Christmas Adam

12-23

The lead pastor at our church used the term Christmas Adam to describe the day before Christmas Eve. I thought it was hilarious! (He was outlining the schedule of church services - all five of them - for Christmas Eve.) We spent Christmas Adam doing some usual things. Colors and stickers at the table, streaking into the living room after bath, and having some tummy time on the kitchen table. Hattie is really good at tummy time and can lift her head up quite well for her 9-week-old self!! I don't put her on the kitchen table very often, mostly because I don't want any of the kids (ahem, Molly!) to pull Hattie's blanket (and her) to the floor.

From this angle Hattie's head looks flat! But it's not. Must just be a funny angle. :)

Gingerbread Houses

12-22

Building gingerbread houses is hands-down a favorite Christmas activity in our house. And by gingerbread I mean graham crackers. :) I did some prep work during the day to help our decorating go as smooth as possible. I put together three houses using candy melts instead of frosting. I had extra candy melts in plastic baggies that I used for Alanna's birthday cake. A minute or two in the microwave and some graham crackers make for quick little houses! They were extra colorful, too. Bonus! I figured the candy melts would also help the houses weather the storm better as well. While I was assembling walls and roofs, Charlie and Alanna were furiously unwrapping candy for their houses. I pulled out a bunch of leftover candy from Halloween, various parades, and random events and put it all in a big bowl. Charlie and Alanna probably spent 30 minutes pawing through the stash and unwrapping different candy. It was a total time saver that evening when we decorated! I put together a bowl of candies for Molly, too; tootsie rolls, smarties, sweettarts, skittles, m&ms, salt water taffy, and a box of nerds just to name a few. I left the nerds in the box and just put the box in her bowl. I figured she could open the nerds and sprinkle them on the roof of her house or something. Well, she had different plans. Once Matt did some frosting work on her house, Molly got busy poking the candies into the frosting. She did a really great job! When she got around to using the nerds, she just plopped the whole box on the frosting!!! Ha! 

Alanna and Charlie started out doing their own frosting on the houses, but after a while, Charlie accepted help from Daddy. Alanna pressed on and did hers completely on her own. Her funniest thing was two pieces of licorice that she called the grasslands. So cute!  

Hattie and I were mostly watching, taking pictures, and helping with one hand here and there. Matt was mostly the one helping the kids, not that they actually needed that much help once we got going. They knew what to do! At one point, Hattie was stretching out on the floor so Matt took a break and cooed with her for a few minutes.

Can you see her grasslands?! It's the two long Twizzlers in front of her house.

Can you spot the box of nerds?!?

Charlie was hard at work. He was the one who ate the least amount of candy while decorating. Molly and Alanna were chowing down!

Molly's completed gingerbread ranch style home on two acres:

Towards the end of the evening, since we worked on the gingerbread houses for probably 45 minutes or more, Matt did a fence on Alanna's board so she would have more places to put candy. The goal for the kids was to get as much candy on their houses and foil boards as possible. They did an excellent job! We used up a ton of candy (and still have a ton left), the kids had a blast, the houses got decorated, and the candy doubled as a special bedtime snack. All good things!

Alanna's gingerbread mansion:

Charlie's gingerbread craftsman masterpiece, and a leftover toot-cereal that he ate.

Sunday Smiles

12-20

Matt had three eager beavers helping him make chocolate chip pancakes. I think they were on the look out for misbehaving chocolate chips that missed the bowl. :)

Later that evening, I took Charlie and Alanna to a little snowman party. Their friends Paige and Jace invited them the week before. It was a pajama party, too. The kids did a little craft, had hot chocolate/cider, did a toilet paper wrapping snowman game, watched Frosty the Snowman with a popcorn and cheese snack, and played Christmas charades. It was a nice little 90-minute party! We haven't seen much of our friends lately so it was nice to connect again.

How do all seven kids have the exact same look on their faces?!? Hello, TV eyes!

Short Visit, Short Hike

12-19

Kubes passed through Roseburg on their way to CA for Christmas so they stopped in for a very short hour-long visit. They pulled in JUST as I was about to walk out the door to go to a Young Lives Christmas play date. The kids played together for a bit while the adults furiously conversed. :) The Kubes got to meet Hattie for the first time, too!

Later that day, we went for a drive up river and stopped at Susan Creek Falls for a short hike. The waterfall probably looked pretty impressive with all the rain we had been getting but we didn't make it to the waterfall. Charlie had a bathroom emergency so he and I (with Hattie on my chest in the ergo) hustled back to the parking lot to use the restroom. We made it! We explored a bit afterwards but didn't make it back to the falls this time. It was still nice to get outside.

Fullerton IV Christmas Sing-A-Long

12-18

Here are a few pictures from Charlie's first kindergarten performance. Due to the fact that they have music for only half of the school year, I'm guessing that this will be Charlie's only kindergarten performance. Kindergarteners sang Jolly Old Saint Nicholas and then the other grades each performed a song. They finished the program with three sing-a-long songs that we all participated in. His grade stood on the risers and first and second grades stood on the bleachers to perform. The third-fifth grades had their own performance after the younger grades. Good thing, too, because it was wall-to-wall parents and families in the gym!! This was how Charlie looked for most of the performance. He seemed either overwhelmed or not feeling well. After the short concert, Matt took the girls home and I stayed to help out with Charlie's classroom party. I discreetely felt his forehead and he felt feverish, which explains the rather blank look on his face during the concert. Poor guy.

A half smile anyway. The classroom party consisted of snacks, decorating a sugar cookie (they each got a cookie and a spoonful of frosting for themselves and sprinkles were poured on the kids' plates so there wasn't any communal sharing of frosting knives or licking stuff and touching things. So gross!), and doing a craft. I organized the craft so we did a short four-bulb strand of construction paper Christmas lights, the same craft Alanna and I did at the beginning of December. At the end of the party, we had enough time to play one game of Christmas Bingo. It was so interesting to put faces with the names of the kids we have been hearing about since the beginning of the year. Charlie's stories make so much more sense now...

Melanie's husband won this Christmas centerpiece at his work Christmas luncheon just a few days before they were going to head out of town. Melanie dropped it by our house because it would be long dried up and dead by the time they got home. Little did she know that it would be such a taste of home! Mark always gets Jean a beautiful floral centerpiece for Christmas complete with a candle and all. Some years it starts on fire. :)

Hattie bomb!!

My 101 fever guy didn't even have enough energy to actually hold the tag reader pen. He got it going and then just laid it on his ear. Sad.

8 Weeks, Hair, and Smiles

12-17

Hattie's hair! I thought it would be fun to include a picture of the back of her head to show off her hair.

This is how most of her pictures look. Her cheeks appear to be resting on her chest, and honestly, I think they might very well be.

But sometimes she picks her head up enough to make a face or a sound. Sometimes said face looks like this:

Week 8, by the way. And sometimes, her face looks like this!!!! Love Hattie's big smiles!!