Today was a great day:)  I had MOPS (Mothers of Preschoolers), and it is so refreshing to get together with other moms and be reminded that you are not alone in all the crazy moments of motherhood.  Therapeutic.  And today we made this awesome beaded serving spoon!

So easy!  It honestly took less than 15 minutes.  It would be so easy and cheap to make a whole set of matching serving utensils.  What a great gift!!  I could make them and sell them on Ebay:)  I’ll add it to my never-ending list of things I could do someday…

Another great thing about today was that my mother-in-law insisted I open my Christmas present, since she said I needed it now.  It was a set of the Three Wise Men to go with my cherished Willow Tree Nativity set.  I just set them up on my mantle yesterday, and this was the perfect addition. 

The wise men look a little less worn than Mary, Joseph and the shepherd, who have been well-loved and played with by Analise.  She likes having it up on the mantle, and she had to bring a stool into the living room so she could look at Baby Jesus.  Sweet.  She was SO EXCITED to help me open the Wise Men and arrange them with the others.  "Is that ok?" I asked her.  "No, they have to be closer.  They can’t see Baby Jesus."  I’m hoping maybe I’ll get another piece or two for Christmas to add to the display.  Analise said we need a stable and an angel, and I told her she needs to tell Daddy 🙂

We’re enjoying reading our Advent verses, singing a carol and lighting the candle each day.  Josiah starts blowing as soon as he sees the candle.  I think tomorrow’s agenda holds more Christmas cookies, along with Analise’s choir Christmas program.  Should be fun!!  We’ll get pictures and video… I can’t wait to share it!  She knows the words to the entire program inside and out. 

Well, a little bit late, but here they are.  We had a tremendous speaker at our Mothers of Preschoolers (MOPS) group in early November, Sherri Torelli.  She was poignant, funny, and full of organizing tips from a "sentimental packrat" personality perspective.  I can’t say I’ve been great at implementing them, especially the Christmas card one, but they are worth sharing! 

• Wrap as you buy your gifts!  Wrap in white paper, embellish with wire ribbon.  Wire ribbon was one of her favorite things.  It’s cheap, you can decorate anything with it, including packages, wreaths, and vases. 
• Put together a basket with a timer, your Christmas cards, address book, stamps, and good pen.  Sit down for 15 minutes and write out cards.  When the timer goes off, put it aside.  Do other things, and come back to it.  Do NO MORE THAN 15 minutes so you don’t get overwhelmed.  Start now (early November) and you’ll be done by early December.  **Hm.  Maybe I’ll try this next November 🙂
• Centerpiece – Simple wide, round bottom vase filled with cranberries and long-stemmed roses (silk is fine) arranged in them.  She used white roses.  Beautiful.
• Any size/shape of vases with cranberries and taper candles in them.  I loved this!
• Cut a circle out of the top of red and green apples, place a tealight in the hole, and use down the center of your Christmas table. 
• Thanksgiving centerpiece – clean out a pumpkin, plant a mum, including soil, in it.  Use as centerpiece, and after you’re done, put it right in the ground.
• Glue leaves on top of pumpkins, like hats.
• Cut a circle in the top of little pumpkins for tea lights, use a simple garland of leaves (or fresh/fallen) or berries down center of table interspersed with small gourds squash. 
• Speed cleaning tips:

1. Put together a carry-all with everything you need so you can just take it with you from room-to-room.
2. Things you need: gloves, all-purpose cleaner, glass cleaner (2:1 water to rubbing alcohol bc the alcohol dries so quickly it won’t streak), microfiber towels (can quickly be run through rinse cycle before cleaning so they’re damp), cleanser, paint scraper for getting gunk off floor or counters, wide paint brush for brushing out window sills, lamp shades & keyboards, natural pumice stone (most unbelievable cleaner for toilets/porcelin – completely wipes away stains – will shine like never before.  She said, "You’ll have to invite someone over just to show them how clean your toilet is!"), Ostrich feather duster (bc the feathers trap dust – great for knicknacks, blinds, ceiling fans – shake it off outside), plastic bags for trash (leave them in the bottom of your trash cans so they’re always ready when you take the trash out). 
3. Stay in the room until your done.  Don’t take things back to other rooms… pile things outside the door, and put them away when you’re done. 

• Chargers are CHEAP (84cents at Hobby Lobby!) and make all dishes look even more elegant.  You can get a plate clip that holds a tiny little taper candle to clip onto charger. 
• Implement a new tradition each year.  
• Trimming tree – make it a big evening.  Special food, music, memories, movie. 
• Birthday tea party for Jesus!  Serve birthday cake and cookies, tea, celebrate Him early in the Christmas season so it starts off with the right attitude!
• Keep a basket for Christmas cards received on the table.  Read a card at dinner, pray for them. If they send a picture, after Christmas put them in a cheap little photo album and keep them handy so you can pray for them throughout the year at dinner.

Today is the first Sunday of Advent!  It’s a wonderful way to celebrate the whole season of Christmas, and to build the anticipation of the Christ’s coming.  I’ve got my pretty little homemade Advent wreath on the table.  There are lots more Advent ideas, devotionals, crafts and resources here: Advent 4 Evangelicals  I attended a fun mom’s evening last week about celebrating Advent.  Having grown up in the Lutheran church where Advent is a part of the church season, celebrating it as a family has always been something important to me.  We light the candles (previous years only on Sundays, but this year we’re going to try to do it every evening after dinner), read a little devotional, and maybe sing a song.  One idea is to use a chocolate advent calendar as motivation for the quiet time, and I’ve got to get a couple for my sweeties! 

Some kids write Dear Santa letters at this time of year.  But as I was taking cookies out of the oven, Analise started her own letter, Dear God.  So sweet!  Check out the video

 

I came into it about halfway through, and she’d already thanked God for Mary and Joseph and the shepherds.  My favorite is the very end, where she decides to start a note to Mary 🙂

This is what happens when I get a nap on Saturday afternoon AND I don’t have to work on my weekly Sunday School lesson late into the night 🙂  You get to enjoy pictures!  Here’s just a couple quick ones from this week!

Crazy girl!  Princess shoes, pink tutu not exactly matching the red jacket, wand, racing back and forth down the sidewalk with her streamers flying.  Anyone doubt that she’s got Brian’s genes in her?

Moments later, she decided to ride down the short steep hill of our driveway, and we experienced our first crash.  She cried and cried and cried over her scraped knee, got pudding and an Angelina Ballerina movie instead of dinner with lots of snuggling.  The next day, I realized she had a big bruise on her shin, poor girl, in addition to the little scrape.  Of course, she was back riding down the hill yesterday. 

Brian came home while we were out playing that evening.  He’s modeling his new awesome reflective winter cycling jacket which he won in the inaugural month of a Saturday race ride here in Birmingham. 

And we’ve not told you about his new bike!  He’s got a brand-spankin’-new Trek Madone 5.5, which he calls The Hornet because of its flashy paintjob.  Trek offered the entire team the bikes at cost, so it was an amazing deal.   (Anyone want to buy 2-year old Trek Madone with more miles than we care to mention??)  He loves the new bike.  He’s hoping to post a blog soon called "The State of the Bikes". 
And two other biking tidbits… He’s been upgraded to Category 1/ elite.  Woohoo!  Now he won’t have to petition to get into the big races.  And his response to the crazy angry bike article was printed by the Huntsville Times, and you can see it here. 

I’ll leave you with a glimpse of our Christmas lights.  Those are twinkling snowflakes hanging down.  As I’ve said in previous years, before kids, I thought that less was more when it came to Christmas lights.  But now that my sweeties ooh and ahh over everything, and we have to pull over to enjoy the biggest, gaudiest Christmas decorations, I don’t think that there’s such a thing as too much 🙂  Unless, of course, we’re paying the electric bill!  Tom put these lights up for us, and the next day, he added to it by giving us his beautiful, extensive wood nativity set.  Needless to say, Analise is ecstatic that Baby Jesus is in her front yard.  We have to go check on him every time we come home.  I’ll post pictures soon!

Lest you think I’m totally on the ball with the Christmas cookies, decorations, lights, etc, I’m not.  The tree is up, but the kids are daily un-decorating it, the boxes are still in the living room, only a few decorations are out, and I’m only about 50% done with my Christmas shopping.  And the artsy-crafty Christmas cards haven’t been touched in a while.  Time to get on the ball!  But the Christmas spirit abounds here!  

Analise and I are embarking on a Christmas cookie adventure, and today, being December 1st was a perfect day to start.  And these Chocolate Crinkle cookies from Family Fun magazine were the best start we could have hoped for!  Easy and incredibly delicious. These are like little brownie bites.

• 3/4 c. butter, melted
• 1/2 c. unsweetened cocoa powder
• 1 c. sugar
• 2 eggs
• 2 t vanilla extract
• 2 c. flour
• 1 t b aking powder
• 1 t baking soda
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 6 ounces (half a bag or 1 cup, I think) mini semisweet chocolate chips
• 3/4 c. confectioner’s sugar

In a large bowl, mix together the melted butter, cocoa powder and sugar. Whisk in the eggs and vanilla extract. In a medium-sized bowl, stir together the flour, baking powder, baking soda and salt. Use a large spoon to slowly add the dry ingredients to the chocolate mixture. Stir in the chips. Refrigerate the dough for 2 hours.

Heat oven to 350 degrees. Form the dough into 1-inch balls, then roll them in confectioners’ sugar. Bake the cookies on an ungreased baking sheet for 10 minutes. Set the baking sheet on a wire rack for 5 minutes, then lightly dust the cookies with the remaining confectioners’ sugar. Transfer the cookies directly onto the rack to cool thoroughly. Makes about 4 dozen.

From Family Fun magazine here

Mom tip!! Analise always wants to take little bites of dough or chocolate chips, etc. I’m constantly having to have her get off the stool, move over to the sink and wash her hands after taking a bite. And she wants to make her cookies into fun shapes, like snakes. And I feel pretty strongly that peanut butter cookies need to be in balls, not snakes. I know, I’m a control freak.  I’m working on it, and kids are slowly but surely breaking me of it.  

But! I’ve started giving her a small chunk of dough, a toaster oven sized baking pan, a plate with sprinkles and chips, and moving her over to the table where she can shape, take bites, and decorate at her leisure. I’m even cooking her cookies in the toaster oven – usually same temp, but about half time, since her cookies are smaller than mine. It’s working WONDERFULLY! We’re all happy!

Analise and Josiah on the Teeter Totter. Click the picture to watch a short video.

We started the Christmas season on Saturday here in our house. I made turkey chili with cornbread, and we enjoyed my delicious apple pie for dessert. Brian brought our Christmas tree up from the basement. Can I just say that the Christmas tree storage bag I bought last year was a GREAT idea?? In contrast to last year’s experience of shaking a mice nest from the tree in its cardboard box in the shed, this year all the pieces were neatly stacked together with their other color-coded branches, and it went together so easily! 

In contrast to last year’s sweet memories of a 2 1/2 year old Analise decorating, this year she was a HUGE help, handing Brian branches, sorting pieces into their color piles. (Sorry they’re not the greatest pictures, but they capture the moments!)

After the tree was up, Analise quickly determined we needed "presents", so she brought in a bunch of toys to keep under the tree.  Good thing… I won’t be able to put the wrapped ones under until Christmas eve, because she’ll never leave them alone!

She wanted to be a part of everything, including fluffing up the branches with me, and helping me put on the lights. When I told her to be careful, she said, "Look, Mommy, when I stand on the chair, I won’t fall because my legs don’t wobble!"

We lost track of Josiah for a bit, and found playing in the kitchen, having found the pre-tree decorating snack.

Brian’s parents joined us for dinner and the actual decorating. Analise again, enjoyed putting up all the ornaments, especially opening the ones that were stored in their little Hallmark boxes. She was SO EXCITED about all the Christmas decorations coming out!  She was determined that we were going to get ALL the decorations out of every box before she went to bed.  She pulled out the velvet ribbon, poinsettias, and garland for outside and carefully placed them all over the house.  It’s festive, specially the poinsettias sticking up from the blinds on the shutters:)  She was so cute. 

Josiah, on the other hand, was seriously into UN-decorating… that’s what these chubby little hands are actually doing 🙂

When he took the decorations off the tree, he’d either take them to another room in the house, leaving them there… decorating in his little way, I’m sure

…or use them to decorate Grandma.

Though last year the tree was heavy on the lower 5-6 branches thanks to Analise’s decorating and Josiah wasn’t a problem, this year I’ve had to make the lower branches the "child safe" ornaments, and move all Analise’s carefully placed ornaments higher up to safer places.  Now, if we can just keep him from pulling the tree over…

I’ll leave you with our one good ornament picture…

It’s going to be a fun Christmas with these 2 little sweeties!

Here’s a 10 minute video of a climb I did up Smeyer Road a couple weeks ago. Beautiful fall colors.

I’ll be posting more videos soon. Stay tuned!

On Tuesday, Analise’s preschool had a pow-wow picnic. They had made pillowcase indian vests and feather headbands with their Indian names on them. Analise’s name was Little Fawn. I only stayed for the picnic, but after I left, they sat in a circle, played their Indian (oatmeal container) drums and danced the Turkey Tango. Fun!

I tell ya… he can entertain himself with anything! I got a cute video of him playing with them, too, and eating them. I loved running them through his fingers, rolling them across the floor, bouncing them, tossing them in the colander. He ate several, rolling them around in his mouth for a bit, before biting into them with a wrinkled face. After feeling it burst its tartness in his mouth, he’d reach in and pull it out, putting it back in the colander.

Love these chubby soft little fingerrs!