Ethan's School Christmas Program

Ethan's first grade class put on a Christmas Program that we got to go to. It was super fun to watch all these 6 and 7 year old singing fun Christmas songs. We got some video, but the files were all too big for this site to let us put them up. It's too bad - they were stinkin cute!!

Ethan is in the back row, second from the teacher

Jason is bored during a short break while they switched songs.

Shelly was excited to see her cousin! Jason got caught in the middle...

Ethan with Aunt Nanon (really she's Mark and JB's cousin, but that's not the point)

Ethan is trying to hard to put up with Shelly... :) He's a sport!

Mark and Emmie Sue

JB, Ethan and Shelly enjoying each other after the performance

Here's us! (my belly is just starting to show)

And Grandpa - The only one without a picture is the one behind the camera - Grandma...

Talking Time with Mrs. Clause

Jason has been going to speech therapy through the school district in the form of Talking Time. He quite enjoys going every week. They start each session in a group where they sing a few songs, focus on a sound and then read a book with that sound in it. Then it's craft time where the kids get to make a craft related to the book while the 2 teachers each take a child in shifts for individual time. Then they get back together for the goodbye song.

The week before Christmas Break there was a special visitor. Mrs Clause came to give the kids a present and talk about some fun stuff about the kids (from a paper the moms filled out the week before)

Here's Jason taking his turn with Mrs. Clause

She gave each child a copy of the Gingerbread Man book with a recipe on the back. The kids pestered us for days until we broke down (and found the time) to make some gingerbread cookies. I had to go on a hunt for a gingerbread man shaped cookie cutter, and we had to fake it with some play dough toys. Don't worry, we washed them well before they touched the cookie dough.

Making Christmas Ornaments

Becca let us have one of her old fake Christmas Trees since she and Bryan have decided to go with only Real Christmas Trees. The only problem was that we don't have any ornaments. I could have gone and bought some, but we are on a student budget, so I thought we could try our hands and making some. I found a few ideas online and set the kids to work - two birds style. Entertain and distract the kids - and - decorate the house with fun memories!

This idea involved painting some popsicle sticks and gluing them into a snowflake shape. Out came the paints and painting shirts! Our table mostly survived... The one downfall to not getting the newspaper. See our homemade advent calendars in the background? There's the big one and two small ones above it. The kids loved those! Thank goodness for printers and brilliant people in the online world who are smart/talented enough to do most of the work for me!

Jason used more water than paint, but that didn't stop him from having fun

Shelly had a lot of fun with these and asked to make more of them for days...

Random Stuff

Here's some completely random pictures from all sorts of times/places. I just didn't want to put them all on their own post... I'm lazy like that.

Katie came to visit and slept on the air mattress... I think this is the last time it was used, but at least it went out with a bang!

Before we moved from CA, Shelly was spotlighted in Primary. This is the plate that she got with fun facts about her. She calls it her 'special plate' and loves when we pull it out for her to eat on.

The kids were keeping Emily company one morning and decided she needed lots of stuff in her crib with her. She still has her pacifier, so this must be before she turned about 14 months, cause that's when we took it away from her.

Jason looks like he has eye make-up on. I think he had a black eye, but it was so long ago I don't remember now.


Here's Emily about a week after she started walking. She's not quite 13 months old here.

Jason in Talking Time. Mrs. Clause came to visit that week and gave the kids a present and told some fun facts about them. It was cute!

He's been doing really well with Talking Time. I think he would do better if I could get my act together better with practice time...

Shelly Turns 5!

Shelly turned 5 yesterday! We had a fun party for her with the Schofields. Becca also made Shelly a cake, but I don't have pictures of it... I'll have to see if I can get Becca to send me those. It was a cool cake, and the kids had fun.

Aunt JB helping Shelly not have hideous 3 day bed head for pictures (Shelly only sometimes lets me do her hair without a fuss... It's often not worth the fuss)

Silly Goose!

I'm sure she got that from her dad, and not from me.....

Waiting for the cake

See, Shelly gets it from the Schofields! Ethan is my proof.

She's trying to wait so patiently for us to finish singing so she can blow out the candles

Make a wish!

Those strange tombstone looking things on the cake are Reese's Christmas trees, couldn't you tell?

Emily enjoyed her piece

Shelly opening presents from Grandma and Grandpa

Fun dress!

Awesome craft box! Thanks for the presents!

Stockings from Grammy!

I grew up with Christmas stockings that my mom made, and I thought it would be fun to make some Christmas stockings for my family. I started making some (found the patterns and cut out the felt for both the stockings and the design and even started sewing) not too long before I had to switch to packing and moving. I didn't get very far at all. My mother (who has much better follow through skills than I do) offered to finish them for me. On our trip down for Thanksgiving she finished all the finishing touches. She had even added some 'bling' to make them so much cuter! We were quite excited to be able to have them for Christmas! Thanks Mom!! That was also the trip where we announced that she's going to need to make another one for us... :)

Fall on the Farm

Random Pictures from the Fall

Emily's not sure what to do about Grandpa...

Shelly riding her bike down the lane - I love all the land that we get to play on!

Mark taking the kids for a ride in the wagon - following Shelly on her bike

Hi Cutie Sue!

Still not sure why she finds that comfortable...


Emily playing with Mark. She does this kind of playing a lot! It's a lot of fun! Shelly and Jason are the 'back-up singers' in the background.

Mark reading to Emily - He's a better parent than I am, just for the record

See how patient he is?

This is pretty much the only Halloween shot I got of the kids. Tragic, no? I blame the rain storm we had to work around.

There is really no chance of going Trick or Treating near our house - there's about 5 houses within a mile, and I didn't want to walk that far! Or an apartment complex with a random collection of singles and young families likely to be elsewhere for Halloween. We decided to make Becca's house our home base that night - Thanks Becca!. The kids had a lot of fun going out randomly between rain spurts. Their hat's didn't always stay on, so mostly they looked like beggars instead of farmers, but they didn't know the difference.

Mark fixed the door to our shed. It used to be a chicken coop and the door was all chicken wire (pretty much exactly like the window above the door). He took the wire out and put up some plywood to help keep the shed cleaner. He's good to me like that! Much less annoying for me to put stuff in there now that it doesn't get nearly so dusty and dirty in there. It's not ideal for most storage, but it's much better than letting in tons of dust and leaves every time the wind blows.

We found an old steering wheel somewhere on the farm, and Mark decided it would be fun to turn it into a car for the kids to play with. Some old oil drums, discarded farm tires, and a bit of manual labor from Mark - and we have a new toy!


The kids were rather excited to watch Daddy make a 'Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Car' (Emphasis from Shelly on the t's and g's)

The kids in the bathtub. That strange line down the center of the picture is the pull chain to the light in the bathroom... Yup, I'm good!

They love playing in the water! Bubbles don't hurt either.