Tanner's Birthday

Tanner's birthday started off with giving his cousin Miles a bottle.

He has always wanted an outdoor birthday party like at the pool or something, but when your birthday is at the end of December that isn't a party anyone wants to go to.  So we rented an indoor soccer field and he invited 12 friends and cousins to come play flag football.  His uncle Scott and I were the quarterbacks and the kids just ran around shouting for us to throw them the ball.   At least that was the play I called.

Scott used a little more strategy and his team seemed to get to the end zone more often.

Next came my favorite part: Costco Cake!  

Tanner got a lot of cool gifts from his friends but the one that really stood out was the Sacramento Kings Jimmer t-shirt.

He had a great day, and we were so glad to be able to have so many family members in town to help celebrate.  

Christmas

The whole Christmas season was really fun this year.  All the kids are at fun ages and were really excited about the whole thing.  We have a couple of advent/countdown calendars and they were super excited to change those each day.

One of my favorite traditions of the last couple of years in Christopher Pop-in-kins.  He first visited our house last year and is so much fun.  He is one of Santa's elves but he has a special assignment to help watch children to make sure they are being good.  He arrives shortly after Thanksgiving and stays until just before Christmas.  Each night he moves to a different place in the house so he can watch and make sure the children are staying on the nice list.  All the kids loved coming down each morning to look for where he was sitting that day.  This picture was one of my favorites, sitting in the fruit basket holding jalapeños!

 By the time Christmas Eve arrived, we were lucky to have all the Wilson's home except for Don and Justin.  Justin came Christmas day.  We missed not having Don here.  But we had 16 cousins from 4 months to 14.  It was chaotic, but super fun.

Someone rented a karaoke machine and that was part of the Christmas Eve fun.

 Rylee really liked someone's voice!

After the singing and dinner, we read the Christmas story and exchanged a few gifts.  In my family growing up, we would draw names and we would get to open that gift on Christmas Eve.  That tradition has continued.

 Once we got back to our house, we opened our new jammies and made some reindeer food.  Each of the kids took a turn throwing some reindeer food.  

 Everyone was really excited for Christmas!!  Cute jammies, huh?

 Marc and I were up until nearly 1 am wrapping the last of their presents.  A few of our kids had been sick and Tanner and Ella were on antibiotics for strep throat.  Around 3 am Ella came in saying she wasn't feeling well so I let her sleep on the floor next to our bed.  Then around 4:00, Sarah came in with the same complaint so I told her the same thing I told Ella.  At 5:30, Tanner came and and started jumping on our bed saying, 'It's Christmas!  It's Christmas!"  To which I calmly replied, yes, but your sisters aren't up.  Mary at least was still asleep in her bed.  Within about 10 minutes everyone was up so our Christmas morning started really early....

 Tanner and Ella each had one enormous present from Santa, but it turns our Santa had been a little tricky in his wrapping.  He had wrapped 5 or 6 boxes and nested them inside each other until they got to their real present.  They thought it was pretty fun!

The rest of the day is picture-less.  Marc and I were too tired to think about pictures.  We had pull-aparts and eggs and grandma's house for breakfast and then went to church with my parents and all the siblings families.  We came home and cleaned up a little of the mess and thought about going back to my parents around 2:30, but we made the mistake of sitting down and decided we needed a nap instead.  We finished off the day with dinner with the family.

It was a great Christmas!

excuses...

This year, I resolve to be a better blogger.

Here are a few pics of what has been going on since our last blog post.

Shortly after Thanksgiving, Marc and my brother Kevin took the kids to Chicago to see the BYU Basketball team play in a tournament.  On the way, they stopped at the Triple XXX family diner.

 Ella had a jump rope workshop in early December.  It was three days of hard work.  We actually hosted three of the staff that came in from other places which added to the fun.  Ella is all the way in the back of this picture.

 We put our shoes out for Saint Nicholas...not sure why that picture is upside down!

 We hosted a gingerbread house party with our friends.  It was a huge success and we hope to make it an annual event.

 This house was quite the masterpiece.  It had a skating rink and the beginnings of  a snowman with the grass showing through where the snowball had rolled..

 Of course there had to be some BYU decorations.  The other house has SC for Santa Claus.  We  cut out little gingerbread people so everyone could put their families around their houses!

 Our trusty dryer, that I bought used nine years ago, finally decided to give us some trouble.  It was unusable for ten days!  We washed the clothes here and then shuttled them over to my parent's house to dry.  Sometimes I just left them there and they came back folded!  I debated about fixing it at all!  This is the laundry pile just in the master bath at the end of the ordeal.  The kid's pile was just as big!

 And in the midst of all the Christmas chaos and busyness, we decided to go from this.....

 ...to this.

 I did not think through what it would be like to do a home improvement project during the holidays.  It's the pits.  On top of the shopping, decorating, baking, and party-going, we now had to choose paint and carpet and stain colors and nobs etc, etc, etc.... 

This will be the new office and we are excited with the result, even if the process was a bit painful.

We also had all of my siblings except for my older brother in town for Christmas and celebrated Tanner's 10th birthday, but those two events deserve their own posts...

This week Tanner's fourth grade class went to the Cincinnati Cyclones v. Toledo Walleye hockey game.  They offer a program called Hockey in Education.  At the breaks between the periods, they have educational spots on the jumbotron.  The one I actually listened to taught mean, median and mode using hockey scores.  It was interesting.  

I arrived late, but found Tanner easily.  Thank you to his teachers for asking them all to wear their class shirt.  Unfortunately, he had already planted himself in a seat with no open seats around him.  I asked him to come sit with me and I thought he was following me back up, but when I sat down several rows up, he hadn't moved.  So I spent $10 to park, $13 to get into the game and probably 45 minutes of driving to watch a game that I don't even understand all by myself....

 Our neighborhood is only about eight years old and our house is only three years old.   We are surrounded by farmland, so I don't think there were a lot of trees here to begin with.  Fall is disappointing for the kids because there really are no leaves to rake (yes, thank you, I got enough of that in Toledo!).  The kids were off of school yesterday so we headed over to grandma's to see if we could scrape together a leaf pile to jump in.

It was sunny but pretty chilly outside but some of the kids worked pretty well (they are pictured!).

 Tanner practiced his rake guitar.

 When we were done, there wasn't much of a pile.   Tanner decided to lay in it!

For Brent and Diana....what we've been doing, in pictures.

Participating in the National Day of Service.  We raked leaves for some elderly folks around town.  The kids actually said they had fun!

 Visiting a local farm with our preschool class.

 Trying to carve pumpkins.  The carving tool we had broke halfway through and we never finished them!

 A little begging for candy.  It is a good thing we have a dress-up box because Mary was something different for each of the three costume-wearing occasions that we had.  Here she was a ballerina.  Belle also made an appearance as did a fairy.

 Traveling with the Comet Skippers jumprope team to North Carolina for a workshop.

 Walking to The Mason Veteran's Memorial with Tanner's fourth grade class.

 This quote made me a little misty-eyed.  In case you can't read it, it says, "Rest only in the knowledge that your grief, the grief of a parent or of a sibling, or that of a child, provides us the blanket of freedom and security which all of us sleep under so peaceably at night."

Thank you to all who serve.

 Going to bed too late!  Mary actually fell asleep eating a cookie!

 Casting 215 kids at the Mason Heights Carnival.

I think we got a picture of everyone on this post!

Toothless!

In August when we went to the dentist for checkups, they hygienist told Sarah that she had a loose tooth.  Since then she has been wiggling that thing with her tongue and yesterday at lunch she finally got it out. She popped it out on the table in front of her, got an excited look on her face and screamed, "This is AWESOME!"

Just as cute even without one tooth!

Today was Mary's first dance class.  She has been so excited.  We went and bought her shoes on Saturday (because of course none of the other three pairs we have in the house from her sisters fit her!) and she practically carried them with her all afternoon.  She wanted to take them to Tanner's football game, but I drew the line.  She woke up this morning and could hardly stand it until after lunch when it was time to go.  She was very sweet.

Marc said I should post this story so I will.

Sarah came home from school on Friday and told me that she saw her friend Jack in the hall and he had kissed her on the cheek.  We were talking about it on the way home from grandma's house last night telling her that boys could not kiss her until she is 32 at the earliest.  The kids were all laughing and teasing and then we heard Tanner from the back say, 'Oooo, Sarah, did you go wash your face?'

It made us laugh.