Christmas Revisited

Christmas was very fun, but I'll just revisit it very quickly because there has been so much going on lately...I'm way behind.
I loved having Christmas on our own (though that doesn't mean I wouldn't love to do it with family again sometime in the future!) and I also loved having a fireplace! It reminded me of growing up and the magic of it all- you just have to have one. I realized I have a ton of traditions this time of year. Let's see how many of them I can recall...
1) Visiting a care center and giving Christmas cards to the residents.
2) Playing music for the care center.
3) Making cookie plates for friends and delivering them.
4) Big Christmas eve dinner and Nativity play
5) Drinking hot drinks :)
6) Writing a family Christmas letter
7) Santa's secret wrapping paper
8*) Slept under the christmas tree the night we decorated it.
9*) Giving each child a new ornament.
10) Sitting on Santa's lap
11*) Service goals during from Thanksgiving to Christmas
12) Stockings- what's in the stockings is so traditional: orange, nuts, chocolate anda candy cane. We always had these things in our stocking growing up along with maybe a toy or two or stuffed animal.
13*) Baking a "speical" cookie for Santa. This year we decided to make the tradition of doing a giant gingerbread cookie (thanks to Grandma who bought me a special pan) and write everyone's name, including Santa, on the cookie. Then Christmas day everyone got to eat the piece with their name on it, Santa having been the first to dig in. :)
14*) New pajamas for Christmas eve night. I'm not sure we'll make it a tradition every year, but the kids definetly LOVED it this year, so maybe we will.
15) Writing new year's resolutions and putting it in the bottom of our stocking. We always did this growing up.
16*) Having a New Year's Goal Fireside Picnic! Maybe I'll do a separate post about this one. :)
17) Taking a picture of each child with all their gifts (like below). We also always unwrap gifts one at a time from youngest to oldest. We did this growing up.

The traditions with the (*) mean that this was the first year we did it, but hope to make it a tradition.

Festivities...

Just wanted to throw up a few of the Christmas festivities so far.
This is the Nativity Play our preschool did for a care center nearby. I wish I had more pictures, it was very nice. The kids sang 4 songs, did the play, and gave cards to each of the residents. All of the residents were in wheel chairs, so it was a little hard to have the kids getting too close, but I think it was a really good experience for them all. They sang SO quietly though, I tried so hard to get them to sing out, haha, oh well.

A trip to Harmon's Tree Farm to find...out that their trees are too expensive for us. :) I'm used to paying like $15 or so for a tree, $50 is just too much. We didn't stay at the farm long and just drove down the street to Lowes to find our $20 tree. The tree is kind of dry already, major shape issues (must have been bundled for awhile), but it was only $20 and is all just the same to the kids. We decided to start the 'tradition' of having a sleepover under the tree after it's decorated. The kids loved it-- but seems to have started the trend of staying up late every night since.



This year, the kids made christmas aprons at a playgroup early December. I thought they were so cute, and festive to help mom make the big batches of cookies to give away. They had a lot of fun making these sugar dipped cookies.


The Christmas Cafe! While the aprons were donned and the kids in the mood, I decided to turn dinner that night into a night at the Christmas cafe. The kids and I made menus that had secret code words for the dinner items. It was a fun trick to play on Dad, and the kids were a hoot acting as our waiter and waitress. The kids especially liked the Golden Snowflakes, made from a round of fresh pineapple. (yum, I love fresh pineapple!)

Turkey Rewind

We got to get Thanksgiving up here before Christmas comes!! (Wait, did I even get Halloween up? That's the way these things go I guess!) We were so lucky and happy to a visitor for Thanksgiving. Kids love the extra attention, of course, and we're really looking forward to seeing Grandma. Lucy still prays almost everyday that "cousins" or "grandma" or someone will be coming on the airplane to South Carolina. ah me, little girl. Anyway, Grandma flew in and we drove the 1.5 hrs to go get her, but of course I decided to make a whole day of it. We started early in the morning with a sack lunch and visited to a gold mine just outside of Charlotte, NC. We joined the little tour and spent quite a lot of time there, in fact, we were "late" heading to the $2 movie, which was next on my agenda. We still went in to kill the next hour watching Despicable Me. The kids liked it, although it was in 3D and Lucy didn't want to keep her glasses on. Willie was fine with having glasses, cute little smiling cheeks underneath. :)


We picked up Grandma Connie amongst mad busy traffic- biggest travel day of the year. We also had a nice Thanksgiving visit. I can't remember now why I was particuarly busy at that time, but I remember not having anything planned for dinner. I did have a turkey thawed, but that was it. Grandma helped really pull the dinner together. Our visit also included a trip to the children's museum to see their new exhibits- Fairytale land and Snowville.

Tis the Season

A friend from my ward shared this with me and I had to post it immediately. Totally set the right mood for the season! I loved it! I loved that that lady knew to stand up immediately. Loved the Random Acts of Culture! And...did you see that organ???
I would click on the link (the title part of the video) because even though it's imbedded heare, it doesn't really fit.

DC or bust...

Many of you know my husband's hobby/dream of running. He's been working really hard this year to hit a fast marathon time. Long story short, this goal has been put on the back burner. But his running fame is big here at Fort Jackson and he was put on the Army 10-miler team for Fort Jackson. The "Army 10-miler" is a HUGE race which takes place in Washington DC and brings in runners from around the world. One of the neat thing is militia from other countries will send their soliders to compete. It's a peace-making kind of thing. It's a really neat race because the runners get to pass many famous icons like Arlington Cemetary, Lincoln memorial, Washington memorial, many of the Simthsonian buildings, up past the US Capitol, the finish (and the start) was at the Pentagon. It was really neat granted, however, the runners aren't sight-seeing while trying to pound out the miles, :) thus we did go to visit many of those places aside from the race. I can't remember right now how Jeremy did exactly... I do know that it wasn't as well as he hoped, he had big blisters on both feet. I actually didn't even get to see him run!! I was so disappointed. I had to take 3 kids on the metro by myself to get to the race, so I opted to just go for the finish and somehow I didn't even see him pass us! Lucy said she saw him, so guess that counts for all of us. It was very fun to take a family trip though! The kids did great in the car, being the longest car ride they've done, I was happy with that. Hallee had the hardest time, but she made it through it. What Lucy does every spare moment she gets...and the reason why Lucy ALWAYS has to wear a skirt! She couldn't practice her spin if she didn't! This last pic is in front of the White House. This was the last place we stopped before hitting the road back home. We were walking around and this bicycle officer stopped to chat. He let us in on this secret he "wasn't supposed to tell people" and said that a certain chopper would be landing in about 15 minutes if we wanted to stick around to watch. Jeremy was as excited as a schoolboy and said he had to see the President's chopper. We waited more than 15 minutes, it was kind of cool to see, but by the time the chopper lands, you're so far away and the angle is such you can't even see anyone exit the chopper. Who knows if it really was the president or not...then again, who else would be flying by Air Force chopper to the White House, hmm?

Pumpkin Season is so fun. We talked a lot about pumpkins at Joy School and there were many activities involving pumpkins this year, so we've seen a lot of orange! We went down to an activity Silly Scarecrows at the historic Robert Mills house and garden in downtown. It was way fun and quite a bargain I thought. The kids loved picking a pumpkin from the garden, which they got to decorate, and we loved seeing all the silly scarecrows put up by different businesses- there were probaby 40 or so scarescrows.




I didn't realize the kids were going to get their own pumpkin from the Robert Mills house activity, and I had already planned a playgroup trip to a pumpkin patch that same week. Athough I ended up locking my keys in the car (and my wallet), it was a great place to play while we waited an hour for triple-A to come rescue us. We had fun with friends at storytime, exploring and taking pictures, but did not end up buying any pumpkins.

Myrtle Beach

We got a 3 day weekend and I just had to get out of town! There are a number of places I'd like to go visit around the area. We decided to go to Myrtle Beach while it was still warm outside. (The fall weather here has been practically summer-i. LOVE. it!) The drive seem to take forever, it made me sad not to be staying the night (we decided we didn't want to spend money on a hotel.) It was SOOOO nice to be at the beach! Nostalgic memories of kids playing in sand, listening to the ocean for hours. I love warm beaches! Nothing especially interesting to tell, and these aren't even the cute pictures, lol! But I got tired of waiting for blogger to load the pictures. So, this post will be short and sweet. Can't wait to go back next summer! (Assuming we get put at Fort Bragg...!)