Friends, Family, Christmas, and Quelf

We headed down to Newnan for another Christmas celebration with my Granny and Pawpaw on Friday. We did not go to the "big" gathering on Christmas Day, so we opted to visit them the day after. We had fun visiting with them and getting some pictures of them with their great-grandchildren.

Yesterday was Christmas with the Freemans and game night. We met them at 9:15am at the Waffle House! Yum! ha ha. Then we came back to our house to open gifts, visit, and play our new game we got for Christmas: Quelf. Well, we actually took a break in the middle of the day to go to Barnes and Noble to look for calendars and for me to pick up a new Disney travel book (ha, yeah!)
I had mentioned it before, but I have to tell you, the more we play this game, the more crazy and fun it becomes! You can click on the name to go to the website. This is the most ridiculously random game I have EVER played. We played it once early in the day, then some Trimonoes. Then, later in the evening, Chris and Hannah came over to play it with us. Well, first we warmed up with a rousing game of Clue (ha!) then we broke out this crazy game. If you love playing games that make you get silly and don't care about acting just plain silly, then you NEED this game! ha ha. Just to give you an example....during our first game, Corey had to talk like a pirate for half the game, I had to do the chicken dance for about 20 seconds, and we had to name countries where Spanish is the official language. Last night, Hannah had to build a fort out of blankets and chairs and stay in it until her next turn, Chris had to put the game box in his shirt until further notice (the rest of the game actually) and Bethany had to make a sock puppet and name it and keep it on her hand for the duration of the game. It is just so completely random what you may have to do, but it is SO good for laughs! It was a great night with old friends!
So, here are some photos from our day visiting with Granny and Pawpaw, our day with the Freemans, and speaking of old friends, a pic of me with my best friend from high school: Aura. I met her on the 23rd and hadn't seen her in over a year. It was great to see her and catch up. There are also a few pictures of the Quelf game we played!

Christmas Day: Part Two

Last night was Christmas at Nana and Poppa's House. We had a delicious and wonderful dinner that she slaved all day to prepare, complete with homemade coconut cake and red velvet cake. I brought some home for the fridge (for now) and for the freezer (for later). Then, we opened gifts. Katie got her prized "Alive Cub." Noah got a very cool Batmobile. We all got stockings full of goodies. We had a great time visiting and spent a good while trying to get a photo of the entire family. Here are some shots from the evening. Today is Christmas in Newnan with Granny and Pawpaw.

Noah with his Batmobile.

A shot of everyone.
You should see all the rejected takes and the ones while we were waiting to get the camera set up correctly!

Katie with "Gigi", her Alive Cub. It moves and makes noises.

A cute picture of me and Katie.

The camera we used actually takes three shots at the end of the timer countdown. I jokingly said, "do something silly on the third take" and the guys and the kids are the only ones who did it, ha ha!

Merry Christmas!

Last night we continued our family traditions that we started last year. We had a birthday party for Jesus, complete with decorations and birthday cupcakes. Then we opened a gift. Actually, this year we opened two gifts since one was for the entire family together. We talked about the Christmas story, and in memory of Jesus receiving three gifts, we also receive three gifts (well the kids do anyway! ha ha). We opened our "something we need" and "something for the family to enjoy together" last night. The gift for the family was our 7 day Disney tickets! WOO HOO! Then, the kids each opened their "thing they need," which was a giant book for collecting autographs, a small autograph book, a wallet, and a t-shirt. Things they need for our trip, of course! :) So, then it was to bed to bed and wait for "Santa." We haven't really pushed the Santa thing on them, we have read the history of Santa and they know he is pretend, but Katie really loves to play Santa. She put out cookies and milk and at about 7:30 this morning Noah was waking us all up. We went to see what "Santa" had brought. It was a GIANT box for each of them and a GIANT stocking. These would be the third gift in the tradition: "something they want." And, who can keep "Santa" from bringing a giant stocking full of tons of other little things, right?!

Katie found her wooden princess castle with mini princess doll collection, and Noah found his Indiana Jones Legos and Nerf gun. Corey is still putting together the Lego set. Noah did help for a while and he put together the airplane all by himself mostly. Their stockings had lots of goodies! Here are photos from the morning, including the Christmas breakfast I made (doesn't it look cute on the platter? ha ha!). Merry Christmas everyone! We are so excited to be spending the day together at home. We plan on watching a movie, taking a nap, then heading over to the other grandparents for the evening.

Christmas Eve: Addis Family Gathering

The Addis family gathered this morning at Cracker Barrel for the annual Christmas Eve breakfast. We ate, hung out, then headed to the grandparents' house for stocking opening. Here is a photo of the gang in front of Cracker Barrel. We all look a little shocked because we are trying to get the photo quickly on the first try since we were blocking the door.

Here is a photo of the matriarch of the Taylor family...my Maw Maw.



Here is a picture of Corey and I, ha ha. I guess this personifies our day. JK. The only one taken on this camera actually and I thought it was kind of funny.


Here is one of Chris and Hannah. Cute picture of them.



Finally, one of Katie and Noah. My mom's camera was the main one used so I don't have tons of pictures to share. We had a fun day though. Spent lots of time opening gifts from our giant stockings and playing the new game we got called Quelf (super fun game by the way, but not for the faint of heart or light of humor!)
Merry Christmas Eve everyone!

Once in a lifetime!

I finally got around to baking yesterday. I actually started on Saturday, just making a few of each kind to take to Corey's grandparent's house because I just did not have the time to do everything I wanted to do before we saw them.
Yesterday, as soon as we got home from eating after church, I started and FINISHED my baking. Well, I finished at about 1:30am. Corey's estimate was that we baked about a million dozen cookies! ha ha. Actually, it was probably close to....30 dozen. My oven was on all day, and it was smelling GREAT in our house! I am so thankful that Corey stayed up with me and helped with the bagging and cleaning. It would have been very sad to have to get up this morning and face the "aftermath" ha ha.
So, we made: Santa Cutouts, Peanut Butter Munchies, Giant Ginger Cookies, French Vanilla M&M Cookies, and Chocolate Chip Tea Cookies. The French Vanilla M&M cookies are a combination recipe. I found a recipe for an "award winning soft chocolate chip cookie" and instead of plain vanilla pudding I used "french" vanilla, and instead of chocolate chips, well...you can guess. So, they taste SO good! The french vanilla pudding really made the kitchen smell like a coffee shop! Mmmmm.
I only took pictures of the Santa ones really, because I was so very proud of the way they turned out. My roly poly Santas fell apart, and I just didn't have it in me to try and repair them. These Santa Cutouts are a ONCE IN A LIFETIME opportunity family and friends! Limited Edition...never to be repeated! ha ha! It was a lot of fun decorating and seeing them come together, but the cleanup just about did me in! Anyway, next year is "dipped in chocolate" year...I am DONE with cookies for a while! ha! (This pic wasn't rotated, oh well.)

Here is a photo collage of the Santa cookies, some of the cookies in baggies ready for the boxes, my favorite diamond Santa (which we kept for the kids :), and the packed and ready boxes. Corey is off work today so we are going to be out and about delivering our goodies! It is only supposed to get up to 49 or so today, so it will truly feel like Christmas!

Christmas Gathering with the Thompsons and Graceland

Our festivities continued yesterday evening with a visit to Corey's grandparents house. We had a great dinner with lots of delicious desserts. Thanks to Memaw and Paw Paw Thompson for hosting a wonderful Christmas gathering and showering your great grandchildren with fun gifts, they have enjoyed them so much already!
This morning, the kids sang in the Christmas program at church and then we had our preschool class party where they exchanged books. You can read more about it all on the captions. Now, I have to get back busy baking!

School's Out!

Yesterday was our last official day of school until January! What did we do on our last day? Well, we did not have a party, since we kind of did that the night before :)
What we DID do:

-Completed our December calendar, counting the days until Christmas and our usual "calendar" stuff.
-Sang all our favorite songs from the Get Set for School CD, and created some letters with our wood pieces.
-Made home made stamped, glued, and glittered, Christmas cards.
-Made an ornament.
-Sorted, counted, and graphed green and red M&Ms and almonds.
-Ate the M&Ms and almonds after we finished!
-Played Cranium Hullabuloo.
-Had a great last day!

I am really enjoying our year of home school so far. Here are some photos from the day. You can see the homemade cards they made as well as the "Santa" faces they made with their hand prints. There are also photos of us working on our candy/almond graph. They are so smart!

"The First Gift of Christmas!!!!!!"

We had our first Christmas "gift" event of the year-last night-following our "school Christmas program."
First, some background about why we had a school "program."
We have been learning these really cute color songs, where you learn to spell the color by singing it to the tune of a childrens' song. We also sing a days of the week and months of the year song. As well as a number song. We have also been learning a character word of the month with a Bible verse to go along with it. So, a couple of weeks ago I thought of getting them to sing all those songs and say the vereses for their grandparents....thus, the school "program" was created.
They were super excited about putting on a "show" for everyone, and Noah even wrote a poem for the occasion. When we were practicing one day I asked them what else they wanted to do for the show and Noah said, I think we should say this...and he recited this right off the top of his head:

"Lights, lights, everywhere lights,
lights until the day is light.
How much presents is under our tree...
then you all can cheer for me!"

So, we all learned and recited his poem since I just think he is a genius four year old to have just made that up first time through. (Now someone is going to tell me that is from a cartoon! ha ha!)
As a grand finale, they sang "Jingle Bells" with guitar and "bells." Then they handed out ornaments they had made to moms and grandmoms.
It was SO cute! If we can get the video on the computer I will post a bit of it at some point.
After the show, the Christmas festivities for the year began!
We went to eat dinner at Cracker Barrel with Jason and PJ and Kaitlyn and Brendan. Then, we went over to their house to open gifts and just hang out. Here are photos of the entire night. Watch out for the extremely cute picture I got of Katie, Noah, and Kaitlyn!


We had so much fun with them and we are thankful that we have such a great family to be friends with and to start our Christmas celebrations together!

Also--on a side note: Jason's mom brought us a tin of Christmas candy last night. It had peanut butter balls (you know like buckeyes) but it also had the same kind of idea but made with Nutter Butters on the inside and my new favorite Christmas candy--OREO balls!!! YUM!!!! Guess what everyone is getting for Christmas next year?!

"Children, Go Where I Send Thee"

That was the Christmas song that Katie's ballet class danced for their recital this afternoon. Here are some pictures. It was a very cute song and they did a great job! They had a party with a cake afterwards.



Katie was actually feeling nervous about her recital this week. I want Corey to comment and tell the story about what she said last night as she was going to bed. Apparently, before last night, Katie had aspirations of being "perfect, like God." What a sweet girl!!!!

Merry Christmas!

I haven't put my Christmas cards in the mail yet...but I had fun doing this today!

Click HERE to see this year's version of our Christmas letter!

Cookie Queen: Concluded....

Here are pictures of the goodies I won at the cookie swap last weekend: the cookie jar prize and the cookie queen tray that will be passed on next year (maybe! ha ha)

Baking, and more baking!

UPDATE:

Two discoveries:

It is imperative that you use a brand name peanut butter when making peanut butter munchies, and I think that White Lily flour makes them better as well. Other peanut butter will result in a dry, rather than moist and chewy, center.

Other news: My giant ginger cookies won for best cookie at last night's scrapbook cookie swap! Woo hoo! They were a "big" hit...ha ha, sorry for the joke.

I just got through baking cookies for another cookie swap tomorrow night. I decided to make Giant Ginger Cookies. All the recipes I have been using recently have been from this magazine that I bought several years ago. Apparently they print it every year because I saw it on the rack at Hobby Lobby today. I plan to make the cute Santa ones you can see on the front as gifts this year.

The Giant Ginger Cookies are turning out GREAT! I have never been a huge ginger cookie fan, but the magazine said that when they first featured the cookies on the front of the magazine in 1998 that they got tons of calls saying they were the best ginger cookies ever, so I decided to give them a try. They really are good. You can click on the link HERE to see the recipe.

Here are some photos of the cookies during and after baking. See how big they are??? Mmmmmm...they are so chewy!

I have just discovered, while typing this blog, that I under-baked most of the cookies. I was sitting here waiting for the timer to beep and it was taking a long time, so I went to check and saw that I had forgotten to set a timer. I rushed to get the cookies out, only to discover that they were even bigger and looked even better than all the others I had made! Argh! We will see after they cool, but I don't think I baked the rest long enough. I think they taste great, they aren't doughy or anything, but that extra 3-4 minutes really made them "bloom" into true ginger-snap look-alikes. It could be that they turn into a crunchy mess, who knows...these pictures are of the "correct" cookies, as I took new photos and replaces the underdone photos! ha ha.

We were supposed to make 6 dozen cookies for the cookie swap, but needless to say I did not make that many! I think these cookies should count as at LEAST two each! (maybe three!) I used the same amount of dough that most recipes use, but it just called for you to make huge cookies. Even the first batches were huge, now these bigger ones probably could count as 4 cookies!

Now, I am sure I could have tried making smaller cookies, but I didn't want to mess with it this time since it was my first attempt. Maybe next time I will play around with the cooking times and try something smaller. I am hoping I can make smaller ones work because I think I want to do these for next year's "competition" cookie swap at church ha ha!

Speaking of baking, the kids and I have also been working on some Christmas baking projects. My mother-in-law gave us a Christmas Countdown book. Each day has a Bible verse and "word of the day" in a countdown till Christmas (of course)! Anyway, Saturdays have a family activity and this week's was to make salt-dough ornaments. We did it this week while Kaitlyn was here as a school project. The recipe is extremely simple (flour, salt, water), but I added some cinnamon and cloves to make it smell good and the house really did smell WONDERFUL while the ornaments baked. Our camera is still out, but I did get to borrow one so I could take pictures today of the three painting their ornaments. Here they are, and some pictures of Katie's and Noah's trees in their rooms, displaying their homemade ornaments.

There is Mod Podge on these, painted on to "seal" the paint and to preserve the cookie from falling apart or whatever. It dries clear.

Katie's white tree in her princess room. We now have a white/silver material covering the stand.Noah's tree. They decorated all by themselves.
Noah has a cookie print material covering the stand on his tree now.

Christmas Photo Shoot

We had so much fun getting these adorable photos of Katie and Noah the other night. You can click on the photo if you want to see them bigger...I get frustrated that Picasa doesn't fit bigger pictures into my 3 column layout. There is one of Noah snapping...you can tell which one it is if you look closely....what cuties!!! (if I do say so myself!)
No, Noah isn't cross-eyed. He just kept doing that for some reason..I think it is his first typical male response to having photos taken!

Challenge: Be a Good Samaritan

We got our Samaritan's Purse Christmas Gift Catalog in the mail yesterday. It reminded me what we have thought about doing for the past few years....giving a donation to a charity instead of buying a gift for our family members.

We tried to last year, and even started by helping with providing Christmas gifts for a needy family, but at the last minute everyone changed their minds and starting buying gifts. We have decided to absolutely do the charitable giving this year, and not give in, even if others do.

There are so many ways to give to others...people who could REALLY use a Christmas gift...unlike so many of us who are blessed with the things we need: clean water, shelter, food, clothes, medicines, doctors, hospitals, the list could go on and on.

If you are a regular gift receiver from the Thompson family.....be prepared. The children will be making their usual homemade ornaments and I will do my holiday baking for gifts. And above and beyong that, there will be a card with your name on it stating the gift that was given in your name....the gift that would provide a child with some clothing, or a family with clean water, or a nursing mother with nourishment. It is what we feel led to do, and what we will obediently follow through with for Christmas.

We will be still doing gifts with our children, that is a tradition that we enjoy with the three gifts (if you read about our Christmas last year you remember what I am talking about), and who would want to give up the joy of celebrating in their own homes? The big difference here is all those other gifts...we will still be giving with our homemade items, but the "extra" buying can be transferred to those who really are in need. None of us are in need...only in "want."

I know there are a variety of charities, local and abroad, who need help. Pick one. Start a trend. Be different.

We Three Kings

Changing things up a bit this Christmas at our house....as far as the gifting goes. I had read an article several years ago in a parenting magazine about the gift tradition that this one particular family did. I really liked it at the time, thought, "that would be a neat thing to do" with absolutely no thought that we would ever consider it.
Now, after several Christmases with small children, we have considered, and adopted it for our tradition this year.
Each of our children, (plus Corey and I) will receive THREE gifts this year. This will be a remembrance of the three gifts presented to Jesus by the Magi.
One gift will be something we want.
One gift will be something we need.
One gift will be something that the family can all enjoy.
This was a tough decision, as it is difficult to not go crazy at the toy store with buying every cool new toy and fun thing you see. But, as a blessed family with many close relatives nearby, our children have the priveledge of getting pretty much whatever they want/need throughout the year...so it doesn't all have to be over the top at christmas. The other reason for this is for there actually to BE a reason for getting gifts for ourselves at all at Christmas! We aren't crazy about the whole Santa thing. When Katie was first born I just felt silly pretending about Santa, lying about it, feeding these ideas in her head...it just seems strange and improbable that a guy, for no reason whatsoever, would travel around the world sneaking into people's homes dropping presents. WEIRDO! Then, my friend, shared with me how her family never "believed in" Santa but just pretended and how it was JUST as magical and special to them. It didn't ruin their lives or the surprise of the holiday and gifts. She has taught her son about the fun of "pretending" that Santa brings gifts (but how he isn't a REAL person) and he has a blast leaving cookies that they will "pretend" that Santa will eat, etc.
So, as I was already on the bandwagon, it didn't take much convincing to throw the Santa story out the window. Not that it isn't fun to pretend, kids love pretending...so why lie to them? They know that there are no such things as unicorns and fairy princesses, but they still have fun pretending.
So...at our house, the tradition changes this year. I am looking forward to actually playing with each and every one of the three things our children get. Taking the time to enjoy each one, to discuss WHY we are getting these presents and what it means. Talk about what we can/did for others for this holiday to make it better for others since we are so richly blessed with "stuff."
I guess between my last two posts I am looking more and more like the eccentric mom here. But...it's not like I am crazy about everything. My kids have chores, are respectful, have healthy imaginations, love to play together, enjoy life...they are having just as much fun as other kids...if not more I think!
anyway...go ahead and post your comments...
Oh...and for my friend who has so many great ideas:
I am really not a stalker trying to be you and copy everything your family does! I just think we are long lost kindred spirits and now you are helping me "out" all the ideas I have had since now I can say "well...she does it so I am not the only crazy mom thinking of this!" thanks!