Some snow

We have had an unexpectedly white week after Christmas. A beautiful layer of snow has covered everything and I just can't help but be amazed at how pretty it all looks under a gray sky. My phone camera does not even come close to capturing its beauty, but at least I can take a picture to remember and share. There's something about the stillness and the whiteness of snow that just makes it magical.

On Monday morning this is what things looked like (about 2-3 inches)...

On Tuesday morning we still had a pretty good amount of snow so we (April, Alex, and I) finally took a walk around the neighborhood to see what everything looked like. It was a beautiful walk.

Yay for snow! 

Christmas 2021

Mini Light Bright--A Christmas tree by April

Christmas is over and we survived! It was a good year for our family and we were certainly blessed to have such a good Christmas this year. Today was a peaceful day of being together as a family enjoying the gifts everyone received.

Christmas Eve is where we should start though. We spent most of the day down in Springfield at Michele's parent's house visiting, making pizza, and exchanging gifts. It was a nice day with his family. After that, we drove back home to begin our family Christmas "white elephant" gift exchange. The kids chose to do a white elephant gift exchange in lieu of pajamas for our Christmas eve present opening. I kinda missed the pajamas this year, but this turned out to be a fun thing for all.

April got pretty creative with the wrapping too...

We set all the presents in a pile in the middle of the living room and exchanged them one by one. It was supposed to be a sort of funny gift that the person receiving might think was funny. We had some good laughs for some of the gifts, and some were just fun. All were great. It was fun to see the thought that went into these gifts.

Now onto Christmas day...

The stockings are about the only thing I got pictures of. First we have Salem's stocking (the cat). I don't usually get anything for the cat, but I just couldn't resist this Stranger Things arcade and scratching box.

Alex's stocking...

April's stocking...

Mom and Dad's stocking...

Aaron's stocking...

Aric's stocking...

Our tree this year just before I went to bed on Christmas Eve. 

The kids' gifts this year were all large in cost, not actual size. It's interesting how their "piles" change over the years as they get older. Less bulky toys, more electronics or necessities. They each pretty much got one big gift and a few smaller things. April received a Stand Up Paddle Board. Aaron received a new computer chair, Aric a phone, and Alex a basketball hoop (which was actually more for his birthday). It was fun to see them enjoy what they got today.

Salem finally came out to enjoy his gift for about 2 minutes in the afternoon. Long enough to snap these pictures (below), then he was gone. He must have thought the living room was too crazy most of the day because he just wasn't around.

Merry Christmas!

Thankful Thursday: puzzles

I have many things to be thankful for on this very rainy Thursday before Christmas, but today I'm thankful for puzzles and perseverance. I wanted to give up many times on this puzzle. At one point I had the chimney on the opposite side of the house before I realized it was supposed to be where it is! But I fixed it (the sky border was the problem), and kept at it even though I thought it was impossible at many points. I am thankful I finished it and even before Christmas. It's always a great reward to see a puzzle come together to the end. 

Wordless Wednesday: A classic

The boys loved these!

Making Pretzels

I purchased a pretzel making kit from Pampered Chef a few months ago and we finally got around to using it on Sunday. I don't know why it took so long to break it out. I think I was a little intimidated about making pretzels because I've never really done it before. But, this kit made it so easy that I'm already wanting to do it again but with my own dough. 

The tools in this kit made it so easy for kids to help. Alex was thrilled to be helping me. He jumped right in and wanted to do it all.

Eventually Aric saw what we were doing and decided to help form a few pretzels too. 

I love how uniform the pretzels are with the little pretzel forming tool. We were all able to get them about the same size and shape.

The finished pretzels looked so amazing. I was pretty proud of how well the kids (and even me) were able to do this. Our cheese dip was another story. It wasn't very good because I cooked it too hot and made the cheese grainy. Time to perfect that part too!

Such a fun night of making pretzels!

Wordless Wednesday: Llamas

 Birthday time in 1 week...

LEGO Harry Potter Castle

 ~This happened in June 2021. A special anniversary gift from Michele.~

I never shared about one of the best anniversary gifts I have ever received. Before our anniversary in June I mentioned that maybe we could get a bigger gift for each other this year because I really wanted the Harry Potter Castle LEGO set. Part of me was serious, and part of me knew that we probably shouldn't spend too much. 

Well a week after our anniversary Michele surprised me by stopping at a LEGO store while we were out and about as a family shopping. He told me to get the set. The kids were there and they were all surprised too. It was so fun to take that huge box out of the store! We've never purchased a set this big. I had fun building it over the next several weeks. I can't remember how long it took exactly, but it took a while!

They offered me a new one in the brown box from the back rather than the one on the shelf so it would be a box that was in perfect shape. We also got 3 free cars (for a deal/offer they had at that time). 

After taking it out of the brown box it has a regular LEGO box with a picture of the castle. It was getting pretty exciting to open up. 

The number of bags inside was pretty crazy. I needed to organize them so I could find them in an orderly fashion as I built.

 

So, first order of business was to put them in numerical order. That way I could put them in the box carefully in a way that I could just pull out the next bag.

There were 4 manuals! That's a lot of instructions!

Finally it was time to start building! I enjoyed every moment of building. 

Slowly, section by section it started coming together.

Seeing the details emerge as I was building was neat. This picture below is of the great hall.

It was finally finished! I didn't keep track of exactly when I finished, so I can't remember how long it took, but these pictures were taken in mid-August. So, I must have finished probably end of July sometime. Probably about a month of building time (in between a lot of life and fun summer activities).

Here's a tour of the inside:

What special gift this was. I am so thankful for a great husband!

Weekly Wrap-Up: The one with school pictures

Life this week...

We just had a nice long 4-day weekend and we're all sad it's over. I guess it's always nice to start a new week though. Not too much happened over the weekend. Just a lot of relaxing at home, getting things done.

Kids' School this week...

I received the digital images from Alex's first school pictures this week. They turned out pretty good. He chose to wear his Taco Bell sweatshirt/hoodie for the picture. I did ask him to remember to take it off. Oh well, it really is a good representation of him this school year anyway. I had the choice of backgrounds, and I chose these 3 for my digital images. I'm having a hard time deciding which one is best. I think the gray one is probably my favorite with the school year on it.

Alexander, 5th grade

 

Mom-school this week...

I started doing piano lessons this week for myself online with Hoffman Academy. I am really enjoying them. I love that I can do it anytime from home. I've been trying to teach myself the piano since I was a kid. I remember using a Nintendo game and a keyboard when I was a girl. I have had a desire to learn for a long time. It's amazing how that knowledge from when I was a kid doing piano on the Nintendo is actually still there and helping now. I think it was this "game" called the Miracle Piano System (click the link to see it on Wikipedia).

Places we're going and people we're seeing...

On Thursday (since Alex had no school) Alex had a Nerf Wars camp at his parkour gym. It was a 2-hour block of playing Nerf games with other kids his age. He was super excited, but when I came back he was so bummed because his Nerf gun had not worked very well the whole time. He pretty much was sitting for most of the time he said. This was a new gun that he just bought especially for this day, so it shouldn't have had any problems. When we got home we checked it out and it shot our Nerf darts fine. We think there might have been some things that might have caused it to not shoot very well. Such a bummer though! Now we know to send him with 2 in case one isn't playing nice.

 

On Tuesday we went bowling for $2.00 Twosday at Langer's. This is the place we went to many times over the summer for kid's free bowling. It was our first time back since summer. Still a lot of fun! I didn't get any pictures of bowling, but I did get a few pictures of him playing some arcade games.

I enjoy the indoor fire they have. I can sit there while Alex plays. Although he wanted me to come and play with him quite a bit this time.

Alex and I tried a new food place called Dave's Hot Chicken before his Nerf War camp. The spice of the chicken was great, but then I flicked a piece of the seasoning in my eye. I thought I was going to be blind. It was so painful. Lesson learned: spicy chicken belongs in the mouth, not the eye. It was pretty tasty though. Alex wasn't a fan of the dry seasoning.

My favorite thing this week was... 

 Alex wanted to make me hot cocoa with peppermint one evening. He kept saying he wanted to do something for me, but it was a surprise. Then he spilled the beans when I asked why we had to get some peppermint candy canes earlier in the day. Such a sweet kid!

 

My kids' favorite thing this week was...

Playing with this Magic Penny Magnet Kit. It was a gift for Aaron last Christmas, but Aaron decided he didn't want it anymore so he brought it out for us to play with. Alex was so excited to finally get to try it out. He really wanted to try it out when Aaron opened it last Christmas. Now was finally his chance!

 

This kit has a whole booklet of fun magnetic experiments, but of course he just wanted to make some cool designs. Fun fact: Most US pennies and US coins are NOT magnetic! The coins in this are just fake ones. 

Things I'm working on...

I am currently finding all the pieces to and rebuilding this LEGO set. It's Benny's Spaceship, Spaceship, Spaceship set. I spent most of the weekend looking through all of our gray bin for all the gray pieces. I'm tired of looking at gray, but the good news is I am almost done with gray! Only a few more colors to go!

 

Something I accomplished...

Writing this post! I have been wanting to blog all week, but just didn't make the time. I am excited to finally be writing a post again!

Movies/TV we watched... 

We watched The Christmas Chronicles on Netflix on Sunday evening for pizza night. That's a fun movie.

Games we played...

Alex and I played SkipBo. I also played a new one: Rack-O, with Aric. We also put together the Harry Potter LEGO game to play later next week.

       

I'm grateful for...

Lunch dates with friends.