Reality Bites

Now that Christmas and presents are over, it is time to play with friends and family, eat lots of food, go shopping and hit all the amazing sales, sleep in, stay up late and just kick back, right? WRONG!!! Not in our house. A cruel twist of fate took that all away for me. In the last 4 days, I have cleaned up throw up messes on the carpet, changed too many diahrrea diapers, cleaned that up from my older kids a few times, run the humidifier non-stop to help my children breathe, gone through a bottle of Dimetapp, Tylenol Cold and straight up Tylenol, (not really, I am not over-medicating my children and Mollie has not had any of the cold medication, I watch too much news for that) measured two fevers over 100 degrees, wiped noses at least 1000 times, held sick children, lost sleep, washed my hands so many times they are now chapped and bleeding, (I have also gone through about a tub o' Vaseline), finished off 4 liters of Sprite, used up a tub of Clorox disinfecting wipes (love those things), missed all the great sales, missed skating, planetarium shows and Arctic Circle with cousins, playing games with my family, roasting mallows on their new fire pit, and pretty much enjoyed a really big fat Pity Party. Yes, we had both stomach flu and nasty cough and colds, go figure. By the way, Tyler was working during most of this at both the bank and the Planetarium, although he was a huge help in the middle of many nights cleaning up children.
I suppose it isn't really the holidays without a little of this, but I want a vacation now!
OK, side note by me: Although we have been very house bound, I have to say my mom, dad, sisters mother in law, and sister in law have been very kind, helped out and kept me company quite a bit. And to find the silver lining, I have spent a lot of really fun one on one time with each of my kids, I got to hold them while we watched movies they got for Christmas, we put together puzzles, we played games, we played with Moon Sand, and I have put aside a lot of what keeps me busy and spent some priceless time with them, I love my kids even when they throw up, sneeze, cough and do other things on me.
(Sorry no pictures on this post, really there is nothing you would want to see!)

We had a great Christmas

I hope everyone's Christmas was wonderful. We sure had a great day. It started with Christmas Eve at Grandma and Grandpa Larsen's house where we dined on the traditional Six foot long Subway sandwich and Martinellis followed by opening Christmas jammies
and reading the Christmas story. We then packed the kids up in the van and headed over to Grandpa and Grandma Morgan's to do the "Secret Sibling" gift exchange. My younger sister Carrie drew my name and once again she outdid herself. The gifts all have to be homemade and over the years we have had some fun ones. this year Carrie put together "Survival kits" for Tyler, Reagan and Elise. Survival kits because she sent me a gift voucher for a round trip ticket for Mollie and me to go visit her in Michigan this summer. YEAH!!!!! I am so excited, they have lived there 3 years and I have never been there.

Then we headed home and kids went to bed while visions of sugar plums danced in their heads. Christmas morning they awoke, (with a little prodding from Mollie) to a big wall of wrapping paper
they had to break through to get to their gifts, (thanks for the idea Michelle, the kids loved it).
We spent the morning opening fun gifts from Santa and we all had a great time.

One of my favorite gifts was Photo shop from Tyler, YEAH!!! I am so excited to spend some time playing with it. I hope you all had a great Christmas I know we did!

Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to one and all. We are so grateful for the chance to celebrate the birth of our Savior and His life as well. May this day bring peace, love and happiness to all.

I miss EJ

I thought I would add a quick post about my brother EJ. He is in France serving in the France, Paris mission. On January 3rd, he will have been out for a year and I can't even believe it. We got some pictures of him via email along with a great letter. He is doing awesome, loves the work, loves the people and I know he is loving the culture. I am so proud of him and I miss him every day. Here is one of the pictures he sent, he is the one in the suit.

Random Christmas Stuff

I haven't been very good about posting much lately and so I have decided to clump everything I have been wanting to post into one random Christmas Post, so here goes.

1. Last night I went to a Christmas Craft Exchange for Girl's Night out and it was so much fun. We had great goodies, some really fun gifts to exchange and lots of fun girl talk. Thank-you Ashlee for all the work you go to for these, I love coming to Girls Night out. Here are the gifts I got from the other girls: A crocheted scarf, SNOW blocks, a tin of yummy cinnamon cookies, an expandable photo album, a snowman candy jar and a tin of soap snowballs. I gave gingerbread cookie ornaments and a yo-yo Christmas tree. (Not pictured)
2. We got our Christmas tree up and after a few "What's missing?" we added gold, ivory bows and I really like how it turned out. The Gingerbread decorations went through a trial run as the first set were a bit soft and too tempting for Mollie (she ate two of them) and about 10 others broke off, so I removed them and made more, only this time I cooked them a wee bit longer.

3. Rachel and I made gingerbread houses and it was so much fun. I realized I have never done this with someone before, I have always made one by myself and I discovered it is more fun when you have a friend so hopefully that will be a new tradition.I made the one on the right, Rachel made the one on the left.

4. On December 7th we had our Ward Adult Enrichment Christmas Dinner, that Jeanette and I put together. I am very proud of how successful the evening was all things considered. WE had beautiful table decorations that 12 different ladies did and Arlene did a fantastic job with decorations. Once it was all over, I can say it was fun, but wow it was a lot of work.

This is the table I did. We had everyone do "What Christmas means to me" I chose baking, thus the bottles of spices, thanks, Rach for the idea.

5. Last, but certainly not least, I finally, after way too many years, got my Nativity set. I found it at Real Deals and I couldn't be happier with it.

Happy Birthday Mollie

We had such a fun birthday for our little one year old, I can't even believe it. She is too little to be one, but nonetheless, I was there and it did happen one year ago. Thanks everyone for the calls and birthday wishes, she was a lot of fun and a kick in the pants all evening. I am very excited for Christmas with her, she loved the presents.

First "Real" Snow

By the first "Real" snow, I mean the kind of snow where you can do this...

and this...

and this...

and even this...

Just watch out for the yellow stuff!

Tyler took the kids out and they had a hey day. I loved it too, because it was warm and toasty and quiet in the house!

IT SOLD!!!!

We finally signed on our townhouse and so it is over and done with, YEAH!!!!! I am very excited as this has dragged on quite a bit longer than we originally anticipated. It has been on the market since March and although that is less than a year, two months without renters has not been fun, so we are very happy and feel very blessed at the timing of this.

So what is Frankincense anyway?

Last night for Family Home evening we decided to come up with gifts we could give to Jesus, since for a 3 and 5 year old their focus seems to be so much on getting. Well after 10 minutes of discussing what gifts would be appropriate to give to the Savior and what that meant,we figured it was time to write down what gift we would give put it in a box with a bow to put under our tree (when we actually get the tree). So I had made little cards, all cute and scrapbooky, gave one to each of the kids and Tyler and myself and then said ok what gift do you want to give. Reagan immediately, "I know what I want to give", Ok, what is it, Tyler was ready and waiting with his pen to write it down and Reagan said, I would like to give him Frankincense. What are you going to do with that?

Frankincense: The most important ancient fragrances were frankincense and myrrh. The Arabs used the milky sap of the frankincense tree, and called it al lubán, from the word for milk. (The same word gave rise to the name of Lebanon, whose mountains were always capped by milky snow). “Al lubán” became anglicized to olibanum, which is another name for frankincense; the latter name refers to the pre-eminence of this resin, the true or frank incense.

Did you know if there had been a fourth wise man, he might have brought cinnamon as that too was a very important spice at this time period, interesting.