Christmas is finally here!

Santa's elf helping prepare on Christmas eve

Samantha got the phone she's been asking for, for forever!! And used all 250 free texts in a matter of minutes!!
Ethan's swiss army knife from grandpa

Ethan had been bugging my mom about what was in a present she had for him under the tree. My mom jokingly told him it was a tutu, and so the running joke began. Ethan would joke about what he was going to do with his tutu and how excited he was to get it. So... my mom couldn't resist actually going out and buying him one. It was so funny Christmas morning when he opened it... :D

Thanks to the Markels for our awesome Tony Hawk game!

Abby got this pretty quilt from grandma Whiting, with lots of hours of love and care sewn into it.

Another big hit was Owl City tickets

It was fun to have Granma and Karl to share Christmas with us. We haven't ever had someone share Christmas with us at our place our entire marriage, so it was a nice treat.

Brad was super excited about "helping" put this toy dinosaur together for Ethan

Elise working on a new fashion design

Ethan wasn't too bad at it either!! :D

Santa brought Abby a desk. Here she is at 12:20pm

Here she is at 4:50pm

Here she is at 6:41pm!

She was busy, busy, busy in that desk ALL DAY!!

While we didn't recieve snow for Christmas morning, late Christmas day came a fog that produced this beautiful hoar frost for Boxing Day.

The hike up Pilot Butte was so pretty!

A great wrap up for our Christmas season.

More December fun!

December brought more fun, like the ward Christmas party. Although we are not coordinated at all in this picture from the party, I think everyone looks pretty good. Thanks to Lora for taking the pictures- we haven't had a picture of us all together for a very long time! I went to help in Ethan's class to help them make gingerbread houses out of graham crackers. All the children in class were carefully following the model the teacher had shown them and my son comes up with this....????

I also went with the YW to wrap presents for the needy seniors in the community. I thought it turned out to be a really nice event.
Some of the younger girls joined us as well.
We also went for a snow shoe trip up to Virginia-Meisner snow park. It was a little chilly to begin with or if you stopped moving. We did about 3 miles.




At "the top"

Very pretty day and pretty view.

Abby's tuckered out!

Brad took the little kiddos out sledding one day over the break.

And the kiddos and I joined the YM/YW for tubing at the tube park

Some deep snow!!

Check out the cool tow to take you up the hill!

Lots of good stuff this month!

Concerts galore

Concerts, concerts, and more concerts.

This is "Come Unto Christmas" put on my our Stake

I don't know how our school music teacher "gets away with it", but all of our kids Christmas concerts were Christian songs!! Imagine that! At Christmas time! Nice being "off the radar" sometimes.

Silent Night in German (sorta), English, and Spanish (sorta) :-)

This was a sing along at the High School (forgive my "singing along") with again... Christmas songs!

Goal driven...

Ethan decided one day that he really wanted to wear his socks for 4 days straight. He wouldn't even take them off at bed time. I really had to convince him that he HAD to take his socks off for his shower, but that was the only time!

He made a little chart in his room and everything where he checked off his "progress"On the night of day 3 even Ethan was a bit grossed out by the state of his socks and the grimeys between his toes, but he was determined to last the 4 whole days.

And he did it!!

Here he is with his "trophy socks"

....Boys!!!

Think they'll give him a boy scout badge for following through with his goal??

Let the festivities begin!!

We started our December fun on the 5th with the Bend Christmas parade.

Samantha got to wear this super sexy band uniform. Can you tell how excited she is?

Here she is. The flutes are at the back

It was a chilly day so the parade moved pretty quickly. In fact Samantha's band was at the beginning of the parade, and Elite was the 3rd to last entry, and Samantha was back from the parade route before we left!!

Abby and Ethan had a great time riding their scooters down the parade route with the Elite Fitness group. They didn't complain a single time the whole route! They were too busy showing off their scooter tricks... check'em out!

After the parade we met up with the Lewandowski's again for the great Christmas tree hunt.

Brad found "the perfect tree", but had to take one for the team trying to get the tree back to the van through all the brush and ended up twisting his knee. But, we did have one fine tree!!

Brett and Abby were working really hard

Brittany and Sam having a good time.

Sunday we got a nice big dump of snow to start our Christmas holiday off right :D Ethan and his "snow pillow"

Novembers end

We finished up November with a quiet, relaxing Thanksgiving

Christmas preparations

and "The Store"

Over Thanksgiving break Ethan and Abby (with a little help from Elise) opened their store, selling primarily things made out of duct tape, or things covered in duct tape. The milk jugs were "giant ornaments". They wanted to take their store outside, like a lemonade stand, but I told them it was too cold out and it was best to stay inside and we would buy their wares... which we did.

They had great fun for a few hours making their duct tape creations and then setting up their store and relocating their store a few times.

Lots of entertainment and it only cost me a couple bucks to buy their stuff in the end :D

Ethan Videography

Ethan got hold of the camera and made some movies. I will share just a few with you.

ENJOY!