Weekly Review December 30 '11

My last weekly review for 2011! Where did the year go? When I left off last week I had a batch of cookie dough in the fridge waiting to be made into cookies. We did that Saturday morning--the photo above is the end result.

For lunch we drove out to the pizza place where Scott worked for a while--we wanted to give his boss a plate of goodies and invite him to church. (He didn't come, but we tried!) His boss was happy to see us and gave us a gift certificate to come back for another meal for free. We had pizza, subs, and gyros for lunch--very yummy! It was a much more relaxing Christmas Eve than many we've had because we weren't cooking a fancy dinner. We had a simple "Bethlehem" meal instead--flat bread, humus, olives, clementines, dried fruit & nuts, cheese, crackers, and summer sausage. Most of us didn't eat much since we were still pretty full from lunch. Tanner & Frank delivered the last 12 Days of Christmas treat; then we watched Joy to the World (the church's video that includes reading the Christmas story from the scriptures and music by the Tabernacle Choir) and everyone got to open one present before bed. Seth took forever to fall asleep so we sent the other boys to bed, too--they wanted to stay up to be "elves".

Frank, Seth, and Snickers--relaxing on Christmas Eve

I woke up by 6:00, so I decided to get my shower out of the way--we knew the morning would be a little rushed with church at 11:00, and I needed to be there early. The boys didn't get up until about 7:30, so that was a good choice. Everyone seemed to be happy with their presents.

Jared got this nerf gun from his brothers--he has quite a collection! ( I guess this one is actually a disc shooter, not a dart gun.)

Seth's loot from everybody--Santa, us, brothers, grandparents...he was pretty spoiled.

Scott playing "transformers" with Seth.

Tanner tries out the new keyboard. The older boys got this and a Kinect for their XBox. That's mostly what they got, along with a few movies and games. They did not expect to get a keyboard so it was fun to surprise them! (We got a great deal online on Black Friday.)

I got a--project! Yes, that's a dollhouse. I've been wanting one for years and when I got a 50% off coupon for the only store in Frederick that sells dollhouses, I tipped "Santa" off and he took the hint. The problem is, there really is no place in this house for me to build it. (The instructions say you need a large space that won't be disturbed--doesn't exist!) So I am going to have to find someone willing to loan me their basement or I'm just going to have to wait until the older boys move out of the house and use one of their rooms! It'll be fun to build...someday.

Frank opening his metal detector. He was supposed to get one for his birthday this year, but he never got around to picking one out before he got laid off. So it had to wait and became a combined birthday / Christmas present.

After opening gifts and playing for a while, everyone else got showered and we went to church. I was singing four songs in a quartet as part of the prelude and Jared was helping with ushering. Our bishop had planned things out to help set the tone for a reverent and extra special Sacrament Meeting...a lot of the YM and YW were going to open the doors for people as they arrived and there was going to be 10 minutes of organ prelude followed by our quartet for 10 minutes before the meeting started. Unfortunately, the other ward which meets in our building (at 9:00) had an extra long sacrament meeting so when we arrived at 10:40 they were just ending and then they all stood around in the chapel visiting so it was basically bedlam for a while since our ward members were all arriving and trying to get to their seats and the other ward's members were blocking all the aisles and foyers. Oh well! I don't think the organ prelude happened at all, but our quartet got to start about 5 minutes to 11:00 and the meeting was really spiritual and uplifting anyway in spite of the rough start. It was nice afterwards to wish a lot of people Merry Christmas--we love our ward family!

After that we hurried home to change and get some rolls in the oven before going to have dinner with our friends, the Pedersens. They had us over for Thanksgiving, also. We had a nice ham dinner and pulled "crackers" too. It was fun--we all had to wear our paper hats from our crackers during dinner. The missionaries serving in our ward were there also. We were just a bunch of people without any family around banding together! :) It was a different Christmas but we enjoyed it.

Frank had Monday off, so we just hung out, relaxed, and played new games. (We did get some laundry done, too--weren't totally lazy!) Frank had to work the rest of the week so we didn't have any big plans. It was nice for the boys and I not to have to get up at a certain time in the mornings. I had a list of things I wanted to get accomplished over the break so I worked on those things. I didn't get a lot of it done, but it was a pretty ambitious list. At least I got started!

I had a visiting teaching appointment Tuesday morning and yesterday I took advantage of the boys being home to babysit and went to the temple. The traffic was horrible both ways, so that ended up taking up most of the day. They only have sessions every hour during the day time on week days, and I just missed one session so had to wait an hour for the next one. It was worth the wait, though! Last night I took Scott to buy some shoes--he had a gift card to spend.

The boys had several social events--Tanner spent the night at his friend Taylor's house on Tuesday and he has another sleep over at Ryan's house tonight. Scott played basketball with friends this morning, went to lunch, and now he and Allie are at a movie. All three boys went to a movie night last night with friends in the ward. They got home just after midnight--I never heard them come in! I woke up after 1:00 and had to go downstairs to see if they made it home--when I saw their shoes and cell phones lying around, I knew they were home! I didn't go back to sleep for hours after that, unfortunately.

We enjoyed watching BYU play their bowl game this afternoon. Well, maybe "enjoy" is not the correct word since we groaned through so much of it, but we couldn't find much fault with the defense and there were some pretty awesome offensive plays (although they were few and far between) and we are just happy that they managed to pull off a win in the end. If they were going for suspenseful, they certainly met that goal!

The weather has continued to be mostly mild this week. We had rain some days. Yesterday it was colder and it did actually snow--but only briefly. Today it is back into the 50s again. No complaints from me!

Seth is getting very independent lately. He was the first one up most mornings. This morning I didn't wake up until 8:00 (after my bad night) and I found him downstairs playing a game on the Wii--he turned it on and got it going all by himself. Yesterday while I was drying my hair (and no one else was up yet) I heard him moving things around. I went downstairs to see what was up and he had pulled most of the kitchen chairs into the living room, grouped them around the coffee table, put one of his blankets on the table for a "table cloth", and had just pulled 6 plates out of the cupboard so he could set the table. Then he put a piece of cheese on each plate. He woke up the older boys, saying "Get up! I made dinner!" I was impressed he managed to do all that himself--got out the correct number of plates for our family (he didn't know Frank was already at work) and the "table cloth" was even on the table nice and straight! I should have got a picture, but I was trying to get out the door to go to the temple. (If I'd known the traffic was going to be so bad, I would have taken the time to take the picture!)

Best wishes to all of you for a Happy New Year--welcome 2012!