidentally, you know how I like numbers...I checked the Sweet Tooth Fairy price for the items I made.
23 cupcakes and 12 cake bites = Almost $60. !!! I only spent about $5 and a couple of hours. What a bargain!
Hope you had a Valentine's Day full of love! And chocolate!

Oh yeah! I also made this funky cake plate out of a couple of plastic dollar store plates and some old glass spice jars. So there! I crafted too! ha!

Is that enough pictures to fully convey the deliciousness? Sharon? What do you think? ;)

Emily loves....

Tomorrow is the big day, you know. Time to pour your love out to your whole 6th grade class. ;)
Emily made Valentine's for her class this year.
She made hearts out of bubble gum flavored candy canes that I bought at after Christmas clearance sales.
And then she took several hours to make individual cards for each kid in her class.

She's been really interested in drawing these figures lately. She calls them Chibis. I have no idea what that means or where they come from but they sure are cute!

What a lucky class of kids to get custom pieces of art for Valentine's day! That beats a Dum-Dum every day!
psst! Mason's card doesn't have a Chibi inside. It has a very special message instead. ;) Love is in the air!

Merry Christmas from our crazy kids!

If you got a Christmas card from us this year, this is the picture that was enclosed.

If you didn't get one, don't feel bad. No one did.
I was a serious slacker this year.
Plan B was to send out an apologetic New Year's salutation with a witty bit about how "crazy" the holidays were around here.
Now that it's the last week of January and they have not only not been sent, but the pictures haven't even been printed, I am admitting defeat.
So, to all our loved ones, consider this your official

Merry New Valentine's!

From our house to yours!
Phew! Now that that is done I won't have to figure out how to work St. Patrick's Day into the whole thing.

Christmas 2010

We made it! Another Christmas in the books.
Special annual ornaments were sought but not found to represent the big event for us this year: moving.
So on Christmas Eve I threw together some quick and dirty crafty type ones. I just Mod Podged pics of the old house on one side and the new house on the other. Sparkly Mod Podge of course. It is Christmas after all.

Whatever works.
There was no particular theme for the tree this year. We just used all our yearly ornaments which makes for a pretty heavily decorated tree after all these years.

After wishing for pretty much my whole life to have a mantle from which to hang the stockings, we finally do! And yet, we decided that we kind of like them hanging from the stair railing as they have for the past 16 Christmases.  So that's what we did.

And I used the mantle to display some treasured Nativities and other keepsakes that I usually don't even put out because it's too hard to keep the little people away from them. The mantle is perfectly out of their reach.

tsk! tsk! with the power cords! Oh well...
We decorated cookies on Christmas Eve. It was just going to be the gingerbread men that I bought from the co-op but at the last minute I cranked out some sugar cookies from a mix to go with them.

Oh how I hate getting my picture taken. But at least there's proof I was present.

Kenzie got a special gift this year. The plague! She was just coming down with it on Christmas Eve and is still under the train today. Poor kid. As if that's not bad enough, today I took her to a podiatrist to get her toenails partially removed. But that's a blog post for another day.Don't worry. No pictures.

Jaxon was meticulous with the frosting...

And generous with the sprinkles!

Oh Holy sprinkly disaster Batman!!!
We had the obligatory mistletoe, of course.

Perfect for grossing out the preteen daughter every chance we get.
Traditional new pajamas on Christmas Eve? Check!

Stroke of luck finding that personalized t-shirt for Roger, eh?
Santa showed up as expected.

He brought Jaxon that awesome tool bench.

Emily received an mp3 player which has been permanently embedded in her ear since the big day. I guess it's a suitable upgrade from the Barbie one she's been using for a couple of years.
And Kenzie got what every teen always wants...

A fancy new phone. Well, not new new. She helped Santa search high and low for a fancy used phone because she is frugal and merciful.
Speaking of presents, I only made two this year. Not counting neighbor gifts. Rare for me to make so few gifts.
I made two quillows.
It's a quilt! It's a pillow! It's a quillow!!
One for my cat loving Aunt Verna

And one for my Mom. Frogs because she loves them,

With a special cover that has Kenzie, Emily and Jaxon's handprints on it because, well, she loves them too!

Kids, grandkids, my Mom, Aunt, Uncle and Brother all came over for our traditional Christmas brunch followed by watching movies while slipping in and out of a food coma. 
And that was that.
Except for the giant task of packing away all the decorations. Ugh!
I hope everyone had a Merry Christmas! And may we all have a Happy New Year!