They had there last game of the season and then a little pizza party afterwards. His coach got up and gave a great speech in which he praised Alex for all the improvement he made throughout the season and the kids all got a trophy to take home, which totally made my little man’s day.
I told Allison we would simply be late picking her up from gym since we definitely were not going to leave the soccer celebration early. And since we arrived at the gym at 1:30 and her ‘Winter Festival’ celebration started at 3:00, we simply hung out the gym for an hour an a half waiting for the performance to start. (As a side note, I’m a little miffed that I got there that early, saved a seat in the front row, and then they moved in an extra row of chairs IN FRONT OF ME for people who arrived at the last minute. But that’s beside the point…)
Winter Festival is a chance for all the kids, no matter which program they are in, to perform for their parents. So it’s a mix of the cute little preschool classes, the cheerleaders, recreational gymnastics and team gymnastics. They have two sessions and each lasts about 2 hours. Allison’s performance was last. So we had a while to wait, but the shows were cute and my kiddos did a lot better this year than last, enjoying the show and having a good time.
Afterwards, all the kids had a chance to stand on the podium, receive a medal, and have their picture taken with Santa Clause. This was when I lost the little ones. (It took a while)
But they were happy to get a picture with Santa
After such a loooong day (we’d been away from home for 9 hours at this point), we decided to treat ourselves to dinner at IHOP and then went home and got some well-deserved rest!
]]>I meant to take pictures while we were making it, but I forgot. I’m attempting to blog more, especially as we are finding our way in the homeschool journey but I don’t always remember to take pictures along the way. Oops. Maybe that will get better with time. Anyway, all you need is two coffee filters per children (we had some that I bought for doing science projects with), paint, scrap cardboard and glue. Also background paper if desired.
We painted the coffee filters yellow (or whatever) and let them dry. I also cut circles from some thin scrap cardboard that we had in the recycling and we painted those and let them dry. We had to take a break while Allison went to gymnastics since they weren’t dry before she left, but then we finished them up after dinner.
We mounted them on blue paper because I thought it looked cool on the original blog post. The kids thought the sunflowers needed stems so they drew them on with colored pencils but that didn’t show up well in the picture. I love this project because I think they all turned out pretty cool, even Evelyn’s (and she did all the painting herself, the only thing I helped with was cutting out the petals) Can you guess who did each one?
Also, Peter had an unexpected day off due to weather in the area that he is flying in and he was gracious enough to disappear for a couple of hours with the kids so I did some sewing. Poor Evelyn has virtually no winter clothes (I didn’t realize how much she’d grown over the summer) and I have virtually no money to buy her more so I figured this was a good time to break into what’s left of my fabric stash and start sewing again. I got a bunch of patterns traced today, a few things cut out and one outfit finished for tomorrow. I even got out my embroidery machine again!!
Do you think it’s pink enough for her?
We started dong a tour of the United States after seeing the idea on Confessions of a Homeschooler a couple of weeks ago. My favorite thing about the way that she organized her tour is the hands-on crafts and food that go along with each state. We’ve done a lot of our own ideas (making oragami praying mantis for Connecticut, for evemple) but overall I love the idea.
So, for Connecticut I made clam chowder (for the first time), for Delaware we had crab cakes (also my first crab cake cooking experience) and for Maine, I splurged and bought myself two Maine lobster tails at Costco.
Only two, because I just couldn’t bring myself to pay for more, so it was more of a lobster sampling than a lobster feast but still fun and delicious. (As it was, I had to keep chanting, “It’s less than going out to eat, it’s less than going out to eat…” to get myself out of the store.)
The other distinctive food item from Maine are blueberries. However, after forking out $20 for two lobster tails, I could quite bring myself to put down $10 on a pint of blueberries that I knew wouldn’t last 2.3 seconds after I walked through the door with them. So I decided to go with frozen blueberries and bake a pie.
Evelyn wanted me to take a picture of her, as well. Never one to be left out, that Evelyn!
The meal was delicious, everything was consumed voraciously and we’ve added another good memory of our trip to Maine.
(Capitol: Augusta, Nickname: The Pine Tree State)
_blank”>complete lyrics they pretty much have that song memorized (along with most of the other Schoolhouse Rock songs). In fact, when I put Evelyn to bed tonight, she insisted that I sing the “bring you blankie, bring your son” song.
Since Alex has been begging me to teach him how to sew, a few weeks ago I showed the kids how to make their own tricorn hats. I got them started and read out loud to them from 
I bought this 1780s portrait dress pattern to use for the girls’ dresses and mostly improvised on Alex’s costume. My plan is that the girls will be able to wear the dresses again with solid-colored sashes (they really are pretty dresses) In fact, I’m think different colored sashes for the seasons? Alex wore his church shirt and soccer socks, but I made the shorts, vest and hat so it was too terrible time consuming. The shorts are cotton so I can pull the elastic out of the legs and dye them if I’m feeling ambitious one day.
Alex’s musket is the coolest part of the outfit, if I say so myself. After planning how I was going to make his clothing, he kept asking about the gun and I realized I was missing something vital. In searching the internet, I stumbled across 
It was fun but I never want to see white makeup or hairspray again! Happy Halloween everyone!!
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- I installed drip irrigation in the last 8 feet of my garden bed
- I mixed compost into the top bit of the bed
- I planted carrots and beets, the carrots under burlap in the hopes that they will germinate (although it might still be too hot, we’ll see)
- I built and painted another planter box for my grow shelf.
- Did Day 1 of the Couch-To-5K program (and realized how out of shape I am!)
- I filled out and submitted all the online forms and paperwork for my kids to do virtual academy this year (woo hoo! This has been a big stress. I just need Xander’s signature when he gets home tomorrow and the paperwork can go in the mail)
- I got about half of my chore checklist cards made on the computer.
- I made homemade turkey-vegetable soup from a leftover turkey breast carcass and some old vegetables that needed to be used. How’s that for a cheap, healthy meal? I made biscuits to go with it, too. And it was yummy, which is never guaranteed when I don’t use a recipe.
- I went on a date with my husband!
- I blogged!!
Of course, we definitely needed a cake to go with the theme. I thought about this one for a while. Peter’s favorite cake is German Chocolate and I thought a German chocolate cake cooked in a bunt pan would look at least vaguely like a nest… right, right? Work with me here. Allison and I made our birds and pigs out of rice-crispy treats covered in white chocolate. Fondant might have been prettier, but then no one would have wanted to eat them. (Ick) They actually turned out pretty tasty. The only problem was that we used candy for the extremities and discovered that Air Heads and white chocolate just don’t taste all that good together. I should have stuck to royal icing. We filled the nest with leftover hollow chocolate eggs from Easter.
Of course, we had to have yummy food that at least sort of went with the theme. Bacon-wrapped chicken skewers and deviled eggs to the rescue. Does that seem kind of sick to you? Oh, well, at least it tasted good.
We also made balloons with angry bird faces, which I failed to take pictures of. There are a lot of other great ideas for angry bird decor on the web, but I had a limited amount of time as the kids and I tried to keep it all hidden from their daddy. (He might of suspected, though.) ]]>
Sooo…. what do you do Christmas Eve? We like to opening Christmas Eve pajamas. My family always did that and my mom said that it was so that we could have nice new pajamas for photos on Christmas morning. I like this idea! After all, how else do you ensure that your kids are wearing cute, non-ratty, matching pajamas on Christmas morning. And of course, at that point, the kids are happy to open anything!
Of course, Evelyn insisted on wearing her old too-small Dora PJs anyway, but at least in the morning I convinced her to put her new ones on.
Other traditions, how about PIE??? Yum! I love pie but it’s so messy and a pain to make so we get it on Thanksgiving and New Years. I guess that means that our winter desert is pie and our summer one is birthday cake!
How yummy does that look? Now I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving.
It’s been a rough year for her. We moved from North Dakota to Las Vegas and she took three months off during the transition. Then we choose a gym that put in new coaches the day she started. With their competition season starting three weeks later, the new coaches were struggling to keep their heads above water and Allison was of course, not ready to compete yet. She injured her knee doing a punch front in the first practice. We thought it was something simple that would heal with ice and time but after the pain came back again I finally took her to the doctor and found out that she has a small fracture in her knee cap. She’s fine with pretty much any activity that doesn’t involve much impact but we’re keeping a close eye on it and I’m sure that it’s not helping her vaulting ability.
Today we have her second meet. Since we missed out on the fall season, she’s only competing 4 level 6 meets, which is the perfect amount, in my personal opinion. Enough time to improve but not to get sick of it. Her first meet was a month ago. I didn’t blog about it, but if you want to watch the video, I do have it posted on YouTube:
Today was about the same. The team started off on bars, which I was thankful for, since it meant she didn’t have to strain her knee until the end. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a great event for any of the girls. Allison had a beautiful routine, but with one flub at the end that brought her score down to a 7.7. However, the scores must have been pretty low for everyone since she still took fourth place on bars.
Her beam was beautiful. She has a few wobbles, thanks to nerves but scored an 8.9 and took fourth place again. Floor was also very nice, she scored 9.05 and took fourth….again. Are you seeing a pattern here? She didn’t place on vault, but scored a respectable 8.35, which kept her all around high enough to place… guess what? Fourth! So I’ll spare you the semi-identical awards pictures and just assure you that she was in the same place for each of the events.
All in all, we were very happy and are looking forward to the next one! And I’ll get video up for this one…. eventually.
That first day, we baked the pieces and let them dry overnight. The next day, I made half of the icing recipe, and Allison and I assembled all the pieces (which was somewhat like doing a complicated puzzle, especially with the warping.) Finally, on the third day, we broke out the candy and the kids went crazy getting everything put together.
They had so much fun, although Evelyn got bored quickly and ended up mostly just eating candy.
We had to interrupt the decorating in order to attend the ward Christmas party, where we wore our pajamas, ate pancakes and saw Santa.
We forced (yes, it was forcing) the kids to go to bed when we got home, but they were up bright and early the next day to finish the decorating. I’m pretty sure that the only thing they had for breakfast was candy. What a day!
We finally cut them off after they got distracted. I can only handle so many hours of my dining table covered in candy!
All in all, it was a great experience. We had a blast and it wasn’t as much work as I thought. Will I do it next year? Only time will tell.
My favorite part is watching the kids get so excited about decorating.
