SOLD

I have sold 2 bags (4 if you count the ones to my mom) it has given me a really good feeling of accomplishment. I know it will never be a huge money making business that we can retire off of, but it is fun and feels good to make something that someone will actually give me money for. One of them is even on the way to the UK right now! What a feeling to think my creations could be all over the world!

Home for Christmas

Hopefully everyone had a fabulous Christmas! There were some great benefits to staying home this year. We got to stay in PJ's almost all day, I only put shoes on for a few minutes to take out some trash and we were much, much warmer than when we head up north! But there were some disadvantages as well. Like missing all our northern loved ones very much. And all the cooking! I love cooking for my family and especially for parties but I seem to have taken for granted all the great meals we get served to us when we visit Utah for the Holidays. Mom's ham and Christmas Eve spread. Mom and Papa's omelets and muffins on Christmas morning. Grandma Junes extravagant ham and turkey feast on Christmas night. Lasagna or Pie pizza with the Fullmer's and my mom fussing about to feed us in between all our visiting. So since we were away from you all here is a breakdown of our holiday!

We went to see Bolt on the morning of Christmas Eve. It was very cute and we all enjoyed it. Then we had a great lunch at the Yardhouse, enough food to feed us all dinner as well. Then since if we would have been in Utah we would have opened gifts at my moms on Christmas Eve we decided to open those up while the fire was getting ready for smores.

Cute socks from grandma!

And the traditional new jammies for the girls. This year they picked out the fabric themselves.

Then after smores, the reading of our favorite Christmas books and a viewing of A Christmas Story we put out cookies for Santa and headed to bed. Athena was up very early and woke us at 5:50 ready for presents!

Lots and lots of gifts were opened and loved by all of us. Thank you to everyone that sent us such great and thoughtful gifts. Then we moved on to the playing with toys part of the day. Athena was like any 7 year old and spent a few minutes on each toy before moving on to the next one. I hogged the computer all morning getting things loaded onto my new iphone! And Hailey spent some time under her bed trying to plug in her new digital frame. Shawn had to shuffle between us all acting as tech support for all our questions. We played our new Wii game together until I realized it was probably time to start getting things ready for dinner! Our adopted Arizona family (the Newton's) came over and we all ate and drank too much and had a very nice visit. As always I wish I would have taken even more pictures, and I know Papa there aren't any of Shawn or I. What can I say I'm a slacker! Oh well maybe next year.

Here's to a great New Year, hopefully 2009 will bring all our loved ones happiness! We love and miss you all and hope to see you soon.

Adorable Organizer Strikes Again

Athena is our little organizer. While standing in line at the grocery store she can organize the candy shelf in seconds flat, and she loves to put all the nuts and bolts back in the proper drawer at the hardware store. This year her love of organizing has spilled over into the gifts under the tree. She has had them in many different stacks and organized by color, giver and now recipient. At one point they were all on one side of the tree so as to make room for Santa to put his gifts under there. Why this skill has never been used in her own room I will never know. This stacking is driving her sister nuts, and I admit I have been tempted to scatter them around each night after she goes to bed, but we have left them in the neat little piles so far. I have a feeling though that Santa is going to have some tricks up his sleeve come tomorrow night!

Santa Years

We finally made it through the line to see Santa after a failed attempt last weekend that would have had us in line for several hours. Athena has been throwing the "big" questions around a lot this year. You know the ones, "is Santa real?", "do you believe in Santa?" So far we have answered with the "what do you think?" and "of coarse I do" But that look is in her eye that we may not have many more Santa years ahead of us. I am always torn between preserving the innocence of youth and my belief of not lying to my children. When does it cross the line? When the time comes and she does grow out of Santa Claus I will be sad but I also look forward to starting some new traditions and making memories that he doesn't exactly get all the credit for ;)

Violin Serenade

Athena had her first violin concert this week. I made her a fancy dress and painted her nails for the big event. She was surprisingly very nervous when we got to the school. She has never been nervous like this at any of her dance recitals. She was so cute and smiled through the whole thing! The beginners didn't even use bows yet but they were still so fun to watch. There was a girl in the advanced class that did a violin solo that was just amazing! I hope Athena can play like that someday. Here is a little snippet of the concert, all the songs they played sounded pretty much the same so I'm just posting a couple of minutes so you can see her cute smiling face!

Cookie Concert

We got into the Christmas spirit last night at Hailey's Choir Cookie Concert! It was a lot of fun and Hailey even had a solo! She did a great job and we all really enjoyed it. They have this concert in the band room and it was packed, I'm sure some sort of code was broken for the amount of people that can be in that room. They also serve cookies! So here is my first attempt at adding video to the blog, enjoy! (Note: she does sing the song with a boy that is off camera most of the time so that is who she keeps looking at. There was no way for me to get them both in the shot in the tiny band room)