you gotta get up, you gotta get up...

you gotta get up...it's christmas morrrrr-ning!

that song by rich mullins has been running through my head this morning as i tried to get brian out of bed and as our kids are still soundly sleeping. i am guessing that in a few years, the kids will be the ones begging for us to get out of bed to begin the christmas morning festivities, but for now, i'm enjoying a few minutes of peace and quiet! (obviously, the picture above was taken sometime last week instead of this morning... but i thought it looked so "christmas morning-ish!")

we are headed over to spend the morning and early afternoon with brian's side of the family and my mom. this is the first year that we are here instead of doing this and this like brian has done EVERY YEAR OF HIS LIFE... so we're starting some new traditions and missing some old ones. i am sure we will miss all the fun of brian's aunts & uncles (and dogs), but with the 3 grandkids running (and crawling) around, there will be plenty of laughter and memories made today. last night, we attended our church's christmas eve service for the first time, and i hope that is a part of our every christmas from now on. what a blessing to gather with family and friends to sing of Christ's birth! ethan loved singing "silent night" by candlelight, though he only knows one verse... so he was a little confused when "all is calm" didn't come back around the next 5 times! :)

after our feast this afternoon, the kids will hopefully nap and then my dad, joy, grandma, and cousin betsy will be coming over for christmas munchies and more presents! because we've been out of town in the past, we haven't spent much time with my dad's side on christmas... so i am looking forward to that today!

i am guessing the kids will be calling out any minute now. i can't wait to get ethan up and let him put baby Jesus on the advent calendar! may your christmas day be filled with all the celebration and joy that surrounds this season, and may God be glorified for sending the Source of our celebration and the Reason for our joy! may we be like the shepherds, who after worshiping baby Jesus in the manger, "returned, glorifying and praising God for all they had heard and seen" (luke 2:20). merry christmas to you all.

candy cane cookies!

sweet heather & her kids avery & savannah invited a bunch of us over for a fun candy-cane-cookie-making party earlier this month. oh what a great time we had twisting the mint & sugar cookie dough into candy canes! the kids kept trying to eat the dough, and we encouraged them to wait until they were cookies to eat them... but when i thought nobody was looking, i snuck a bite (or two or three...) of dough to taste! and i got caught on camera!! :) i also got caught by avery, who asked me, "mrs. em, take a bite?" of course this was right after his mom told him not to eat the dough. sorry heather!! but wow, was that dough good!! and so were the cookies. i need to get the recipe from heather- she said they have cream cheese in them! yuuuum, yummmmmmm!!!!! i'll make sure to share the recipe when i get it from the cook.

while we were waiting for the cookies to bake, we also made ornaments. the kids filled clear glass balls with all sorts of christmas-y doo dads. this was a lot of fun, too, and as you can see, even the adults made sure their ornaments were just right. :) we have no picture of caroline or savannah because they NAPPED while we partied... next year they will have a ball, i'm sure, but heather & i agreed that it was nice to be able to make cookies with our boys without baby girls at our ankles! :)


here are more pictures from our cookie party. heather wants to make this an annual event, and i agree!


joseph & natalie had so much fun making cookies with mommy!


it looks like ethan had a good time, too!

there i am sneaking some dough... boy was that mint dough good!

heather and avery rolling out the dough

avery was so proud of the ornament he made himself!
(which later crashed to the ground in a million pieces...
so heather, at least i got a picture of it first!)

mommy -to-be catherine getting practice holding a newborn!
(one month old baby claire)

thank you for a fun morning, heather!

where's baby Jesus?

ethan is really excited about christmas this year. he has learned several christmas songs, his favorite being "jingle bells" and "away in the manger" (not to mention caroline's "deck the halls"). he has become familiar with the nativity story, and especially with the angels singing "glory to God in the highest". he loves to exclaim that at random moments throughout our day! i introduced him to an advent calendar this year, and we have had fun opening the drawers to the calendar and putting a different character in the manger scene. from day one, ethan would ask "where's baby Jesus? where's baby Jesus?" i have told him that we have to wait until christmas to see baby Jesus, just like God's people waited anxiously for the Messiah to come. he heard those words, but he still asks "where's baby Jesus" each time we celebrate another day of the advent season. i love to see my child's anticipation of seeing baby Jesus! it really brings home the anticipation of His actual birth!

with ethan learning christmas songs this year, our weekly trips to the grocery store have now turned into caroling events. two weeks ago, he treated the other publix shoppers to 250 rounds of "jingle bells"! last week, we had not been in the store more than a minute, and ethan unashamedly shouted at the top of his lungs, "GLORY TO GOD! GLORY TO GOD IN THE HIGHEST!" it was one of my most proudest mother moments thus far. :) that same day, we got home & i was reading him the biblical accounts of Jesus' birth... he was helping me fill in some blanks here and there... we'd gotten through the angels greeting the shepherds, and at one point, i said, "and the wise men said..." and ethan chimed in, "jingle bells! jingle bells!" so we need to work on the details a little....

i thought i'd share a picture up there of our funny little christmas boy in his new hat! thanks, aunt kristie!

the spoilage begins!

christmas started a little early at our house when a box arrived the other day from my aunt & uncle. ethan was so excited to see what was in the box, and caroline was so excited to see four million white styrofoam peanuts come flying out of the box as ethan began the mighty excavation! thank you, uncle lloyd & aunt susan, for your thoughtful and generous gifts! ethan was speechless when he unwrapped the cars movie. seriously, he quietly stared at the dvd case for at least 10-15 seconds with a huge smile on his face before he exclaimed, "i-i-i-i-i-it's lightning the-keen (mcqueen) the movie!" i have since tried to convince ethan that the movie is simply called "cars", ya know, to save the boy some breath instead of requesting "lightning the-keen the movie" so many times... "cars" is so much easier to say! after going back and forth about this, he finally gently patted my shoulder and as calmly and condescendingly and lovingly as possible, he told me, "no, no, mommy... it's called lightning the-keen the movie." it will be a long time before i forget that moment. :)

caroline loves loves loves her little train, and as you see from the picture below, ethan was very excited about it too. in the next picture, he is demonstrating for his sister just how you act like a train. he also refers to the train as "caroyine's special choo-choo train" every single time he talks about it. oh it makes me sad to think of all the funny things he says that i am already forgetting. but at least a few of them are recorded here! anyway, my aunt & uncle blessed us with other little christmas-y gifts and a home depot gift card which will definitely go to good use! (thank y'all so much for the wonderful gifts! we love you and wish we could see you more often.)


in the picture below, i had asked ethan to "hold up the present" for me to see... and he did!



i know that this is just the beginning of opening several gifts for the kids... we have tried to downplay the emphasis on presents and highlight the non-material blessings of christmas... but at the same time, i've been getting so excited about giving our children the gifts that we've bought them. we are blessed beyond measure. we have much more than we need. i forget that so often, and my heart fills with the "i wants" and the "i needs"... when really, God has been so good. i am humbled when i realize how comfortable our lives are, and those "i wants" go flying out the door as i praise the Lord for His grace & mercy in our lives. i have the peace of God and the gift of His Son. there is truly nothing else i need.

o, christmas tree!

we have had a great time decorating our tree this year. my preference is to pick out our tree the friday or saturday after thanksgiving so that we can enjoy it as long as possible... well, that was our plan this year and was even on ethan's countdown chart but the days were numbered before our disney trip, and i knew i'd want to take time to enjoy getting the tree just right! so we waited till we got home, and i'm so glad we did. there were fewer trees to choose from, but ethan did a great job helping us find a good one. (he heard me tell brian, "this one looks full", so he went around touching all the trees saying, "yis one yooks full! yis one yooks full!") he had even more fun helping us get the lights out. we have 2 strands of lights that have 16 different functions... a little overkill if you ask me, but boy oh boy did our little boy have fun pushing those buttons a thousand times!!! (see picture to the left...) we got alllll the lights on the tree and decided to put up the ornaments the next day. i'm SO GLAD we waited because the next day, i noticed that the bottom strand of lights were only working intermittently.... and then they went out completely. i guess they'd had enough of a workout with ethan the night before! so we took all those lights out and planned to use the LED lights that brian had bought earlier in the season. i then realized that they didn't twinkle, and i really wanted twinkly lights... so we took his LED lights BACK to target but discovered that they didn't have LEDs that twinkle.... so brian lovingly agreed that we could get non-LED twinkly lights (that were also a fraction of the price of LED lights for twice as many!) we took the time to put the red twinkle bulbs every so often in the lights to make them twinkle, and then we put them on the tree. let me just say that "twinkle" was a little bit of a false advertisement!! a better description would have been "flash on and off in strips, leaving most of your tree to look dark at any given moment". they blinked in sections. how dumb is that! i was so disappointed, but i knew i was stuck with these lights at least for this year. so my sweet, patient husband helped me find all the red blinky bulbs (with the lights already on the tree) and replaced them with the regular bulbs... so now we have non-twinkly, non-LED lights, and frankly, it's not what either of us wanted! but it's pretty, and i'd already almost forgotten about all that until brian brought it up today. i have pledged to my wonderful husband that we will have LED lights on our tree next year! and i will be looking for bonafide twinkly ones!!! (for the record, i was going to leave the whole lights fiasco part out of this post, but i made the mistake of reading this to brian, and he made me tell this silly story....)

ok, back to decorating our tree... before i put up all the ornaments, i decided it was time to purge my ornament collection. i have so many sentimental ornaments that i will never ever get rid of, and then i have my "worked at family christian stores for years and bought way too many ornaments at 80% off in february" collection. it was time for most of those to go. they were nice, but i decided that we needed to make room for the growing ornament collections of our children, not to mention all the popsicle stick creations that will donn our tree before too long! brian did not believe me when i told him that i was getting rid of 38 ornaments!!!! i shared some with friends before donating the rest, and it felt so good to downsize a little! with all of that said, now i'll share our NEW ornaments this year... :) but first, here is our tree this year...



our family ornament is a gingerbread cinderella's castle from our recent disney trip. i saw this our first night at downtown disney, and i'm so glad i found it because i never did see another ornament that i liked. i love this one because it represents our wonderful disney trip but doesn't scream "DISNEY!!!"... it still kind of goes with the overall vintage theme of my tree. ethan's ornament for this year is a "happy birthday jesus" cake with a candle on top that lights up. he is very very into birthdays this year and loves talking about whose birthday is coming up. we have been teaching him that Christmas is the celebration of Jesus' birth, and he has fun singing happy birthday to baby Jesus. :) he loves this ornament, and one of the first things out of his mouth after i gave it to him was, "don't put it on the tree!" yes i realize there's a pine needle on the cake in the picture, but it's christmas eve and i have way too much to do today to retake this picture!! :) i searched long and hard for caroline's ornament this year. currently, her favorite christmas song is "deck the halls". she has been doing this noisy thing with her tongue that sort of resembles "lalala", so we started singing "falalalala" whenever she made this noise. she quickly learned to wait through "deck the halls with boughs of holly" and to only do her little tongue thing whenever we got to "falalalala". i have still yet to get this on video, but it's pretty funny. so i was determined to find a musical "deck the halls" ornament. the best i could do was this little plastic hallmark music box ornament. when you open the little drawer, the girl dances around the tree & the song plays. it will be fun to tell her this story as she grows older! what's almost as funny is to hear ethan say in one breath, "caroyine say deck a halls a vows a hah-yee, bayayayayayayayaya!" when he was in nursery last week, he exclaimed this to our friend katie, and with his added stuttering at the beginning of "caroyine", katie was slightly concerned that he was having stroke! oh dear!

i took some fun pictures of the kids with their ornaments today after church, so i'll post those soon...