a merryhappy christmasnewyearsCbirthday...

As our extended family has grown, our holiday celebrations have had to evolve with the addition of new sisters and brothers by marriage and their family celebrations, new children and the challenges of traveling, and the overall desire to spend time with all our loved ones without a ton of pressure or stress on multiple parties.  This is such a great process because it means there are more people to love in our family!  So this is what our holiday plans have looked like for the past couple of years and they have seemed to work really well.  My brother's wife Amy's family lives in Washington state, so their family flies there to celebrate one holiday per year, switching between Thanksgiving and Christmas.  So on the opposite holiday, we celebrate with the my family.  That means on the holiday that Marcus and Amy are in WA, we celebrate with Steve's family.  But his sister-in-law Christy's family is always able to be together on Christmas, as well as his brother-in-law Colyn's family.  So we celebrate Thanksgiving with Steve's family on Thanksgiving, but we celebrate Christmas on New Year's to allow Christy & Colyn to be with their families.  And long store short (!!), since we celebrated Thanksgiving with the my family on the farm, we had Christmas Day at home with just the 6 of us, and then celebrated Christmas with the Steve's family over New Year's Eve and New Year's Day.

Christy and I offered to host the festivities this year - with New Year's Eve at her house and New Year's Day at our house since that is also Carsten's birthday.

We all arrived at Jeff and Christy's warm and cozy home around suppertime, and had delicious chili with all the fixings (corn bread, noodles, cheese, sour cream, onions, etc).  The kids ate first...

...then they ran off to play while the adults ate and visited.

Pretty soon though, the kids were bugging us: "WHEN IS CHRISTMAS!"  So we gathered in the living room around the pile of presents.  Kaatje sorted them into piles for all the cousins, and then each kid took a turn opening one presesnt.

Shields and swords for each of the kids made by Uncle Jeff were a big hit, as well as lots of legos from Papa and Aahma and Uncle Colyn and Auntie Melanie.

After the kids' presents were all opened, the adults took a turn.  We each brought a game that we thought looked great and didn't own and then took turns picking one of the wrapped gifts for a round, then went around again and could choose to "steal" one of the opened games, including the one that you brought!  Very fun and bonus, we had a lot of new games to play together for the next couple of days!

We did not stay until midnight to ring in the 2014 with everyone.  As you can see, by 9:30 our kids were starting to turn into pumpkins. =)

Our table the next morning, holding some of the handmade lovlies from Melanie, Christy and Mom B - these little things were some of my favorite gifts for all the kids!

When the kids woke up, C first told me "I am a whole hand now, Momma!", then they asked for their shields and swords.

Ready for combat!  (full disclosure, while Jeff and Christy usually like to surprise us with the gifts they make for the kids, they did ask beforehand whether or not they could give us short swords with the shields.  We said yes, they will just get taken away if not used properly!)

Our kids had a full night of sleep so they were up bright and early, but the rest of us slowly got up and ready and arrived at our house for a late brunch of egg dishes, fruit, and Christy's cinnamon rolls.  Pippin got to come and celebrate with us too! (he didn't get any cinnamon rolls though)

After a late breakfast, the kids ran off to play and we got out the games!  Here is Jeff and Christy's new game, 7 Wonders.  We also played Mom and Dad's new game, the infamous Horse Racing Game made by Colyn, and Melanie and Colyn's new game Roll through the Ages.  And got New Year's dinner of ham and mashed potatoes and squash ready there too.  I wanted to get a photo of us all at the dinner table together, but alas, did not.  Didn't get a group family photo either, but trust me, we were all there, we all ate well, and had a lot of fun together!

After dinner there was legos to be put together, knitting to be done, cars to be watched out the window, visiting and laughing to enjoy...

piano to be played...(the kids played too)

video games to be played/watched (these boys LOVE their big cousin!)

ball to be played with Papa...

AND A BIRTHDAY TO CELEBRATE!  I can't believe this sweet boy is "one whole hand."  He is our peaceful patient boy who loves his siblings, loves to play games, and loves nature - we are excited to see what FIVE brings for him (although the thought of him going off to school already?  crazy.)  He picked a chocolate cake with white frosting and blue letters.  We made it together, and while I am no cake decorator like my lovely sister-in-law Jessica, we did pretty good (thankfully putting the candles at the top hid my mistake of starting too low on the cake!)

Before we ate cake though, we opened presents!  He loved his gifts...

...especially his Scaredy Squirrel books!  This was from Papa and Aahma along with a card game, he got legos from Kaatje and Greta, and a new big box of colors from Melanie and Colyn, and our gifts for him this year were skateboarding and sports guys (want - he kept asking for a real skateboard, but that will have to wait a few years), a play cash register (need - ok, this really wasn't a need, but it will be so much fun for him and all the kids), an orange VW bug shirt (wear), and Saredy Squirrel has a birthday party (read).

I know this is blurry, but I have to show you - look at this sweet boy just two years ago...

And look at him now on the same stool!  Oh we love you, big boy! 
We all enjoyed cake and ice cream, then snacks, popcorn, apples, a movie for the kids and a round of Pandemic (our new game!) before everyone left to head home.

(Henry thought he should go too.)  

Merry Happy Christmas New Year's Carsten's Birthday EVERYONE!!!!!

PS.  If you are intrigued, give us a call and read this sentence outloud:  "Oh no, they cancelled the boat show!"  =)

happy new year's...

Happy 2014 to all!  I love the beginning of the year, as it can be such a nice demarcation for a fresh start on things.  We don't do well with Resolutions, but it is always good to rethink how we are doing things in our household, in our family, in our parenting, and make some new goals.  This space is always a goal for me as you may have seen in the past 2 years!  I would like to blame it all on that 4th child and the new level of busy that brought to our house, but really, I think my problem was getting behind and then not knowing where to start again.  Do I start posts from 2 months back?  5 months back?  Do I just write about this child's birthday when I haven't posted about the one that was a month ago?  It was honestly easier to just stop.  But the two blogs that I enjoy reading the most are both of my sister-in-laws' blogs, and love seeing their families basically grow up in those spaces and the wonderful record that they have of it.  So I really don't want to call it quits.  I want to keep taking photos and capturing moments and memories and writing about them so that we can share them with all of you, and look back on them and have fun seeing how little everyone was then.  (Although I can't imagine thinking how little they are now, because they all are SO BIG! =)  So new goals need to be set.  Again.  =)

1.  Hoping to post more present events and activities right after they happen (like about Carsten's birthday yesterday). 
2.  Not to get bogged down by what I wanted to but didn't post (like Henry's birthday 2 months ago). 
3.  Not forget those events past (oh Henry will get a birthday post!), just come back to them when I can - don't stress, just enjoy posting. 
4.  FUN FRIDAYS need to come back!  We still have them, I still have pictures of them all, they just haven't made it to here.  (Why I stopped posting them is a perfect example of how things have gotten out of control for me.  We had a Fun Friday with Marcus and Amy, and rather than post about just that day, I wanted to post about the rest of their time here first, but that didn't happen and pretty soon another Friday and another Friday and another Friday went by and then I just stopped because that was easier.  sigh.) 

I will start here with these ideas, and see where we go.  Hopefully when I look back here in a couple of months I will be happier with this space, rather than just sighing and skipping on to the next thing on the list. =)  Because through all that happens, I have this wonderful family and a full life and the grace of God.  We are so, so blessed.

2012 Advent Calendar...

It is the time to start thinking about Advent again, and I realized that I did not post about what we did for our Advent Calendar last year.  We like to do something special with the kids, it helps our whole family focus for the Christmas season.  Another activity I like to do with the kids at Christmas is make an ornament together, and in my search online for ornaments, I came across a number of references to "Truth in the Tinsel" Advent ornaments.  I looked them up and was impressed.  It was going to be perfect to do with the kids being the ages they were.  And are you kidding me?  G being able to craft everyday?  She was in heaven.  I knew there were going to be busy days too so I did purchase the printable color in ornaments too, and there were many days that we colored one of those and glued it to a plastic lid, added a ribbon and voila!  While looking up a few more things about this program, I also saw a neat way to organize the activities for the whole month - using Christmas paper and canning jars!  Both of which I had a huge abundance, so that made a nice Christmas decoration on the top of our bookcases for the month, and the kids could hardly wait to pull down the next jar and see what was in it. (I did get a lot prepped before Advent started, due to Thanksgiving being so early, but I also adjusted things as we went too, and there were a few days that we couldn't get to it and we did 2 or 3 the next day...it was very flexible and easy to keep up with!  And as I always do, if there was something I didn't think would work or if I had a better idea, we just did that instead.  In fact I subbed in some ornaments we already had too!)  

Here are the photos for each day, and check out the website or send me an email if you have more questions about it!

(Reading the last day on Christmas Eve right opening the cross with the devotions was so fitting and moving and a perfect way to focus our family Christmas celebration!  Seeing the look on the kids' faces as they "got it" was probably one of my favorite parts of the whole month)

fun friday, 6.21.13...

In planning activities for our week with M&A, we knew that IKEA was on the list, and the boys wanted to golf, and the girls wanted to go thrifting/shopping, but we needed something special for the kids too.  I listed off a number of things to them including the zoo, museums, and a local chlorinated swimming beach.  As soon as I said beach they immediately said "E would love that!"  My kids would too, definitely, so for fun friday while they were here, we headed for the beach.

This beach is really a man-made swimming hole that is chlorinated, which is really nice because as most of you know the lakes can get pretty scummy in MN on hot summers.  So you have the clean water of a pool, and the atmosphere of a beach with all the sand!  This place gets pretty busy, so we made sure we were there right away in the morning when it opened.  And since it was cloudy and had rained the night before we had the beach to ourselves for an hour before people started trickling in!

We staked out a good spot under the umbrellas and headed for the water.  H was unsure...

...so he watched while E tested it out.

The big kids were super excited that Uncle M went right into the water and played with them.

Getting thrown in was big fun!

And E and H had a lot of fun playing near the shore with the sand toys we had just gotten at IKEA.

Another fun game which was by far C's favorite, was to back up to the building and run on the sand and straight into the water making glorious splashes!

C's splashing got a little too crazy at one point though.  He splashed H right in the face and H ended up getting a big red puffy eye.  He cried and fussed and wouldn't open it - we didn't know whether some sunscreen had gotten in it or whether it was sand and going to damage his eye.  But Auntie A wins the best auntie of the year award for her heroics that day at the expense of all the people at the beach thinking of calling child services on her!  H would NOT open his eye even with me trying to pry it so we could not flush it with clean water.  So A offered to throw water from my water bottle at his face if I could distract him enough to get him to stop crying and look up.  Sounds HORRIBLE, I know, and I will never forget the look on M's face (he was NOT in on the plan), but it seriously helped so much.  H's eye was still quite red, but he at least was able to open it without fussing.  THANKS SO MUCH A! 

As a precaution, since eye stuff is scary to me, I did take him to our pediatrician's office (which was only 10 min away from the beach), and they flushed the eye again and he was back to normal by the time we got back to the beach.  M & A did kid duty and everyone had a blast at the beach.  They even got hot dogs form the concession stand which my kids thought was awesome.

 All in all, I think everyone had a great time!

Then we headed for home where it was bath time, nap time, quiet time, (more golf time for M), followed by Noodles for supper.  What a great fun friday!!!