Some pie

Apparently everyone liked the Pumpkin Pie. Well, not me or Tom, but most other creatures.......

Christmas Day

More stockings, Jacob laughing, and Leanna playing with what was probably her favorite gift, a Hannah Montana barbie doll.

Christmas night/morning

Santa must have been very tired, in his note he wrote that the reindeer couldn't finish the cookies instead of carrots!

You can see the clay penguin nativity scene I made for Laura, I was still finishing it into the morning..... it ended up being more complicated than I expected.

Jacob in the Baby's first Christmas outfit that all four kids have worn

And Leanna going after her Christmas stocking

More Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve

From before Christmas......

While I remember...........
We did go look at lights in our jammies (except for killjoy Tom this year) before Christmas with thermoses of hot chocolate. We won a coupon to see lights in the parkway free from Leanna's school craft night so that's where we went. We looked through the Christmas barn afterwards. I wouldn't go every year, but every few or so.........maybe. We have to find a good route to look at lights every year.

We never found the time to decorate the cut out cookies this year. And that's the best part! Il love decorating them, being creative about it.. The night we made the cookies was the Saturday before Christmas and I also still had to decorate the tree and look at lights with the kids(which we did that night) and finish a few homemade presents and finish wrapping presents. I just didn't have enough time to do everything this year.
Christmas morning I accidentally unplugged the computer (not realizing he had the tree lights pluged into the same outlet as the computer) and when the computer restarted, well it wouldn't restart. Tom was able to restart it in safe mode only, and we managed to save all our pictures and documents on dvd disks, thank God!! Then he had to reformat the computer when he had a chance. So we didn't have a computer and I couldn't unload the pictures from our camera. So that's where I've been. I'll post more when I get a chance. Plus I've been just trying to find a way out from under the Christmas mess. So, you know, happy holidays to anyone who reads this blog!

Interesting

My sister wrote about finding a person who believes in her and that she can accomplish great things. It reminded me of a similar person I used to know. He was a professsor, and I decided to "google him" to see what came up. (Not much aside from mentions of him as a great professor and one blog where a former student lists about 5 quotes from him. He's older so there aren't many online references). So out of curiosity I decided to look up a few other teachers. I think it's can be fascinating to do these searches because you run into all sorts of things that aren't what you were looking for, but are interesting nonetheless.
This article has a breif quote from one of my former professors, but the man it's written about sounds very intersting. He left the English Dept. before I got there, but he sounds like his class would have been fascinating. "Raconteur, renaissance man, the working man's intellectual. He is a storyteller void of pretense, gleefully following his synapses wherever they take him. Keeping up is half the fun."
I love the recipie book extras, and the brief info on the tomato. (I think I have a few cat-lover readers-can any of you explain the Pizza Pieno recipie quote to me?)
Ok, the baby's sleeping now, so my blog posting ends. Too much to do!

Penguins

"A Mexican newspaper reports that bored Royal Air Force pilots stationed on the Falkland Islands have devised what they consider a marvelous new game. Noting that the local penguins are fascinated by airplanes, the pilots search out a beach where the birds are gathered and fly slowly along it at the water's edge. Perhaps ten thousand penguins turn their heads in unison watching the planes go by, and when the pilots turn around and fly back, the birds turn their heads in the opposite direction, like spectators at a slow-motion tennis match. Then, the paper reports, "The pilots fly out to sea and directly to the penguin colony and overfly it. Heads go up, up, up, and ten thousand penguins fall over gently onto their backs." -- Audobon Society Magazine

Craft links

I may have to do this with the kids next year:

http://www.scrapbookscrapbook.com/free-printable-christmas-nativity.html

Christmas scrapbook stuff: http://www.scrapbookscrapbook.com/christmas.html

Free printables: http://alenkasprintables.com/free_printables.shtml

The Crafts

We didn't have time to do even half of the crafts they had there-waiting for everyone to finish took long and we had to go to tables where there was enough room for all of us. Plus we made photo frames for the Santa pictures with popsicle sticks and we had to wait for them to dry before they could be picked up.

So we made candy cane reindeer, Christmas stockings, the photo frames, and Leanna colored an Elf. I grabbed some paper to make gingerbread men strings and a wreath and took those home.

At the end they asked all students left there to come on stage for a picture. Here is ours. Leanna is the electric one in the front, we were about to leave when they announced this.

Winter Craft Night

The school has a partnership with a local church and they hold many functions there like last night's Winter Craft Night. They had a pot luck dinner but I don't think many people brought stuff. Tom thought he'd be finishing a job for the beginning of the week, but they didn't have enough work for him so he ended up being home and able to attend. I don't think he was so thrilled with that, but I was!! It helped with controlling our kids while there and was good for them to spend time with their father. I don't know if he'd admit it, but I think he had fun making stuff too.

Santa Claus made an appearance. Timothy was kind of in awe. In fact at one point when Tom

said he would take Timothy over to see Santa (he wouldn't go at first, too scary) Timothy ran away-who has time to wait!- and up onto the stage as another family was getting their picture taken with Santa! Tom had to run up and get him, while apologizing to the photographer and family! We'll pick up the pictures the school took with Santa after school today. Justin was too afraid to sit with Santa, but he wanted to go over and tell Santa that he wants a bulldozer for Christmas. Leanna said she was going to tell Santa she wanted a Dream Catcher, but apparently when she got up there she asked for a Hannah Montanna guitar.

Leanna asked me if that was the real Santa. She sounded a bit skeptical so I told her that I thought it might have been one of Santa's brothers, but I wasn't sure because I didn't get a good look at him.

The best part of cookie-making

Always one of my favorite parts of making cookies, anyway.

A few cookie pictures

We made 3 batches of Christmas cookies last weekend-sugar, gingerbread, and snickerdoodles. But we ran out of time to bake the sugar cookies because they had to chill for three hours and we had Claire's birthday party that night also. The snickerdoodles (pictured) were good, but no one cared for the gingerbread. I used a recipe from the Joy OF Cooking and didn't like it. Anyone have a recipe they've used and know is good?

Doctor's again

Both Justin and Jacob were due for checkups in November, but they were so booked up that it had to be put off for a month. We got Laura's old roommate as one of our nurses again. This visit took two hours, although this time they had the excuse of having a student do a check also. She was the nicest bubbliest student doctor I've come accross yet. Jacob liked her too.
Justin was completely uncooperative this time. He cried and clung to me. He did not want to be touched at all! By the time they were ready for shots (near the end) he was finally starting to get used to the situation and actually got very silly.

Justin: 39 inches tall, 31.5 pounds
Jacob: 26.5 inches tall, 18.3 pounds

(for comparison, that's about Timothy's weight at a year old!)

Also....

What will they think of next? (I think baby wipes are much cheaper and work just fine, but if you have money to burn......)

MomSpit is a line of no-rinse cleansers for those times when brushing hands on the seat of your pants won't do. The cleanser contains no actual spit (because that would be gross) but users are assured that there's love in every drop.

Looks like an Evil Anne Geddes

I couldn't resist posting this one. Looks like baby in a blender to me! I'm kind of a simple girl though, I think it's easiest to wash the baby lying down. I was given several of those little baby holder things, for when the baby can sit up, that I gave away. I thought that it would make it more difficult to wash the baby that way. Babies have all kinds of little folds to clean. And it can give a false sense of security-babies can still slide down into the water. Great if it helps someone else, just not for me.

A new style of infant bathtub from the Netherlands is generating a fair bit of buzz on the internet. The idea is to mimic the position the baby was in when inside the womb. It also provides better water coverage -- everything below the neck is underwater -- so the baby is less likely to get cold. The manufacturers even claim it will help with colic and learning to stand.

Adorable

He's five months old now

Jacob, on the floor at

Claire's party

Belated Birthday Wishes

Sorry, I meant to post a Happy Birthday on Friday, but I

was busy and forgot.

Happy Nineteenth!

Happy Holidays, from Justin

He truly is full of the holiday spirits. From to singing Santa Claus is coming to town, tohis excitement at holiday displays, to his "decorating" our house. Or himself.

It's more fun sideways