Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve Morning we woke to LOTS of snow which continued as the day want on!! (I'm on the WARM side of the door taking pictures!)

NOTE these pictures are taken in the first half of the day, but the piles got higher as the day went on!
One of our kind neighbors Fritz brought over his snow blower for Scott to borrow, you can see how deep it is!

Here are a couple shots from our deck... some snow was there already, but more than half of it was new from last night!

Another angle on our deck.

So I got this idea from again my terrific Aunt Chris! I couldn't resist! And yep, even Scott and my door got one!

We have a few Christmas Eve traditions at our house,
#1 We have our traditional Crunchy top ham/potato/cheese casserole with other fun things.
#2 We do the Christmas play with Joseph Mary and Baby Jesus. (I don't have pictures this year).
#3 On Christmas Eve we open one gift... PJ's (or the like). This year Scott wanted to do all John Deere! Kamiah said, "Was this Daddy's idea?" Of course! :)

And the winner of the best gift given Christmas 2010 award (according to me) The footed PJ's for Scott!! Ha ha ha!

Complete with a back flap! Scott said, "and you paid extra for that??!!" Yes and it was worth every dime! Oh it made me laugh! Every time someone mentioned the word "PJ's" I couldn't help but laugh!

You too could be the proud new owner of these fantastic PJ's!http://www.bigfeetpjs.com/ or http://www.footedpajamas.com/ or https://www.orderforeverlazy.com/flare/next?gclid=CPnR1Y7vrqYCFQO8KgodvQmzoQ there are of course others too!

Oh what a good sport my husband is!! Wearing his new PJ's that he was thrilled about!

#4 Scott and the kids go out to leave treats for the reindeer.

#5 we make cookies for Santa and Kamiah normally leaves a card too! (this year we cheated on our "homemade cookies" we still made them at home, but Pillsbury made the dough!)

And this is the very sad face of the girl who didn't want to give Santa the cookies! At first she was so excited about the cookies, and was helping get everything ready... and then she realized they were for Santa and NOT her! We told her she could have others, but she didn't want any for Santa! (and she Definitely didn't want her picture taken, this was the shot I could get!)

Classic

Quotes from my kids in the last 24 hours!

Kamiah, "Sometimes I get tired of boys at school being so gross!" (Time will change that!)

Wesley, "every car is special!" (Very thoughtful.) (fixed version... I typed it wrong the first time!)

Halle, "I wish I was a mom and could make garlic!" (I guess she really liked my garlic bread!)

Wall Flowers

No we don't have the curtains back up yet... we keep forgetting about those.

Well, I'm sure most of you have seen the new fad paper flowers? Typically they are about 1-2 inches in diameter, they're really cute and I was thinking "what if I made them big, say 8-10 inches and put them on my girlies' wall?? So I got 4 12" pieces of paper in the about them the same color family and glued them together and made a large flower. I did this with three different colors that went with my girls' room and I was really excited about them especially that they are each a little different. Here's a link to a YouTube video on how to make them.

My first one (blue) I had a harder time doing it kept wanting to rip on me! So I discovered some tricks. If you want it the folded look like my blue one is do one (or both) of two things; fold it in half after you cut the spiral, before you spin it up that would probably work better. And/or remember in elementary school when you took brown paper bags and rubbed them on them self to make them soft and worn looking? This might make the paper easier to fold in half if it's a little softer.

My pink one I didn't fold too much and I think they worked because most of the paper I used for that one had color on both sides. So when the paper is straight you see color instead of white on the back.

The green one. By this time I started figuring out what I was doing and what I needed to do to get it to look right! So, since I made it bigger, if I wanted just the tips folded I needed bigger hills and valleys as I cut, then it was easier to fold without ripping! Anyway, if you try it good luck!

The kids and I one day were hooked on watching some howdini.com cake making videos (I'm not sure how we got started?) But we decided to decorate some cakes, the kids had lots of fun being creative!

Make sure you've got some extras for 3d toppings! I'm amazed at how creative they are at howdini and how simple it is or at least seems!

And of course you have to sample along the way!

Family triathalon

Well, one friday I decided we needed to do something fun. We were going to have an Evans Family Triathalon. The first event was inspired by my awesome aunt Chris, bowl races! Yep! The kids loved it!

The kids tried two versions:

the first, bowls upside down pushing them across the floor while ontop,

the second, standing in them and twisting a lot trying to moved forward.

Halle needed some extra help.

For Scott and I we needed to improvise... we were too heavy for the upside down bowl race. So we raced on all fours. Scott tried to be extra tricky! If you think that looks easy you should try it!

Next race was hopping on one foot which was Wesley's idea (which he made should we knew it was his idea so he made the rules, some of which change as we were going ) :)
A since we were all busy hopping I don't have any pictures!
The last act in our family triathalon was soccor--and I know it's not an individual event like most triathalons have but it's our own so we did what we wanted!
Then we ended the night with some homemade ice cream (another great idea from my aunt Chris!)

We had a blast and decided we need to do that more often!!

This is a picture of Jameson the night of fun games.. but he missed out because he went to bed. Don't you just want to clean his cute little face up and give him a big smooch?!

A Purse for a Princess

Halle loves this purse. She sleeps with it, takes it to the store and all around the house. I was noticing the contents one day and had to laugh: all the wild uno cards, play car keys, a drink (the baby bottle), snacks (play food), AND THREE PHONES (for her the purple compact brush equals a phone). Should I be worried??

Beggars Night

Halloween this year was spent with family.

Where Scott's family lives they do a "Beggars Night" where they trick or treat on the night before Halloween. I think it's a little strange the city does that, but it work out in our favor this year with Halloween on a Sunday!

We had fun carving pumpkins, there were a total of 17 pumpkins for everyone to carve... (so some of the adults did more than one). It was pretty neat with all of them lit up outside... I think the trick or treaters were impressed!

Here are a couple of spectators!

For dinner we had mummies and apple lips!

We had to hurry after carving pumpkins (they took longer than expected) so we quickly got our costumes on and I'm sure you'll notice ketchup on kids' faces--at least my kids faces!

This year we had a snow angel, a fierce shark that I couldn't get to look at the camera and a little pink poodle!

Oh yeah, and a pumpkin, a good sport husband rock star, and me, I'm just dressed up like my grandma used to do!

We did a few games after trick or treating.

Orchard 2010

Well, of course we went to the orchard this year again... but daddy couldn't come this time. Lucky guy was cleaning garbage on the side of the road with the youth. (The youth in our ward have a stretch of highway they have adopted.) We were running out of season to visit... so we went with out him.

Unfortunately it had been wet and rainy prior to us going so Jameson couldn't do a whole lot, but he sure thought all those apples looked good!

They told us that each basket holds approx. 10 lbs. of apples. It didn't seem to be long before I turned around and each had their basket almost filled or filled...whoa stop! :)

Good thing we like apples. It has been our main fruit for the last 2 weeks!

Well, this past summer at the beginning of July, we had a terrible rainstorm. It rained someting like 7 inches in 1/2 hours (or so I was told). All I know is there was a whole lot of rain in the morning and suddenly we got water in the through the floor drain and shower and toilet...yes, very gross. Luckily it wasn't obvious that it was sewage water, meaning we didn't see any toilet paper. Needless to say, we had quite the project this summer and fall. Scott and I were very naive about that kind of home improvement project, "We'll have it done in a few days, maybe a couple weeks!" Unfortunately not! We're finally starting to wind down our project and here are some pictures from our journey!

This first pictures is a little hard to tell, but if you look closely at the lower 1/3 of the garbage cans (you can see it on the green one the best) you can see how deep the water got in our cul-de-sac.

Here's Scott and a friend removing carpet and pad (Scott was telling me to hurry and take the picture because it was cold and heavy!)

We had cleaners come since it was sewer water, but we had no idea that they would they would cut everything out! Even the entire door jamb of all the doors. All the trim, insulation and bottom 2' ft of dry wall. SO... all the basement came upstairs and out to the garage. All 4 kids were in one room upstairs. It's been a little crazy over here for awhile, but things are getting put back in there place little by little.

In the bathroom they took away our cabinet and vanity too! The kids loved going through the rooms under the wall and playing hide-n-go-seek... unfortunately once all the remodeling started they couldn't do that anymore, but they did get to chalk on the floor sometimes.

This is September 22nd, the night before we got carpet. We had a party at our house! Several friends came and helped work on it with us! Scott pulled an all nighter! Got done at 6:45am, washed up and went to work! At about 9:00 he came for a little nap and then went back. I was only up until 4:30 or 5:00 (and I got up with Jameson once too)!

Sweet Katie stayed until 3:30! Helping us tape and plastic EVERYTHING before Scott painted the ledge with the paint sprayer! But we had fun!

Wesley Had fun watching the carpet layers work and they said they didn't mind him around. When they left it was nice to lay on the soft new carpet. Wesley was so cute he said, "Mom, can I bring our toys back in?!" He comes back in with one thing and announces, "Here's the first toy!"

After working so hard on the basement for so long, we started running out of steam to finish, the last things have taken way too long! But we finally painted the trim and ledge in the bathroom today and hope to get the last few things taken care of this week! I'll have to send pictures of it finished, when all of it is!