A pretty nice Christmas/ Happy New Year!

A pretty nice Christmas – we experienced a nice Christmas Eve service at our church then had a quiet evening with just our family at home. We had a nice time celebrating Christmas with Kathy’s family on Christmas Day and had a fun time together with my family, a couple of days later, on Saturday. While at Kathy’s side of the family, the kids received gifts they all wanted. On my side, my Mom and Aunt Marlene each, gave the kids money the day before our get together. Then my family, my sister’s (Val’s) family, my brother’s (Brad’s) family and Aunt Marlene met at the Mall of America to do some shopping. All the children bought items they would enjoy, with the money they were given, after that we all ate at the food court. Saturday evening, when all the celebrating and partying was over, I asked the kids individually how they felt about this Christmas. They all said it was great! A day later, their toys started breaking and things weren’t going just right – they said Christmas was okay. Now they say it was a pretty good Christmas and realize that they have a lot more in life to appreciate than many other children out there.
Today our whole family (quite rare for all of us to go at the same time) went to the movie theater to see the 3rd movie of Night at the Museum. We all thought it was very good and will probably watch it again, on a DVD at our house. Now we’re ready to bring in the new year – Happy New Year!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Christmas Vacation

Paul is starting his Christmas vacation, getting a full two weeks off of school. He hasn’t had much time behind the wheel, learning to drive, but we’ll bump that up now that he’s going to have more free time. The kids made sugar cookie cutouts and decorated them, Paul thought it was a great idea (as long as he had a very limited part of doing any real work – the actual making and baking of the cookies). Grandma and Grandpa Webb came up for the event. After a couple hours of that, we ate dinner then went to our church for a Christmas concert. Heard some great music with a short Christmas message from our pastor towards the end.

Brenna, Shaylin and David have school Monday and Tuesday of next week then will be off for a week and a half. They’re all ready for their break to start now but know that the those two days next week aren’t going to be too tough. I brought Brenna and Shaylin to their basketball game tonight while Kathy drove Paul and David to a concert at Paul’s school. The girls lost their game and Kathy and the boys left the concert at intermission feeling they saw enough.

Last Saturday we went to a Christmas party where we were together with about twenty other families from our church. There was a lot of food, a lot of socializing and a lot of children with lots of fun.

We went downtown St. Paul the other day, walked around to check out some decorations – even took a picture for our Christmas card there. Will try to post some pictures soon.

David has still been talking about wanting to do things with his friend Timmy quite often.  Saturdays plans are made to have David spend the night there, usually works out pretty good having those two together.

Dehydrated doughnuts

We will have a box of doughnuts in our house two or three times a year. The kids will do almost anything, to get a doughnut, when we’re out and about. Last week I was straightening out our laundry room, downstairs, when I came across a doughnut box. Sure enough, there were three doughnuts inside. They looked very normal, but they must have been there for a while because they really, really dried out. They were dehydrated doughnuts. So what do you do with dehydrated doughnuts, you give them a taste – at least our kids did. They were hardly edible but each child did manage to eat a quarter to a half of one. It’s amazing what they’ll eat when they want too as compared to a lot of dinners that they don’t want.

Paul made it through his last full school week for the year – he’s been doing well with his grades. German and algebra are his tougher classes as compared to him enjoying and feeling history and geography are easier.

Brenna and Shaylin are pulling in good grades also. School might be a little easier for Shaylin while sports are more natural for Brenna. Friday evening, Brenna was playing basketball (their team won) while Shaylin was singing in the church kids choir.

David decided to quit basketball and is spending a lot of his time drawing. He draws a lot of Spider-man, Iron-man and Military soldiers. We’ve had a lot of fun times with David in the family but still have trying times. Weekly, we will pull the car over when the arguing gets too fierce and weekly we have to separate him from his siblings ,at home, because the arguing gets too harsh.  Prayers for each of us too have soft hearts towards one another (at all times) are a good thing for us – Maybe the Christmas season will help it out.

Holiday Traditions

Thanksgiving weekend kicks off our holiday traditions, with Black Friday being the day we buy a Christmas tree and decorate it. The tradition is not a huge deal like going somewhere and cutting one down, it’s more, head to Menards, find a tree within their selection of precut trees, tie the thing to our roof top and drive home. The decorating of the house and the tree gets a little crazy, mainly because we pull out the seven or eight boxes from storage (with the decorations in them) and it’s a free-for-all as to what goes where. The last couple of years, Paul decided he was going to be in charge of the outside lighting. He’s finding out why it’s not as easy as it looks. The strings of lights never want to light the way you think they should – you know, plug them in and watch them light up. He plugs the strings in one at a time, some may light up great and some may not light at all. Then there are those that start out with a flicker then go out and without touching them at all come back on again but as soon as you touch them they go out again. The challenge is on then to defeat the lights and make them work at your will, a losing battle.

Another tradition that happens (not within the family but goes along with the spirit of Christmas) is the big 3M building near our house, leaves certain lights on at night to make a giant Christmas tree. Paul also got in his tradition of watching A Charlie Brown Christmas.