Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas. These are just some of our family traditions and favorite things from Christmas this year.

Christmas Eve we let the kids open Christmas pj's.

All the kids in their special Christmas pj's. Notice Luke and Levi have little monsters. We thought they went well with our little monsters. 

Luke opening his favorite toy. A battery operated gun that shoots a ton of bullets. He has played with this all day and shot at anyone and anything that came in his path.

Tayci opening all her Star Wars figures. She makes her mom so proud!

I thought I had one of Abby but I didn't so here is another of Luke opening his Batman belt. He is way into Batman this year!

Levi opening a present. Like the whirlwind that went through our living room. Man was it a mess. They had fun and I am glad. Although Daniel and I could use a nap. It was rough getting them to sleep and then Levi was up at 1, Luke was up at 2:30, The girls were up at 4, and then they were all up at 5:30. They were just too darn excited.

Each year we write down what we are going to work on to make ourselves better as our gift to Jesus and they all came up with some good ones all on their own. I was really impressed with their gifts to Jesus this year.  I love how thoughtful they are. I love this holiday season where we honor Jesus.

Merry Christmas! 



Hills on the Farm!

So some friends of ours here in Alabama gave us the opportunity to take care of their farm while they went away for Christmas. My kids love it. They have so much fun. Each day we go the kids get excited to look for eggs in the many spots the chicken lay them. Some days there are a lot but others there is only 3 or so. It's because their dog Sheba loves to eat them so if she finds them she gently cracks them open and licks out the yolk. It's funny how gently she holds them and then barley cracks them. It's funny to watch.

Abby and Luke feeding Clyde the horse. You put the food in the blue bucket and he will eat out of it. If the chickens get done with their food they will all head over and sit in the bucket and eat his food. Quite funny to watch a bunch of chickens fighting over the food and the horse sitting back scared to eat it.  

Levi throwing feed to the chickens. He loves it and would keep feeding him if I didn't lock the tack room.

Abby throwing hay to the goats. They are funny. Sometimes they get so excited to eat that they will choke an you have to rub their necks and smack their stomachs to get it to go down.

The kids making sure the chickens have food. They had just thrown it. The chickens will follow you until you feed them so they are usually the first to get fed. Then the kids go look for eggs in the barn. The first day they got 11 eggs. 

Kids chasing the chickens to try to hold them. Tayci was successful.

They have really enjoyed it. It has also kept them busy since they have such a lengthy Christmas vacation. I think we will keep our day jobs though. This is a little too much for Mom to handle on a full time basis.

Chestnuts Roasting On An Open Fire!

Oh how we love this time of year when we get together with family and friends. This year our army friends became our family as we were not able to head home for Christmas. One fun thing we did was roast chestnuts on a fire with some good friends of our the West's. They are a great family and have four kids basically about the same age as ours. You always here the old Christmas song of "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire" and we actually did it. Our friends bought them from the commissary and they cut an "x" in the top. This makes it so that when you roast them the skin eventually peels back on it's own. Sure enough they did. They have the taste and texture of a potato if cooked properly and if they aren't moldy inside. Once cooked let them cool and them you peel them and roll them in melted butter and cinnamon. Word to the wise though. Don't put a hot pan that has been in a fire on a hot pad. Ours burned a hole clean through. We love that our friends are so adventurous and let us experience this with them. They were awesome. Before we roasted our chestnuts we all sang Christmas carols and finished off with the song "Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire." Good Times! Good Times! that is one good thing about Alabama, is that it's not too cold and not too hot during the winter. We comfortably enjoyed a good fire. Merry Christmas everyone!

Happy Birthday Abby!

Abby turned 9 on December 16th. She is quite the young lady! She is my tall skinny girl.

Abby loves Rapunzel and actually had a cake like this last year but this year she wanted Flynn with her. She loved it! The grin says it all.

 

We let the kids pick their favorite meal and Abby chose steak, mashed potatoes, green beans and chocolate covered strawberries. As you can see by Luke's plate he was quite excited.

Abby making her wish! Go Abby!

So many people wished her well this birthday. She had a wonderful day and loved all the attention. She actually had a friend party the day before and was able to spend some time with some really good friends. They made pizza's and painted toe nails. She had a lot of fun.



D.A.R.E Graduate Tayci!

Tayci's 5th grade class graduated from the D.A.R.E program. They put on a cute skit and sang songs about how they are going to stay away from drugs, alcohol, tobacco and bullying.

Tayci receiving her diploma!

Tayci posing with the McGruff (I think that is what they call him) Dog and Sparky the Fire dog!

This is Tayci with her whole entire 5th grade class. Her Teacher is Ms. Hilton. Tayci had her last year for 4th grade. It was fun to have her again. Tayci enjoys her and she has made some good friends in her class. She is next to her good friend Kara.



Our STAR Abby!

 

At Fort Rucker Elementary they offer so many clubs and after school activities. This year Abby chose to be in chorus. They were able to do a Christmas Program and this is her doing some of them. I tried to upload a video but it didn't seem to work.

This is Abby singing and dancing to "Rockin Around the Christmas Tree." This is big for her because she is such a shy girl.

This is our Abby in one of the Final songs. I think it was "Feliz Navidad."

She has come such a long way and has really come out of her shell. She was a mazing and we are so proud of her!

Christmas Around the World - India

This Family Home Evening we did India for our Christmas Around the World. We have chosen to focus on traditions as opposed to just foods. One of the traditions for India is that they get together and make treats or foods for family and friends. That is what we chose to do.

Levi is my wonderful little taste tester when we made peanut brittle and toffee. He was a great help.

 

Abby, Luke and Levi making the star cookies. Those are my favorite! Yum!

Luke and Tayci making Reese's brownie bites (a recipe a great friend gave me). They are so delicious.

The kids putting our goodies in the boxes for our friends and family here on Fort Rucker! We delivered 12 boxes of treats. It was so fun to see them get excited about giving and wishing everyone a Merry Christmas!



Christmas Around the World-Germany

We are doing Christmas Around the world this year and we started with Germany. We learned about the traditions of Germany and one of them being Gingerbread Houses. So we made our own rendition. The kids had so much fun. 

The kids hard at work making their houses. Levi ate most of his decorations. Germany makes huge elaborate houses, some take weeks to make. We saw pictures and they were amazing. 

The finished products! The one in the middle is Daniel's. They had so much fun and we had a lot of fun as a family. A great Family Home Evening! We finished off our night by watching "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" and "Shrek the Halls." The perfect night.



Thanksgiving 2012

Happy Thanksgiving!

We started our Thanksgiving this year celebrating with some friends the Saturday before. We had an official turkey dinner complete with all the fixings. These are our good friends Garet and Andrea Cooper. They are in Daniel's Unit back in Utah. They are good friends and we enjoyed spending a holiday with them. Garet made an amazing turkey.

We then carried on a family tradition of PIE NIGHT the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. We invited neighbors, classmates and church friends. We had a full house and it was so much fun.

This is one of our neighbors across the street. We enjoyed spending the time to get to know all of

them.

These are some great friends from church. We enjoyed some yummy pies and good brownies. It was all so good.

Thanksgiving Day at the Landing Zone here on Post at Fort Rucker. We enjoyed going out and not having to cook or clean up. 

Levi is ready to eat. He was on his best behavior!

Smiling Abby (or Babby as Levi calls her) Ready to dive in.

Happy to be here Luke (or Lukey) as Levi calls him) is ready to eat to.

Tacyi (or Cici as Levi calls her) can't wait. 

Levi was so good and ate all his food. He is saying cheese in this picture.

We are just happy to not have to cook or clean up afterwards. We had some great friends who invited us to their houses but we wanted to keep it low key. It was nice and relaxing.

Digging in to some yummy food. Filled our selves up and someone wait on us. My kind of Thanksgiving!

Creative Kids!

The girls had to dress up as a book character at the elementary school today. This is my sweet little Hermione Granger from Harry Potter.

This is my brave Jedi apprentice Ahsoka Tano from Star Wars the Clone Wars. (tear, tear she makes me so proud!)

This Levi being Levi. He just wanted his picture taken since I was doing all the other kids.

At the Primary school they had to dress up as a Pilgrim or and Indian. Luke chose an Indian as you can see. We used one of Daniel's old shirts and ripped it up and he and his sister Abby decorated it with Indian symbols. We had gone to a friends place to see their horses and other farm animals and they had all these peacock feathers so Luke collected a bunch and he wanted to use them on his headband. I had placed them in a different spot but he informed me that it was wrong. and made put them where they are in the picture. He had to come up with an Indian name so he chose. Chief Peacock! Man that kid kills me. They all had to wear their costumes to school.

TIMBER!!!!!!!!!!

This lovely dead as a doornail tree has been in our backyard here at Fort Rucker. Every time there is a storm it loses branches. Hallelujah the are finally cutting it down!

This tree stood a little taller than a two story house. The trunk was about 3 feet in diameter. One of the branches that came down a few months ago broke the fence which they had to replace. The guy in the photo took a huge wedge out of the trunk and it fell with a HUGE thud. They made it look so simple.

This guy did the cutting of the whole tree, brought it down with a friend, chopped the whole thing up and then made our yard look more lovely than we had it. Amazing!

They had to saw the trunk of the tree into a bunch of sections so that a fork lift could carry them off.



They left us some good fire wood for our fire pit. Nice guys. The last time a branch fell it almost hit our dog but managed to break an Adirondack chair we had by out fire pit. Thank heavens it's gone!