Other November Memories

November 6th was the 2012 Presidential Election.  I didn't take any photos of the experience, but Isaac and Caleb went with me to vote and it was a great experience to take them with me and answer Isaac's 72,000 questions and teach him about democracy and our great nation.  Unfortunately, our pick - Mitt Romney - lost.  President Barack Obama was re-elected.  Now that he has been re-elected, we wish him the best and pray that he will have success as he guides our nation.  

In November I also participated in my first monthly Hy-Vee Freezer cooking club.  I love it!!!!!  Absolutely life changing.  I should take a picture sometime.  Essentially I get together with 5-10 of my girlfriends at Hy-Vee (local grocery store) for 2-3 hours two Saturdays a month and during that time we prepare a total of 20 freezer meals to feed my family for the month.  We are loving how the freezer meals are simplifying my meal planning, dinner prep, and grocery shopping budget.  We also love the variety of meals that we get to enjoy and expose our adventurous kids to.  And I love that cooking dinner has become a relaxing social time for me. :)  Love it.

A few other random photos from the month of November.  

Isaac and Elise eating peanut butter and honey.

We went to the Liberty Christmas Tree Lighting to listen to Liberty Youth Chorus sing (Michayla, Ally, and Blake are in the choir and Michelle is the founder and director - go Michelle!).

Isaac got really into building forts.

Isaac and Elise discovered how to watch Disney shows on Jeremy's iPhone.

Caleb crawled around and looked cute and emptied a box of sandwich bags (among other mischievous moments that aren't pictured).

A Few Other Moments

We always enjoy a visit from Grandma and Papa!  And, of course, we can't capture all of the fun on camera.  There are so many "not pictured" moments - like baking Thanksgiving rolls with my mom, Jeremy and my dad going to the movies, HOUSE HUNTING, laying on the bed and chatting during quiet time, watching a movie, staying up late chatting about everything under the sun, and just hanging out.  But here's a few other moments that were caught on camera....

Lots of fun, cuddles, and tickles.

Picking up the kids from the Thanksgiving - themed preschool activities.

Papa taught Isaac how to create histograms from books (by going through the book and counting how many of each letter is used, and charting that information on a graph).  Isaac LOVED it and became obsessed with it.  He made LOTS of histograms and spent loads of time working on them.  Here he is with one of them. :)  Thanks for starting him on statistics early Papa. 

Grandma made cookies with the kids.

Playing hide-n-seek.  Nice hiding Jeremy and Isaac.

Grandma playing trains.

Papa helping construct a mammoth marble raceway.

Papa invented a technology based scavenger hunt game.  He would take a photo (like this one) with his phone and then come into the other room and show the photo to the kids and they had to go in search of the item pictured. 

During preschool, Papa, Grandma, Caleb, and I went to downtown historic Liberty and wandered through Antique shops - then headed to Ginger Sue's for a yummy brunch.

Papa's famous "tie a kid up in your jacket to keep them occupied when they are waiting for something and getting bored" trick.  Elise liked it.  And I remember being tied up in my dad's jacket at her age too.  How fun!

Good bye photos as we headed off to the airport!!  Thanks for making the trip!  We love you!!!!

Christmas Book Countdown!

This year I decided to try something new and we counted down to Christmas by the kids unwrapping and reading a different Christmas book each evening.  We raided the library and used up our whole stash to get the 33 books we needed (we started Thanksgiving night).  My plan was to wrap the book each night.  And I did the first night.  Then my GENIUS mother suggested just putting the book in a gift bag and reusing the same gift bag every night for the whole Christmas Book Countdown.  SO much easier and better in every way!!!

It was fun to have my parents here for the first few nights of the Christmas book countdown.  The kids made the most of it by asking them to read the books to them.  My parents also brought 2 new Christmas books as gifts for the kids and Isaac and Elise were excited to open those as well!  I love books and the Christmas book countdown was such a great excuse to spend lots of time cozied up near the Christmas tree reading.  It slowed the evenings down and made us take the time to enjoy each other.  Yay for Christmas books!!  This was a really enjoyable and relaxing way to countdown to Christmas.  I hope to do it again next year.

Here is a (not quite complete) list of the books on the agenda this December.  These are the books that I checked out from the library - so it doesn't count the Christmas books we own.

1.      What am I? Christmas  (Anne Margaret Lewis)

2.      A Christmas Goodnight (Nola Buck)

3.      Christmas is coming!  A Holiday Pop-up Book (A.J. Wood)

4.      Helping Santa: My First Christmas Adventure with Grandma (Illustrated by Bert Dodson)

5.      We Believe in Christmas (Karen Kingsbury)

6.      What Can You See? On Christmas Night (Victoria Tebbs)

7.      Room for a Little One: A Christmas Tale (Martin Waddell)

8.      Snowmen at Christmas (Caralyn Buehner)

9.      Frosty the Snowman (Steve Nelson & Jack Rollins, Illustrated by Brad Davies)

10.   Llama Llama Holiday Drama (Anna Dewdney)

11.   The Twelve Days of Christmas (Laurel Long)

12.   Together at Christmas (Eileen Spinelli)

13.   The Berenstain Bears and the Joy of Giving (Jan & Mike Berenstain)

14.   Deck the Halls (Illustrated by Veronica Vasylenko)

15.   Christmas: Season of Peace and Joy (Dori Hillestad Butler)

16.   The Spirit of Christmas (Nancy Tillman)

17.   A Child is Born: From the Gospel According to St. Luke (Illustrated by Marc-Alexander Schulze)

18.   10 Trim-the-Tree'ers (Janet Schulman)

19.   Where is Baby's Christmas Present? (Karen Katz)

20.   Good Night Baby Jesus (Adam Gamble)

21.   Santa Claus The World's Number One Toy Expert (Marla Frazee)

22.   Lift-the-flap Christmas Stories (Christina Goodings, Illustrated by Annabel Hudson)

23.   The Fourth King: The Story of the Other Wise Man (Ted Sieger)

24.   The Christmas Baby (Marion Dane Bauer)

25.   Merry Christmas, Big Hungry Bear! (Don and Audrey Wood)

26.   Jesus' Christmas Party (Nicholas Allan)

27.   Christmas Tree! (Wendell and Florence Mino)

Trimming the Tree

I have wonderful memories of helping my mom decorate the Christmas tree each year growing up... so it was really special to me to be able to decorate our tree with my parents this year.  It was especially fun to decorate it on a cozy Sunday evening and have it be a whole family affair. :)  The men got the tree all set up in the tree stand, then my mom and I strung the lights, and then everyone helped put on the ornaments.  Most of our ornaments come from my family because growing up, my parents gave us each an ornament each year.  So it was fun to look through all of those ornaments and memories with my parents.  Isaac got to put the star on the top of the tree (with a little help from Jeremy and Papa).  And then we turned off the lights and snuggled up together to enjoy the twinkly lights and sing Christmas carols -- that is one of my all time favorite Christmas activities!

Christmas Tree Farm

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we headed out to the Christmas Tree Farm to select and cut down our very own Christmas Tree!  We did this 2 years ago, and I had been really looking forward to doing it again.  I was SO bummed when we arrived because I forgot the camera!!!  Thank goodness for modern technology.  These photos are brought to you by Jeremy's smart phone. :)

The Christmas Tree Farm is such a fun experience!  The first thing we did when we arrived, was hop on a horse drawn wagon and go out among the trees in the fields.  When we were pretty far out from the barn we got out and started looking for our Christmas Tree.  We were looking for a small (5 foot tall) tree that was cute and a little Charlie Brown-esque.  We found our tree right away!  Then we wandered around among the trees and took some photos.  The big kids loved the experience.  Poor Caleb wasn't feeling very well, but he was a trooper and we kept him bundled up and cuddled him real well.  Even he smiled while we were out there.  Then it was back to our tree, which Isaac appropriately named "Bob" and Jeremy chopped it down.  We then carried our tree back to another wagon and hopped on for a ride back to the barn.  At the barn we warmed up next to the heaters and drank hot chocolate with marshmallows (Isaac spilled his - and was quite upset about it).  "Bob" fit nicely in the back of our van and we headed off to take him home.  Even though my parents came for Thanksgiving, it was so fun to get to kick off the Christmas holidays with them too.  It made it feel like they were here for two holidays.  Yay for Christmas time!