How I Spent My Christmas Break

The kids were out of school for 2 weeks at Christmas time. We had so much fun those two weeks, despite all the illness we had going on. My brother Sam and his wife Teresa came down from BYU Idaho and Teresa's parents came up from Dallas. We had our 2nd Annual Family Gingerbread House Contest. You can click on that to see the pictures of the completed houses.

Emily had a party with some friends one night and they played Dance Central and had a gift exchange.

Teresa's Parents, Antonio and Angeles, taught us how to make tamales. We made chicken, pork and bean and cheese tamales. In total we had over 200. They were SO DANG GOOD! We divvied up the spoils and my family had our tamales gone in about two days. We did save some for Steve who was out of town at the time.

We had fun making the tamales but we found out that making them is no small task. It took us all day long and we had 7 adults and 4 children helping.

On Christmas Eve everyone came to our house for dinner and a Christmas program.

After our program, we had a special visitor stop by.

This was Antonio and Angeles' last day in Utah. They left for Dallas early the next morning.

Santa with me mum

We all opened our Christmas PJ's and got all warm and snuggly

On Christmas morning everyone from my mom's house came back over to our house (at 6:45am) to open presents. After the presents were opened we all got ready and went to church.

Addy was so excited about this gift, she would not release her grip on it. This is the thing I sat on the floor at Walmart in Missouri on Thanksgiving Day for. I am pretty certain that my sitting on that Walmart floor in Troy Missouri, in the pharmacy department no less, is what led to our subsequent month long disease-ridden cough laced bronchitis pneumonia fest. It is a mistake I will never make again. But hey, we did get a Kinect out of the whole deal.

The aftermath. This is what our house looked like for the next two days.

We moved our old xbox up to the game room to make way for the new xbox/kinect in the kitchen/family room. Steve and Zac and Sam spent a great majority of the day playing Zac's new game. Poor Z, we didn't know it at the time but he was suffering from pneumonia at the time this picture was taken. His lungs could have collapsed at any moment. I still feel like a horrible mom.

The girls spent the majority of the day playing the kinect downstairs while the boys were upstairs. I am so glad we have 2 xboxes now. It makes things so less argumentative that way.

The kids got these hats for Christmas. They wore them all day on Christmas and pretty much every day since. I love them. Everyone comments on them whenever we go somewhere. Look at those cutie McBooty kids! I love them!

On the 28th, it was Sam and Teresa's first anniversary. They were going to share their anniversary with us and we were all (the adults) going to go see the new Mission Impossible movie. Well, this was the day Zac went to the doctor and Steve and Zac and I ended up spending most of the night in the ER and my mom and Lauren were taking care of our girls. So Sam and Teresa went out to dinner that night and then the next night we went to the movie. The next day, December 30th was Lauren's Birthday and we all went to her favorite place, The Olive Garden, for lunch. Then we went to my mom's house to play games.

The next day was New Years Eve. You can click on that to see our NYE photos. Then the kids went back to school on the 3rd of January. Despite being sick, we had a fabulous Christmas break. I love my family so much and am so thankful for these fun memories we made.

Monday Morning Musings/Never A Dull Moment - It's For The Birds

So our house is under attack by a flock of sparrows. They won't leave our yard and they keep flying into the windows. It started yesterday morning and they are still attacking us even as I type. We had several fly into the windows throughout the day yesterday. This morning when we were in the kitchen eating breakfast, three of them flew into the patio door within 20 seconds of each other. And I have been hearing them hit various windows about every 30 minutes or so, all day long. I'm not sure what to do about it.

Last week Zac had the chance to go to the Student of the Month lunch at his school. He went with his principal and a few other students. They went to a Chinese restaurant and then to Baskin Robins. One of the students that went with him was Chris Stewart's daughter. I had no idea they lived in such close proximity to us. If you don't know who Chris is, he is the author of "The Miracle of Freedom: Seven Tipping Points That Saved the World" and "The Great and Terrible" series, which Zac has read. He is also running for Congress.

Zac was in Ski Club last year and he loved it so much. Neither Steve nor I ski and neither of us has any desire to. So I was glad he was able to ski with his friends once a week last winter. This year my bad mom skills showed themselves when I turned in his application for Ski Club a little too late. By that time there was a waiting list to get in. I tried everything to get him in, including bribing the teacher in charge. Ok, not really. But I thought about it. I thought long and hard. Anyhoosers. I was so so sad last week when Ski Club started. I had to pick Zac up after taking a test after school and all the kids in the club were sitting out front waiting to get on the bus. I seriously felt like the worst mom ever. Because we all know, I'm not takin' him skiing. It was that club or nothin'. But as I was sitting there in the van waiting for him, watching the members of the ski club I had a realization. HE HAS PNEUMONIA! HELLO! He couldn't go skiing, even if he was in the club. Especially because on that very day that ski club started, he woke up having a hard time breathing and had to do a breathing treatment. And he was totally exhausted that day when he got home from school and had to do another treatment that night. The doctor told us it would take at least a month for the pneumonia to clear up and that he shouldn't do anything strenuous in that time. Ski Club lasts for 2 months, which means he would have missed half of it (and lost half of the money for it) if we had signed up on time. It was just a reminder to me that sometimes things don't always work out as we want them to, but we don't know everything, and sometimes what we thought was a bad thing works out for the best in the end.

Addy has this breakfast eating problem. She likes to eat weird things for breakfast. Like soup. Or ham sandwiches. She gets this from her father. Anyway. She also can't eat breakfast within the first hour of waking up. So if I make her something, it just sits there. I usually make her wait to eat after the girls do so that she will actually eat her food. Sometimes this makes her mad, even though at the times I do make her food because she insists she will eat it, she doesn't. She does eat breakfast everyday though. Well, on Saturday I guess she couldn't remember eating. (A problem she has been having lately when she says: I'm STARVING and you haven fed me ALL DAY. And then I remind her of all the times I fed her that day. And she still doesn't believe I have fed her.) So Saturday, she says to me all exasperated and mistreated like, "Why do you NEVER make me breakfast!?!" And I told her that I always make her breakfast. She said, "No you don't. You didn't make me breakfast on Sunday or Friday or Wednesday or JULY!"

Birthday #5 x 2 At Long Last

On Monday, November 28th 2011, Addison turned 5 years old. It is still hard for me to believe that it has been 5 years. Her birth was the post that started this whole Blog thing. We had just returned home from our trip to St. Louis the day before her Birthday. We had a family celebration that night, and my mom and sister Lauren came over to help us celebrate. For her Birthday Dinner Addy requested grilled cheese sandwiches, tomato soup, and grandmas salsa. She will not eat any other salsa, and I can't say that I blame her.

I had planned a Birthday luncheon at McDonald's with her friends for that Thursday, but had to cancel it because I was sicker than a dog, and so was Addy. And not only that, but we also had a bit of a natural disaster that day. I thought, no problem. I'll reschedule it next week when we are all better. Well more than a month later, we are finally all better. And the party was on. We went to McD's with her friends last Friday, January 6th. Better late than never, right? Here's the whole gang.

The Night We Partied Like It Was 2012

This is how we spent New Years Eve:

We had some company over

Addy and Lauren

Emily and Kay

Aubrey, Teresa and Sam

Some of us had a little less energy than others

Allyson and Steve


We did a little cup stacking


Played a little golf


Went skiing

We also had some major dancing going on but I don't have any pictures of that that anyone wants me to post. Rephrasing: I don't have any pictures of that that anyone IN the pictures wants me to post.

Played some Skip-Bo

Some of us decided to change our look and freak our mother out.

Poor Sam. I've decided that no matter how old he gets, he will always be hen pecked by his dear mother. He decided to give himself a haircut and stopped short of completing the process, leaving a mohawk. Which Emily and Teresa then sprayed all purple and glittery. My mother freaked totally out. For some reason (maybe it was past her bedtime and she was really super tired) she really thought he was going to leave his hair like this. Just so you know, he didn't. Maybe she just hasn't been around enough boy haircuts. I do this to Zac's hair all the time when I'm cutting it.


Addy gave Lauren and me our Birthday present from her that she has been working on for weeks. She sang songs and gave the performance of her lifetime.

A few minutes before midnight, we loaded up with horns, poppers, snaps, streamers and fireworks and went outside to wake up anyone in the neighborhood who might have been sleeping through the changing of a year. We were out there for a few minutes, but that was as much as we could stand because it was freezing outside.

The next day we went to church. Then we came home and had a relaxing quiet day with our family. We set some family and individual goals and made plans to carry them out. I love a new year!

Monday Morning Musings - It's A New Dawn, It's A New Day, It's A New Life For Me

Where's Addy?

I LOVE a new year. It's the best feeling. A whole brand spankin' new clean slate to do with whatever I want. Yesterday we set goals. We set several family goals and made a plan to carry them out. We also set individual goals and made plans for those. Each first Sunday of the month we are going to evaluate how we did the previous month and make a new plan for the new month. I found this quote yesterday and put it on the front of our goal journals:

"I urge you to examine your life. Determine where you are and what you need to do to be the kind of person you want to be. Create inspiring, noble, and righteous goals that fire your imagination and create excitement in your heart. And then keep your eye on them. Work consistently towards achieving them." -Joseph B. Wirthlin

This is the kids last day of Christmas break from school. Real life starts again tomorrow. It will be nice, but I am glad to have this one last bonus day to just kick around the house and hang out together and have fun.

We took down our Christmas trees and our decorations today. I think I enjoy taking them down as much as I enjoy putting them up. It is so fun to decorate and anticipate the holidays and it is also so fun to clean it all up and give the house that fresh clean slate feeling that comes with a new year.

So Steve made a big change in his life last week. He traded in this:

For this:

It was a good change that was a long time comin'. He just had to talk himself into it. His old monstrous beast was a gas chugging diesel. And for the last year or more, diesel has been a full dollar a more a gallon than regular gas. And Steve drives a lot. He fills his tank up an average of every other day. So with the savings he will get with better mileage, regular gas prices, and a smaller truck payment, we are thinking we will save enough each month to almost pay one of his employees pay checks for the month. Not to mention that his oil changes will now be 1/3 of what they were. And he drives so much that he has to buy new tires so often. And the smaller tires are half the price of the others. And I don't have to take a running leap to get up into the truck now. Too bad he didn't have this truck all those times I was pregnant and had to make my way up into one of his big huge trucks.

The other day Addy was talking to me about something and I really had no idea what she was talking about. I kept asking her to clarify a little. She got frustrated with me and said, "MOM! Are you hearing what I am saying to you? Do you think you are losing your mind or something?"

We were driving in the car one night and Zac changed my Christmas station to some other station and a rap song came on. In a part of the song that just had music I started singing my own rap song. Zac turned and looked at me and said, "No free stylin' mom." Then later Emily was trying to get him to change the station to the station she wanted. He said, "Zac FM doesn't take requests".

Have you ever seen the show Take the Money and Run? The kids and I watched it last summer and the other day the girls were for sure they were filming an episode near our house. We had been gone somewhere and when we got home, there were 2 cars parked down the street from our house by the walking trail. One of them was a really nice car, but don't ask me what it was. I'm not a car person. Not long after we got home the girls were in the kitchen and they saw a man dressed "in very nice clothes" by their description, running down the trail to the car with a silver briefcase attached to his wrist, just like on the show. For a minute I thought maybe it could be possible they were filming the show, but they said there was no camera crew so I had to burst their bubble and tell them it probably wasn't so. Now I'm really wondering what was going on.

Speaking of TV shows...Do you watch The Big Bang Theory? Oh my! Steve and I had never seen it before, but we just started watching it about a month ago. It is the most hilarious show we have ever seen. I am excited because they had a Big Bang marathon on New Years Eve and so our DVR queue that was getting rather low on BBT is now bursting at the seams.

Here's the theme song. How can you not want to watch something that opens with such a catchy little ditty?

Dude, That's Sick

We have been living in a sick house for over a month now. It has not been too fun. It started the day after Thanksgiving when we were leaving St. Louis for home. I got very sick. Found out I had Bronchitis. It took me almost a month to get back to normal. Meanwhile everyone else in the family has taken several turns being sick. Someone would get sick, feel better for a few days, then be sick again. We all had our turn. And then we had it again. And again.

We have been the coughingest people alive. There was one point when we were all so sick and coughing and we were trying to read scriptures before bed and we couldn't even read because we were all having one big huge coughing attack.

Every few days for the last month someone would complain of a sore throat that would last for a day or two before it went away and then someone else would complain of a sore throat, and then someone else. Over and over the cycle repeated itself. And about every other day for the last month someone has come to me complaining that they felt like they were going to throw up. Thankfully no one every actually threw up (except for that one time when Addy did, but that is because she was having a coughing fit and gagged on all the coughs).

It's been brutal. It really has. But thankfully we are all on the mend. The kids go back to school Tuesday, and I think they can all go back without the fear of causing some kind of outbreak in their school.

The person who was hit the hardest was Zac. The poor kid. He held out for quite some time while the rest of us were hacking and coughing. He was the last of us to get sick. But when he got sick, he got sick. Like sick, sick. It makes me want to cry to think about it because it makes me feel like a horrible mother. Here's why.

He got sick about a week before Christmas. When I was at the doctor, and found out I had bronchitis, I told her everyone else in my family was sick and asked if I needed to bring them in. She said that the chance they would develop bronchitis was very unlikely. She said if their illness lasted for more than a week, then I should bring them in. So poor Z. He was sick and I was waiting out the week to see if he got over it. It was the day before Christmas Eve and I told him that it had been about a week since he had been sick and I was going to make him a doctors appointment. He told me he didn't need to go to the doctor and assured me that he was feeling much better. So I didn't take him to the doctor. Then Christmas happened. Monday morning he still didn't seem better to me and I again told him I was going to take him to the doctor. He assured me that day and also the next that he was feeling better and did not need to go to the doctor. So I didn't take him. (Stupid horrible mother)

By Wednesday I told him I was making him a doctors appointment weather he felt better or not. I called and made him one for that afternoon. That afternoon I went to the mall with my sister-in-law and the girls because Emily and Aubrey had gift cards for Justice that they got for Christmas and they were hot to use them. So while I was carefree at the mall (well as carefree as you can be with 2 girls trying on clothes and trying to make decisions that fit within the limits of their gift cards and another girl without a gift card who wanted to try on all the clothes in the store even though none were in her size). Anyhoo, carefree at the mall. Steve took Zac to his doctors appointment.

While we were in line to pay, I received a call from Steve. I asked him how the appointment went. This is what he said, "She said to take Zac immediately to the hospital because his breathing was so shallow and his oxygen level was so low and his lungs could collapse at any time. She thinks he probably has pneumonia." Comosaywhat?

Talk about freaking out. The line in that store could not have moved slower. Addy could not have made me crazier while we waited. The check out girl could not have irritated me more when she said there was a little hole in one of the shirts the girls were buying, and went to look for another one. I could not get to the hospital fast enough. And I could not think of a worse mother at that time than myself. Why did I wait so long to take him to the doctor? What if his lungs had collapsed in the middle of the night while he was sleeping? Don't people die from pneumonia? Why did I wait so long to take him to the doctor?

I finally was able to collect myself enough to tell the sales girl I didn't care about the hole, just finish ringing us up, hole and all! I took the girls over to my mom's house and left for the hospital. What was wrong with those people at the hospital? Who did they think they were making us wait so long? Didn't they know people die from pneumonia? Didn't they know his lungs could collapse AT ANY MOMENT!?!

At last they took us back. For more waiting. They did a chest x-ray and found out that he did indeed have pneumonia. They gave him a breathing treatment with more powerful stuff than we had been giving him at home. They watched his oxygen levels. They gave him a steroid and an antibiotic. Finally they deemed him stable enough to go home.

He has been like a new kid ever since. They told us that he would start to feel better in a few days, that it wouldn't be immediate. They said that he still needed to take it easy even after he started to feel better. They said that he would feel better, but that the pneumonia wouldn't clear up completely for about a month. So you can imagine how happy/freaked out I was the very next day when he was up riding Aubrey's new ripstick through the house. Happy because he felt good enough to get up and move around but freaked out because I didn't want him to overdo it. He has been getting better each day since then. Yesterday he was able to play our new Kinect for the first time since we got it on Christmas.

So I think I can say that our Month Long Sick House 'O Fun is coming to a close (knock on wood). Just in time for everyone to go back to school. It makes me sad that our whole break was spent sick. But I try not to think too much about it. I also try not to think too much about what kind of a mother would let her son linger on with an illness such as this and ruin his whole Christmas holiday. And almost die. We have one more day of break left and I intend to make the most of it. Without overdoing it, of course.

When I posted on Facebook that we had been at the hospital, My friend Coren said that we should consider taking trips to the ER out of our Christmas break tradition. Oh yeah. I had forgot all about last year's New Year's Eve visit to the ER in Dallas to get Addy's face sewn back up. I think in the future we will try to ditch that tradition.

Results Revealed - 2nd Annual Gingerbread House Contest

Thank you all for voting in our Gingerbread House Contest. Here are the results:

Best Overall:

This ended in a two way tie between this house

And this house

Most Creative:

This was also a tie, and I acted as tie breaker

Funniest:

Winter Wonderland:

Martha Stewartest:

Christmas House:

2nd Annual Gingerbread House Contest

Last year was our family's 1st annual Gingerbread House Contest. It took place in Dallas Texas with family members who were celebrating Christmas together before Sam and Teresa's wedding. My family missed out because we were in St. Louis celebrating Christmas with Steve's family before traveling to Dallas for the wedding. Apparently the contest was so much fun, we have decided to make it an annual event. Last Tuesday we held our contest. It was a fun night. We want YOU to vote on the houses and determine our winner. You can vote for the "Best Overall House" to the right of this blog post. After voting for the Best Overall, please vote for each house in the following categories:

Most Creative

Funniest

Winter Wonderland

Martha Stewartest

Christmas House

HOUSE #1

HOUSE #2

(the other side of this house has a person's name on it)



HOUSE #3

(the back of this house is eating the chickens in the yard)

HOUSE #4

HOUSE #5

Don't forget to vote on the side of the blog for the "Best Overall" and vote for each house in one of these categories: Most Creative, Funniest, Winter Wonderland, Martha Stewartest, Christmas House. Polls will be open until midnight Christmas Day. The winners will be announced on Monday, December 26th and the creators of each house will be revealed. Merry Christmas!