Christmas Eve

We had such a great Christmas Eve!

Alli came to visit for the weekend and we loved having her.  Unfortunately, she did catch the nasty stomach bug that has been going around the neighborhood and was sick most of the day.  Luckily, it's a 24 hour bug and she was better the next day.

We had a snowstorm on Friday so there was a great layer of snow.  Steve took Anna to the nearby ravine to do some sledding while I did some dinner prep.  They were gone for more than an hour having a blast.   Anna loved the sledding.  She met up with some of our friends from our old neighborhood: Skylar and Rylee.  She wanted to sled with only them.  Skylar wouldn't, but Rylee did.

Later, we made our ornaments.  I wanted to have an ornament that Anna could do and that used materials that I already had laying around.  Luckily, I noticed a few people had made cute holiday people from craft sticks.  I have a bunch of those, plus felt and paint, so away we went.

I used the craft sticks to make a snowflake and a Christmas tree.  Anna painted both of them with the paints.  After she finished those, she went off to bed for her nap and the rest of us worked on our ornaments.  We made ours a little different.  Steve made a snowman, I made a snowman and a Rudolf, and Alli got into it the most.  She made a snowman, elf, Santa, and Rudolf.  It was a lot of fun.

That night we had our fondue dinner.  I thought that I was conservative in cutting up the meat, but apparently I over-estimated and we had a lot left over.  It was delicious.  Anna had fun stuffing herself with ham and chicken dipped in honey and trying shrimp for the first time.  Luckily, Alli was feeling well enough to join in for dinner.

After Anna was in bed, we ended the night by watching A Muppet Christmas Carol.  The perfect ending to a great day.

Making Fudge

Of course, we had to make some treats for Christmas and Anna and I tackled some fudge.  I decided this year to make the fudge a combination of semi-sweet and milk chocolate chips.  I like the sweetness that the milk chocolate gives it, while the semi-sweet makes a firmer fudge.  It worked really well and I love the walnuts in them.  Anna's contribution consisted mainly of stirring the chocolate and licking the spatula.

December Crafts

Here's what you're looking at: Top l-r: Anna's pomander, finished beeswax snowflakes, cutting her snowflake, Steve & Anna decorating the house; Middle l-r: Steve working on his pomander, beeswax ornaments hardening in the pan, proud Anna with her snowflake; Bottom l-r: our finished pomanders, snowflakes I made on the library doors, Anna & I decorating, the finished gingerbread house!

Here's a little bit of what we've done this Christmas season.  We've tried to keep things low-key and fairly simple.

We started off December by making some orange pomanders.  I got some whole cloves and clementines at the store.  I got some recommendations to use clementines instead of oranges because the skin is thinner and easier for kids to pierce with the cloves.  Anna really enjoyed making them.  I did end up just piercing random holes all over her orange with a knife and that made it really easy for her to do it.  I made a couple and we even convinced Steve to join in.  His is the Christmas tree orange.  It was fun and fast and now our library smells great.

Later, Anna and I decided to make some snowflakes.  I folded hers into a square snowflake just so she wouldn't have to cut through so many layers of paper.  She's still learning how to use the scissors.  In fact, she mostly made random straight cuts along the sides.  I went back and just connected some of the cuts to make them holes.  She was so proud of herself and her snowflake.

One of the crafts I did mostly on my own.  I bought a pound of beeswax from Amazon and a cute snowflake cookie pan from JoAnn's.  I melted the beeswax in a double boiler and then Anna would point to the snowflake she wanted me to fill.  We ended up making 17 snowflakes total.  Later, I used a hot piece of metal to poke a hole in each one and threaded it with a piece of twine to make ornaments.  We passed them out to our neighbors and friends for their Christmas gifts.

Our biggest project so far has been the gingerbread house.  Steve picked up a kit at the grocery store.  We used the candy they provided plus some that we got at the bulk section of Winco to decorate.  Mostly, I put frosting on the house and Anna chose which candies she wanted and stuck them into the frosting.  I did candy corns around the bottom and the front door.  Steve did the jellybean windows.  We had a lot of fun making it and Anna is enthralled by it even two weeks later.  She drags her stool over to the counter to stare at it.  Well, stare at it and slowly eat a piece here and a piece there of the candy!

Just one more project left- ornaments.  We're going to do those when Alli gets here for Christmas weekend.  That'll be another post.  Merry Christmas!

Snowman

Last Saturday we woke up to find that it had snowed during the night.  Anna was excited.  She's told me that it should snow every day because it's winter.

Steve headed out to shovel the driveway with Anna in tow.  She grabbed her little garden shovel so she could 'help' Daddy.  Mostly, she ended up stomping on it and eating it.

The fabulous duo then headed to the side yard and made a little snowman.  Steve did most of the work, with Anna adding a handful of snow now and then.  We found a hat and scarf that we weren't using, a big carrot, and a couple of rocks for the eyes.  Anna was so excited to have her very own 'Frosty'.  The next day, she almost cried when she noticed that Frosty was melting.

O, Christmas Tree...

 Well, we got our Christmas tree.  We waited a week later than last year because our tree last year was one crispy critter on Christmas Day.  We also bought our tree from a local vendor instead of from Home Depot.  We're hoping that we'll do a little better moisture-wise this year.

Here's our tree, half lit.

Vario's is in downtown Tooele.  They had a lot of trees for us to choose from and we decided to get an 8 footer.  It wasn't really hard to find one, but Steve was worried about getting it home.  Luckily, they guy there was willing to tie it on for us.  It only slipped back a little bit.

After a few false starts, we were able to get it into the stand and fairly straight.  That was a challenge because we found it has a crooked trunk!  The next step, of course, was the lights.  We had two strings that started out half working, but then we got them both working.  Steve strung them on the tree and plugged them in.  Only half worked!  At that point, Steve decided to go buy some new lights and recycle the old strands.

That evening, we all got together and decorated the tree.  It looks great!

Archery Date

On November 27, Steve took me out on a Groupon Date.  He'd bought a couple of Groupons, one for an archery lesson and one for an Ethiopian restaurant.  The restaurant coupon was about to expire and the archery would expire in January, but who wants to shoot a bow when they're 9 months pregnant?

We were the only ones at the archery range and got the instructor's entire attention.  Steve took a little longer to warm up, but he caught on to the shooting much quicker than I did.  Half way through the lesson, I realized that I was closing the wrong eye!  It's amazing what a difference changing the focus eye can make!  We both did end up with one bulls-eye each.









Afterwards, we headed to the Ethiopian restaurant.  Unfortunately, the Groupon was expiring the next day, so everybody and his dog was there to cash in their coupons.  I think we waited for 30 minutes to get seated and another 30 before we were waited on.  There were only two guys trying to take care of everyone.  The food was good when we finally did get it.  There's no silverware, so you pick up the food with little pieces of the crepe-like bread.

Leaving the restaurant, we thought we were going to be half an hour late getting home.  Traffic had other plans, though.  We got to our exit, and discovered it was closed due to an accident.  We were rerouted through Grantsville.   The amount of traffic going through the small neighborhoods made things even slower.  Despite that, Steve and I had one of the most unique dates ever and it was a lot of fun.