Christmastime 2012

It is snowing perfect little sparking snowflakes right now, and they are twinkling down next to the Christmas lights shining outside my window.  I am watching one of those cheesy TV holiday movies I still have on my DVR ("A Christmas Kiss") and it still feels like Christmas to me!  I guess I am just not ready for Christmas to be over.  So I will do a Christmasy blog post!

 

On Christmas Eve, we were driving around to visit Preston's mom and then over to my parents' house for a party.  Cora was singing pretty much the whole time we were in the car, which was a pretty dang long time.  Her two songs of choice were "Here Comes Santa Claus" and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer."  Unfortunately for us, she doesn't know very many of the words to "Here Comes Santa Claus," and so here is what she sang for the 20 minutes STRAIGHT she was singing that song:

 

Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus Lane!

Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus Lane!

Here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus, here comes Santa Claus Lane!

 

She knows most of the words to Rudolph, though they don't always make it out of her mouth in the right order.  I know that she was driving Dax (and possibly Preston) crazy with the singing, but it made me smile to see how happy she was that Christmas was here:

 

After eating our traditional Christmas Eve dinner of pizza and egg nog with my family (I know, we are so high-brow and sophisticated!), we watched Scrooge and played with the kids and ate treats until it was time to go.  The kids got to open a present on Christmas Eve (that is what Cora has on her lap in the video), and they all got new Christmas pajamas.  I wish I had a video of Dax opening his jammies.  He was soooo excited for his new Christmas pajamas since I had to take his Santa pajamas from last year away a month or two ago because he just couldn't fit in them anymore.  After everyone was all snuggled into their jammies, we packed ourselves up and headed home.  The kids were just the teeeeeniest bit excited, and it took them a while to calm down and get ready for sleep.  Right before we went upstairs, Arden wrote a note to Santa to leave with his cookies.  Side one :

 If you can't read it, it says: "Dear Santa I hop you have a good Christmas HO-HO-HO"  Side 2:

"I believe in you :)"

How cute is she?  I wish I could save up these Christmases while the kids are little and use them up slowly over my whole life, instead of having them fly by so fast all in a row!   I guess all I can do is soak them up as much as I possibly can.  

Preston and I got all the presents wrapped and put under the tree around midnight.  There is nothing better than that moment when everything is ready and the house is so quiet and still:

Love it!  I wish I could go back there right now and do it all again.

Christmas morning was finally here!  The kids were so happy to open their stockings and see the little gifts inside:

We waited for grandma and grandpa and aunts and uncles to come over to finish opening the presents.  We had some cinnamon rolls and watched the sun came up on a beautiful Christmas morning.  Here is Cora, looking out the window:

When Grandma and Grandpa got there, they showed the kids how Santa's reindeer had left footprints all over our yard (the footprints look a lot like the prints from our local neighborhood deer, but the kids knew they were Dancer and Blitzen).  Arden old everyone that while she was sleeping she opened her eyes and saw Santa's hand waving to her through her window from out on the roof.  Wow! 

Dax had a couple of BIG boxes, and couldn't wait to open them.  He scored some large new friends:

After breakfast and some treats, we headed over to my Grandma Wilson's house.  It is always good to see her and she was doing well.  She gave us a book about her life when she was young for Christmas full of pictures and stories.  It was so fun to look at I read it all today when I should have been cleaning up the kitchen ;-).  I learned quite a few things about her and my Grandpa that I didn't know before.  Here is a picture of 4 generations of moms and daughters on Christmas 2012:

We headed to Preston's mom's house after that.  The kids had so much fun eating the delicious soup she had made for us (and her treats) and playing with their cousins, big and small.  Lately, they love to play with their cousin Jacob, who just got back from a mission a few months ago.  They treat him like a jungle gym and he is a very good tickler.  They were asking when he could come over for another play date as I put them into the car. 

 

We went home and played with our new toys for a little while, and then it was time for bed!  The kids had been asking and asking (and asking) for new "Dream Lites" toys for Christmas.  If you don't have a little kid and have never heard of a Dream Lite, it is a stuffed animal that projects lights in the shapes of stars and moons onto the ceiling...kind of a toy/night light combo.  The kids all ended up buying each other Dream Lites for Christmas.  (Grandpa was a little jealous of Dax's Dream Lite because it was a fuzzy bear dressed up in a 49ers jersey, and along with the stars it projects onto the ceiling is a 49ers logo!  Maybe if Grandpa is a good boy I will get him one for his birthday).  The kids were excited to try out their new bedtime toys and jumped right under the covers. I was worried they would be up all night watching the lights on their ceiling, but they were so tired from wrestling with Jacob that they all dropped off to sleep pretty quick. 

 

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

#4 Locks of Love!

I have been working on doing 26 Acts of Kindness for the past couple of days (have you heard about it?  Look it up, it is a great idea and has really helped me feel the Christmas spirit instead of feeling sad and helpless about things that are beyond my control).  Here is one act I did today. 

 

Before:

 After!

I am donating my hair!  I have been thinking about changing my hair for a while, but I was unsure what to do and afraid to do anything drastic so it just kept getting longer and longer.  This gave me a good reason, so I decided to just chop it all off.  Yay!  

This was in honor of Catherine Hubbard, age 6.

https://www.facebook.com/26acts?ref=nf

Hanging with Santa...

This week has been a roller coaster.  We have had some superfun highs, and all of us have had some unbelievably horrible lows. 

For the last few days I have probably been driving my kids crazy with all the extra hugs and squeezes and I-love-yous.  If anything good can possibly come from something so utterly catastrophically unthinkably awful as what happened in Newtown, it is that I have again realized how precious my own kids are, especially my own little first grader.  I love my Arden more than I could ever imagine I could love anyone, and I am so grateful to have her with me this Christmas.  I can't get enough of her this weekend, and even snuck in her room and slept in her bed for a while last night.  It is going to be hard for me (and I am sure for all of us) to smile and wave as I send her off to school in the morning.

Phew!  Anyway....we have been busy getting ready for Christmas this week.  For FHE on Monday, we drove around the neighborhood and delivered gifts to some neighbors.  The kids loved to knock on everyone's door and yell "Merry Christmas!" as they handed over our small present.  My Dax is especially friendly and made sure he got out of the car at every single house.  He is such a fun, outgoing kid and loves to do things to make other people happy. 

On Thursday, Arden was superexcited to get to sing in her school's "Deck the Halls" performance.  Each grade in her elementary school sings a couple of Christmas songs to a huge herd of crazed, camera-wielding parents.  The first graders sang "All I Want for Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth" (which is hilarious because when I took Arden to her first day of school, the three kids at her table had not a front tooth among them.  Arden's front teeth are growing in now, but I thought that the song choice was appropriate) and "Up On Rooftop." 

We were walking down the hallway of the elementary school with the kids before the show, and Dax as usual was not so much walking as dancing/jumping/turning in circles.  Unfortunately for Dax, he wasn't really watching where he was going, and also unfortunately, the school has some big metal posts along the walls every so often...you see where this is going?  Dax was jumping along backwards along the wall and then decided to turn around at just the wrong moment and BONG!  Smacked his little head right into one of these metal posts.  Behold:

Nice little goose egg on his forehead over his eye.  Poor baby!  He was pretty brave about the whole thing (after the first minute or two of crying, of course) and had forgotten all about it by the time the songs started.  Speaking of songs, as a member of the herd of crazed camera-wielding parents, I DO have video of Arden's songs, but Preston isn't here to remind me how I get my videos into the right format to post them here.  (I took a couple of snapshots too, but they turned out horribly).  You will just have to trust me when I tell you that all the kids were supercute and Arden did great!  Have I told you how much I love that girl?

On Friday we were going to try to visit the live nativity at Liberty park to make up for missing the other nativity, but it was cold and raining HARD and so we wussed out.  Instead we put on our jammies, grabbed our sleeping bags, and had a movie night.  We watched "Muppets Christmas Carol," and Cora was nice enough to let me cuddle her through pretty much the whole movie.  She is such a great little teddy bear, and likes getting cuddled almost as much as I like to cuddle her.  Sometimes in the middle of the day for no reason she will say something like, "Mom, can we sit on da couch wif my bwankie and snuggle?"  Um, if I HAVE to.

On Saturday we woke up to a winter wonderland:

Hmmmmm...I was planning on going for a run outside that morning, but after looking out the window and seeing this I again wussed out.  I don't know about you, but I don't enjoy running with slush in my shoes.  Another treadmill day for me.  (Less than a month until my first half marathon!  Aaaahhh!)

Later that day we had our annual Haun family Christmas party.  We ate lots of food and played lots of games and then ate some more food.  The highlight of the party, of course, was getting to hang out with the big guy himself.  That's right, SANTA!

Dax was so excited to see good ol' Saint Nick, and could NOT WAIT to jump on his lap and tell Santa how he has been such a good boy and ALWAYS does what his mom tells him too (Lies, but I'll let it slide.  Santa knows the truth).

Arden and Santa go way back, of course, and she didn't hesitate to sit on her ol' buddy's lap and tell him she wanted a toy dog for Christmas (which she has never mentioned to me before...I think Santa's elves may have already made her something else...oops).

Cora for some reason was a little nervous all morning knowing that Santa was going to be coming to the party.  I showed her pictures of her and Dax sitting on Santa's lap last year, all smiles, but she was still worried.  Cora has never been afraid of Santa before, so I thought that once she saw him she would be fine.  HowEVer, when Cora's turn came, she decided she would rather not leave her daddy's lap, thanks anyways:

Santa, of course, was very understanding and still handed over the candy cane and the present.  Hmmmmm...there is no understanding the mind of a 3-year old.  (By the way, can you see the look on Dax's face in that picture?  Pure adoration.  Love it.)

Grandpa showed Cora how it is done and was all smiles for Santa:

Attaboy, Grandpa. 

There is only a week and a day left before Christmas now and I have about 1.3 zillion things to do to get ready, so I am calling this a blog post.  I will leave you all with some wishes for comfort and joy.  If you are bored, come on over to my house and I will set you to work wrapping presents.

Christmas Ups and Downs

I missed my blog-a-week minimum again, and I sincerely apologize to my two faithful blog readers! I have been busy with all of the hustle and bustle of Christmastime.  I will try and catch you up on a few of the fun things we have been doing.

First, on the weekend after Thanksgiving, we tried something new and headed up to the land of Og.  My dad and sister were running in a "Santa Fun Run" there, which is where everyone in the race dresses up like Santa and the runs a 5k.  After the race, there was going to be a "Holiday Lights Parade" and then some fireworks as they turned on the lights to their Christmas Village there.  Sounds fun!  We didn't make it up there in time to see the race, but we saw plenty of sweaty post-race Santas on our way to the parade. We found our spot and settled in to watch.  Dax was just a little excited:

The parade was pretty fun!  There were quite a few floats, all decked out in Christmas lights.  There were firetrucks with lights, boats with lights, motorcycles with lights, and jeeps with lights:

Then at the end of the parade was the big man himself, Santa Claus!

After the parade ended, we walked up the street to view the fireworks.  The kids had a great time riding around on everyone's shoulders, pretending that whoever they were riding on was a horse and trying to get them to chase each other around.  There was lots of yelling and giggling and pretty much making a spectacle of ourselves:

Then, fireworks in November!  Quite an unusual sight:

The next weekend, we thought it MIGHT be fun to take the kids to the festival of trees.  I remember going as a kid and thinking it was really boring.  I wasn't sure if the kids would like it, but I read that there were fresh cinnamon rolls and fudge, so I knew it couldn't be all bad.  First, we checked out the gingerbread houses. 

They were amazing!  There was gingerbread Hogwarts, a gingerbread Dr. Suess house, gingerbread churches (like the one behind Dax), gingerbread birdhouses, and even gingerbread lighthouses. 

We looked at a few trees, but all that gingerbread and candy had made us hungry, so before long we were sampling the fresh sweet rolls with chocolate milk.  There were so many beautiful trees, Cora especially loved the "Pinkalicious" tree:

Arden kept whining to go over and do some crafts by the door (that costed extra $$$).  We told her that we weren't going to do the crafts since we had lots of crafts at home, but she wouldn't give it up.  I got a little tired of hearing about the crafts over and over and over, so I made her pose by this Grinch tree :-):  She is even pulling an appropriate face!

After the trees started to blur together, we took in some quality entertainment!  These are the "Clogging Grannies," and they were awesome. I soooo want to join this group when I am a granny.  Arden asked if she could have a jacket like theirs for Christmas because they were "so shiny!":

Earlier this week, we thought we would follow up all the Santas and Christmas trees with a little something to help us remember the real meaning behind Christmas.  Up in Layton they do a "Journey to Bethlehem" at one of the churches, where people dress up in costumes from Jesus' time, and take tours around showing scenes from the Christmas story, complete with real live donkeys, camels and other animals.  We were so excited to show the kids this....until we saw the line.  It was LONG!  We waited in the line for about 20 minutes and it hadn't moved much at all.  The kids were getting restless.  We estimated that we would be in the line for about another hour.  It was already coming up on 7:30, so we threw in the towel.  The kids were disappointed to leave without seeing "da baby Jesus" but were satisfied when we told them we would stop at the Layton City park lights on the way home.  Here are the kids' favorite light figures.  Arden liked the unicorn:

Dax liked the (you guessed it) dinosaur:

 

(Mom! Do you see the green, glowing T-Rex behind me!  Can we have one in our yard?  Pleeease?  Because nothing says "Christmas" like a gigantic, light up T-Rex!"

Cora liked them all!

So, we started out the evening hoping to see our children reverently looking at a nativity scene, but ended up with giggles in front of pink unicorns and dinosaurs.  Fail.

Well, that is all the fun I can squeeze into this post.  Hopefully there will be much more to come!  And in less than a week from now ;-)

Thanksgiving 2012

I think we have found a solution to our storage problem...so here goes:

THANKSGIVING!  It seems so long ago now, but it was only a little over a week ago.  We got to have Thanksgiving TWICE this year. 

First, we had Thanksgiving dinner with the Zaugg family the Sunday before Thanksgiving Day at Preston's brother's house.  There was turkey, mashed potatoes, rolls, and pie....and a pinewood derby race! 

You heard me. 

Preston's brother has his very own pinewood derby racing track in his basement.  I am still not clear on the reasons behind this, but it is fun, so whatever!  And so it was decided that the First Annual Zaugg Family Thanksgiving Pinewood Derby would be held.  Preston helped each of our kids put a car together the week before the race.  Daxton's car looked like a skateboard, and Preston helped Dax attach a dinosaur to the top so it looked like the dinosaur was riding a skateboard.  Unfortunately, once we tried Dax's car on the official track, the dinosaur was too tall to fit under the timing gate at the end of the track.  We had to rearrange the dinosaur so he was laying down on the board, so it looked more like a sled than a skateboard.  Dax and Preston were still happy so it was all good.  Cora's car was purple with LOTS of bug stickers on it (I don't know why she chose the bug stickers since she is not really fond of bugs, but again, Whatever!).  Arden's car was orange with flames on the side...and a giant screw taped to the top so it was heavy enough (Whatever!).  All of the cars did surprisingly well and Cora yelled "I won!  I won!" after every heat -- even though she was usually second or third.  Arden's car was actually the most successful and she won nearly every heat.  She pretty much tied for first place with her cousin Ben.  It was a super fun night!  I have no idea why I didn't take any pictures!  Duh!

Thanksgiving - Round 2 came on Thanksgiving Day.  We headed over to my parents' house for dinner.  We only had to bring the sweet potatoes and a couple of pies (Lemon Truffle and Raspberry Cream Cheese, yum!), so it wasn't too much work for us.  All of the in-state siblings were there, and the kids argued in the car about who got to sit by Val. Preston helpfully reminded me that I should bring my camera this time.  Soon after we arrived the turkey was carved, the potatoes were mashed and all was ready.  Can you guess who was the most excited to get down to bidness and start eating?

This was the first year we got to eat in the "East Wing," which is a new addition to my parent's house.  It was nice to be able to all fit at the table together for Thanksgiving.  We didn't even have to miss any football, we just paused the game and then we had "skippy time" so that we didn't have to watch commercials.  I love modern technology! 

After we all stuffed ourselves with turkey with cranberry chutney, stuffing, potatoes and gravy, rolls, jello, sweet potatoes, etc. etc., most of us dragged ourselves over to the couch to watch the game in a post-feast semi-coma. 

My kids don't understand the need to hold still after stuffing your face with WAY too much food, but lucky for me, Matt, Grandpa and mostly Grandma did an awesome job of keeping the kids occupied playing tag outside and doing art projects for most of the day.

This left me blissfully able to relax on the couch and watch an entire football game.  This is something that does not happen very often (read: NEVER) at my house since my kids have not yet discovered the awesomeness of football.  Whenever I try to watch a game I get a steady stream of whining about how My Little Pony or Team Umizoomi is MUCH more interesting than any old football game.  So, for me, sitting on the couch with a full tummy and watching a football game while eating the occasional piece of pie in relative peace is pretty much HEAVEN ON EARTH.  Plus, the Cowboys lost which made it even better.   

Dax, of course, enjoyed some pie as well:

I only wish Thanksgiving could come 3 times a year!

I have so much to be thankful for!  I have been truly blessed.  I have a wonderful, hard working husband, three beautiful children, a healthy body, kind friends, a warm house, delicious food to eat, I could go on and on and on and on.  I am glad to have this time of year to spend time with family and reflect on what a charmed life I truly lead.  Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!  Bring on Christmas!