Christmas threw up a little bit in my house...

We love Christmas around here, so we decorate everything we can. It also helps that we have a whole house to decorate this year. It's so much fun! Here is our tree that Shannon keeps rearranging the ornaments on (and adding her own special touches to--like her socks!).We decorated "gingerbread" houses (made with graham crackers) during Thanksgiving when some of my family was in town, and since they didn't want to drive home with them in their laps, they left them all here. Yay for me! They all turned out very nicely. I don't have pictures of the day we made the houses because my camera was malfunctioning, but you can see them on my sister's blog here.Matt decided to make the pyramids of Egypt (ok, so he only made one) complete with palm trees and the Nile River. I thought that was a very cute idea.Anyone who knows me well knows that I am addicted to snowglobes and my mom is addicted to giving them to me. I was sooooo excited to put out all of my Christmas ones this year. Oh, and the crushed house is Shannon's. She has made an afternoon snack out of it more than once.We made a paper fireplace to hang our stockings on (can you tell which one has been around for over 30 years?). Shannon calls them sockings or sockets and she loves to look at them and tell me who they each belong to. Also, when the heat turns on, the air from the vent on the bottom of the picture makes the fire flicker! I know, I'm a nerd.A friend gave me these placemats this year. They are very funny! The santa hats are napkins! It's kind of hard to see, but on the wall is a cross-stitch of santa that my sister did for me a few years ago. I have another amazing cross-stitch/hardanger in the living room that I neglected to take a picture of, but I promise it's amazing.And, of course, the chocolate. I have only made Hershey balls and fudge meltaways so far, but I am also going to make snowflake-shaped marshmallows and maybe some toffee or something. Shannon thinks Christmas is the best thing ever!

Happy Birthday Leah!!

We did absolutely nothing special for Leah's birthday today, aside from the cake. Call me a bad mother, but I don't understand the need to make a fuss over a one year old, since they don't even care. She did get her cake, though, and loved it. I can't get enough of that smile. She is just fun! What a great mess!

Here is the video of us singing to her. I love the part where she starts bopping. At the end Shannon tries to blow out the candle, but she is too afraid to get very close to it.

Gingerbread Festival

Yes, it's that time of year again! My sister, Jeny, and I took the girls to the annual Gingerbread Festival at Thanksgiving Point. Each year it gets bigger and bigger and the houses get more and more amazing. Here are some of the best:I especially liked this temple, because they even made the reflection pond out of melted candy! It was very neat!We all got to decorate a cookie, and Leah loved the frosting. This is her pretending to be shy.They had a stage with Irish Step dancers, and Shannon was enraptured. She wanted so badly to go up on stage with them. There was also a storytelling corner, and Shannon thought that was the best! She sat right down on that girl's lap and made herself at home. I am so glad that she loves books!

Piggies

Leah's hair is finally long enough to put little pigtails in it. She actually looks like a girl now! Aren't those the most kissable cheeks you have ever seen? Shannon saw me get the camera out, so of course she wanted in on the action. They don't even look like sisters!

The other day I found Shannon in her room wearing this outfit. Whenever she finds any kind of stick she calls it a "shock" and uses it to direct music while she sings. This particular song is from the Shirley Temple movie, "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."

And just a few other funny things:

Yesterday I put Leah down for a nap. I walked by a few minutes later and saw her door open a crack, so I knew that Shannon had gone in there. I walked in and found Shannon sitting in the rocking chair holding her puppy, singing "Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam" to Leah. Here I was ready to be mad at her for bothering her sister, and she was trying to help her go to sleep. She loves her sister very much.

I was listening to Christmas music on Pandora the other day and I had the volume all the way up on the computer because I was in the other room cleaning. The music stopped, and I heard the sounds of the games on pbskids.org. I went in to the computer room and found Shannon playing games with her left hand over her left ear and her right shoulder shrugged up to her right ear because the volume was so loud. She makes me laugh every day!

Halloween

Here are the girls carving pumpkins. You may remember the hat that Shannon is wearing from previous posts. She still wears it all the time.Here are the finished products. Shannon carved Tinkerbell all by herself! OK, no she didn't. But she loved it! Matt did the witch.Here are the happy trick-or-treaters. Leah looked like a boy, but that's ok. She was still very cute. We walked to the church for the trunk-or-treat there and got the houses on the way. Shannon got into the spirit very quickly. She yelled, "Trick or treat!" to everyone she saw. She even hit up some other kids who were out. They just looked at her like she was crazy.Shannon got oohs and ahhs everywhere we went. This is one of the most fun nights we have ever had as a family, since Shannon is old enough now to really enjoy this stuff. It's going to be such a fun holiday season! This is completely unrelated to Halloween, but I had to post it anyway. Shannon was singing this song all morning and I couldn't figure out what it was. Finally, I figured it out. She is singing the "Little Drummer Boy"! The "wop wop wop" part is "pa rum pum pum pum." I especially love her drum sound effect. She sang a lot more of it, but of course wouldn't do it for the camera. She is such a crack-up!

Hee Haw Farms

For those of you who read Nickell's blog, this will probably look familiar. Jeny and Mark met us at Hee Haw Farms in Pleasant Grove last night for a very fun evening. There are a lot of pictures, but there was a lot to see!
Here are my cute girls posing in one of the many picture things they had there.We started off by feeding the goats. Shannon was a little hesitant at first, but finally figured out that they just lick the food out of your hands.Then we headed over to the "train." These were just old metal barrels decorated like animals being pulled by a tractor. Shannon said, "Mom, this is a good bumpy!" She is at the age where she loves going over bumps in the car, so this ride was her idea of heaven. Leah also thought it was a lot of fun.
After that we went over to the swing. I think Shannon liked this the best. She would have stayed on it all night if we had let her. Leah had a really good time watching Shannon.
While Uncle Mark stood in line for Shannon to go on a pony ride we went to see all of the animals. They had this GIANT pig (there is no picture I could have taken that would do it justice), cows, donkeys, normal-sized pigs, chickens, sheep, rabbits, ducks, and turkeys. The kids were even allowed to go into a pen to run around with the chickens and pigs. Shannon just kept waving and saying "hi" to all of the animals.
Then came the big slide. We climbed up the hill, and it was steeper than I thought it would be, so I thought Shannon would chicken out, but she wanted to go! It was another bumpy ride, so she loved it.I thought this was a fantastic idea. They filled a pen with dried corn for the kids to play in. I had to drag her out of this to go to the pumpkin patch. Somehow I neglected to take a picture of the pumpkin patch, but it was very neat. It was a field of very tall sunflowers (dried up, of course) where we found two perfect pumpkins. Shannon stopped at all of the broken pumpkins to look at them. I think she would have taken one of them home if I had let her. Gross.This last picture is really for my mom. The sunset was very pretty, and this is her favorite mountain, Mt. Timpanogos.
Thank you, Aunt Jeny and Uncle Mark! It was a REALLY fun evening!

My Favorite Room

Before:After: This was one of the easiest rooms to fix so far. All we did was replace the carpet, scrub the gross walls, and paint. I still haven't painted the trim, but it will just be white instead of the off-white it is right now. I absolutely love the color! It's the sunniest room in the house, so I have all of my orchids in there.

Bathroom Before and Afters

Here is what we started with. I wish I had taken a picture before I cleaned the toilet, but I don't think anyone would have wanted to see that anyway. Jeny got upclose and personal with the toilet when she helped me replace the wax seal, so she can attest to the vileness of it. It's clean now, I promise. Here is how it looks now. Here is a list of what I did, since you can't see all of it: scrubbed everything (I don't know how, nor do I wish to know how, but the previous owners managed to get urine on every wall and the door from about knee level down), new toilet seat, replaced wax ring, re-caulked everything, new baseboard behind toilet, replaced leaky faucet, installed outlet next to light switch (that I haven't wired yet because I don't have a ladder to get into the attic), wet sanded and polished countertop, sealed and painted ceiling, new towel rack, sealed and painted baseboards, and mounted the vanity cabinet to the wall.I had my doubts about this tub, but it cleaned up very nicely. Some of the paint is worn off where there was a door at one time, but I will eventually fix that.

Here is a picture just for fun. Shannon wanted to read a book to Leah, so she climbed up in her crib with her. Leah absolutely loved it. I sure do love these girls.

Funny Kids

People have been asking me for recent pictures of my kids, so I took some today while we were playing. As you can see, Leah's hair still has the curl on top that I can't do a thing with. She is such a cutie. We really like her.

It looks like she is about to attack me in this picture, but it was the best smile I could get out of her on film.

Recently I scrubbed the tile in the kitchen and Shannon, of course, wanted to help. I gave her a sponge and a bucket with a little bit of water in it, and she thought that was very fun.

For some reason this picture uploaded sideways, but you get the point. The top is what it looked like before I scrubbed it, and the bottom is what the grout is supposed to look like (though if you look closely you can see that it needs to be patched, too). It was really dirty!

Shannon has really gotten into the pretend stage. She wraps her dolls in blankets and sings to them all the time. This was too funny, however, to not take a picture. This is her favorite stuffed animal. It's a teddy bear, but his name is Puppy. She did all of this by herself. I especially loved the "peek-a-boos" (sunglasses) that she put on him.

Finally, here is a video of Leah's army crawl. She is getting very fast and getting pretty much anywhere she wants to be.