Miscellaneous Christmas Activities

One of our favorite family Christmas traditions is going to the Festival of Lights. One of our local cities decorates a park with all kinds of lights and people can drive through and see them. They have all kinds of scenes and each year it is fun to see the different ways they set them up and the new things they have added. 

One of the favorite parts for the kids is getting out of their car seats and sitting up front with us to see the lights. You drive through the park very slowly and the kids can see so much more if they are able to get up and see out. Don't let this picture fool you. Leah was having a great time, she just didn't want to smile for the picture. Corbin was more than happy to grin with his chocolate covered smile!

In the middle of December, Leah had her Christmas dance recital. The girls' costumes didn't get ordered in time, so all of the girls got to wear pajamas as their costume. Leah's class did a dance to a song called "Christmas Sarajevo." It sounded like a supped up version of "Carol of the Bells." She did a great job!! And I thought her class did the best in the entire "little kids" program. She is dancing with Kylie and Millie again this year, but I didn't get a picture of the three of them together. I wish I would have.

Leah had a lot of fans come to see her dance. Here she is with some of them. One of her good friends, McKay, came to see her dance. She was really excited about that.

We weren't sure if Grandma Leslie would be able to make it, but she did and she brought Jackson along too.

Leah and Corbin were both especially excited that Grandpa Tucker came. (Oh, and Grandma Tucker was there too.)

Another fun tradition is going to a Gingerbread Decorating Party at our neighbors' house. Leah always loves decorating her gingerbread cookie.

Corbin's favorite part was picking off all the decorations and eating them.

After decorating her cookie, Leah insisted that her dad would want a cookie so she volunteered to decorate it for him. She did it all on her own. Not too shabby!

Leah's preschool class had a "Polar Express" Christmas party. So all the kids got to come to school in their pajamas. I went to help with the Christmas party that day. It was really fun to see Leah in her classroom setting. It also gave me an even greater appreciation for her teacher. She is so patient and kind with the kids. She had a great party planned for them and the kids seemed to have a great time. They ended the day with a Christmas program where they performed all the Christmas songs they had been practicing over the past several weeks.

The Millers invited us to join in their family Christmas party. They had invited Santa to come visit with the kids. After the kids all had a chance to sit on his lap, he read them a story about how the birth of Christ was the real reason for the Christmas season. Our kids refused to sit on Santa's lap, but they were willing to accept his candy cane and listen to his story though.

After the story was over, we were able to convince them to take a family picture with Santa as long as they didn't have to get too close to him. Leah also wanted to get a picture of her and Kylie with Santa.

I'm sure we did a lot of other fun Christmas things, but this is all I have pictures of and all I can remember right now. December is such a fun month with so many great things to do to celebrate!

My Birthday

When December rolled around, it was time for another birthday for me. I love having my birthday at Christmas time. We weren't sure what to do to celebrate. I knew I wanted to go out to eat with Ross, but we couldn't think of anything else to do. I wanted to do something festive, but I had a hard time finding anything that was happening the night of my birthday. Then on the afternoon of my birthday I found out about a Christmas light river cruise near us, so we went to check it out. They took us down a little section of the river that was all decorated with Christmas lights. We even got a visit from Santa who happened to be rowing by on a canoe. I thought it was really fun. Here's some pictures I took on the river cruise.

Afterwards, we went out for dinner. And as we were leaving the restaurant we ran into a couple of my dear friends that I served with in young womens, Debbie and Janice. They have since moved from the ward so that they could take care of their aging parents. But I have missed them a lot and it was the highlight of my birthday to see and visit with them. Don't you just love "divinely arranged" coincidences?! 

It was so nice to have a night out without the kids (Ross's mom was taking care of them for us). But after a stop at Wal-mart to pick up a few things, we decided that it was probably time to go rescue Ross's mom from our two hooligans.  

My kids love playing with the cameras whenever they come out. So here's a few pictures we took that night after I opened up my birthday cards. 

So I decided that I wanted to wait and find out the gender of baby #3 as part of my birthday celebration. When we went to the ultrasound, everything looked great. When they got down to checking things out in the lower body area, they had us turn away so we wouldn't accidently see anything. And when we were done, they put the picture of the baby's gender in an envelope so that it could stay a secret until we were ready to reveal.

I asked my friend and neighbor, Bonnie, to make a cake for my birthday party we had planned for a couple days after my actual birthday that would reveal the gender of our baby. That way it would be a surprise, even for us. So the day before my "pretend" birthday as Leah called it, Bonnie picked up the sealed envelope and then I anxiously waited. 

This was what the cake looked like when she brought it over for the party. Didn't she do a great job!

After the guests arrived we gathered around so we could cut into the cake to find out if the inside was blue or pink.

And here we are revealing the first slice of PINK cake! It's a girl!! I was fully expecting the cake to be blue, even though in my heart I wanted it to be pink. So seeing that it was indeed going to be a girl made the cake all the more sweeter. (But for the record, I would have been happy having a boy too.) But now we get to put our abundance of baby girl clothes and such to good use again! We also have to try to come up with some girl names that we like. I was totally thinking in boy mode and definitely had more boy names than girl ones in mind at that time. 

By the way, the cake tasted as good at it looked. I still get people commenting on how great the cake was. Bonnie is a baking genius and I knew she would do a great job! Overall, I'd say this was a fun and very memorable birthday. Thank you again to everyone who had a hand in making this time special for me!

Putnam Family Christmas Party

The Saturday after Thanksgiving we had our annual Putnam Christmas party. I always enjoy getting together with my Putnam family and this party has been a yearly tradition for as long as I can remember.

Thanksgiving weekend must really wipe Leah out because she falls asleep waiting for Santa to come every year at this Christmas party. So I had to make sure I got yet another picture of her asleep at the party. 

Here's a picture of Corbin getting an up close meeting with Santa when he came in. I think the look on his face is priceless.

And here's a picture of those in my immediate family who were able to be there. My brother, Clayton, and his family weren't able to make it. But the rest of us were there.

Leah is smiling in this picture, but in reality she was really nervous about talking to Santa. It took quite a bit of coaxing to get her to at least stand by him for a picture. I think she did as least tell him what she wanted. And Corbin wasn't interested in sitting on Santa's lap at all!

Here's a picture of my mom sitting on Santa's lap to show the kids that it is not scary at all.

Corbin was pretty excited about the little ball he got for a present.

And Leah loves puzzles, so she was pretty excited about her present too.

Here's a picture of my grandparents sitting with Santa. It is such a blessing to have both of them here for another year. However, they had both taken falls within a couple weeks before this picture was taken. If you were able to look close enough at them you'd probably see how bruised up they are. My grandma still had stitches in her head from her fall. But Grandpa was just bruised up quite a bit on his arm. They are both getting really unstable but they are still really independent. It makes me worry a lot about them. But I'm glad that they are both still with us. At 96 and 86 years old, that's pretty remarkable.

Here's a little family selfie just for fun!

After all the kids had a chance to sit on Santa's lap, they all came up with Grandpa and Grandma to sing a couple Christmas songs with Santa. Here's Leah singing with her cousins, Kaylynn and Cameron.

Having a pinata is another long-time tradition for this party. Corbin wasn't sure what to do at first, but it didn't take long for him to catch on to using a bat to hit something.

Leah was excited to take her turn. She had helped us fill the pinatas the night before, so she knew what kind of fun things were in there.

After all the little kids had a turn hitting the first pinata, it was still in tact. So my aunt had Ross put on a blindfold and take a turn whacking at it. It took him a few swings, but he finally got it busted open.

Overall, it was a fun party and of course was over too soon. The turn out for the party was impressive. Our family is up to over 160 members now and I think there were about 140 people there that day (some were visitors that other family members had brought to the party). But there were still a lot of us there, much more than usual. I'm so glad we have such a big fun family. It's just too bad that we don't get to see each other very often any more.

November 2014

Boy do I have a lot of catching up to do! November seems like it was so long ago. Overall it was pretty uneventful, but here's a few highlights of the month.

Toward the beginning of November, I took Leah of see Disney on Ice along with a few other family members. They showcased Cars, The Little Mermaid, Tinkerbell, and Toy Story 3. Leah has really been into Tinkerbell lately, so she really loved that part. And of course, seeing Mickey Mouse is always a favorite. During the intermission, her Aunt MoMo spoiled her and bought her a snow cone in a Tinkerbell cup.

Here's some of the other little "Princesses" that went with us. It looks like Makynlee and Kenzie got spoiled with snow cones too.

We got invited to join our neighbors' preschool group on their field trip to the BYU Bean Museum. The Bean Museum is a natural history museum that is full of stuffed animals (real ones, not toys). It was recently renovated and looks really cool. Our neighbor had signed up for a special class where they taught the kids about a few different animals and brought out some for them to get a closer look at. A few of them were alive and a couple of them were stuffed. Here's a picture of Leah touching a live lizard. I didn't think she would, but she did okay with it. She wasn't as interested in petting the live snake.

The stuffed penguin was a favorite with all the kids. Even I was willing to pet the penguin. It was pretty cool to see one up that close even if it wasn't alive anymore.

We got out our turkey from last year and all through the month we added feathers to him. Each night with our "scripture, song and prayer" we would each share something we were grateful for that happened that day. Then we would write it on a feather and add it to our turkey. By the end of the month, he looked nice and full of things we were grateful for. I really like this tradition because it helps us really think about how blessed we are. And it is fun to hear some of the simple and/or interesting things that Leah would share. Her feathers almost always had something to do with people in her life, like getting to play with a friend or cousin, going to Grandpa's house or making a new friend at school. She is definitely in a stage of life where she is very socially driven. For Corbin, we would just think of something that he seemed to really enjoy that day and write it down.

To celebrate Thanksgiving, we had our usual Thanksgiving dinner on the Sunday before with my family and then went to Ross's mom's for Thanksgiving day with our Leslie family. And as it worked out, we were able to stay the night at her house which was very helpful since my ultrasound was scheduled for the next day and we were able to leave the kids there while we went to the appointment. (I'll post more about that later.)

So there's our November in a nutshell. Time flies.