Playing Catch Up

The stockings were hung in the kitchen with care

Maren "helping"

The finished product

Charlie the elf

presents are fun to open

Little Miss Mischief

Life is just moving too fast for me lately. So, I'm taking President Uchtdorf's counsel and I'm slowing down. I've neglected my blog for a while, so it's time for a quick catch up. We had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We celebrated with my family and had a lot of fun. We had lots of yummy food to eat and had fun playing games with all of the kids. My nephews are at fun ages, and I thoroughly enjoyed just watching and listening to them. Two days later, we took down the fall decorations and put up all of the Christmas stuff. The kids love getting the tree out and decorating it. This year we put the tree on a table hoping to deter Maren from pulling it over. She can't pull it over, but the bottom branches are bare because she has pulled all of the ornaments off. Every year my parents give the kids a new ornament for the tree. This year Addy got a piano ornament, Sydnee got a crayon box ornament and Maren got an Elmo ornament. The girls love to place their special ornaments on the tree. As a family, we get an ornament every year from somewhere we have traveled too. We couldn't find an ornament on our last trip, so we will be creating our own with some pictures of our trip to Idaho. Ben went to St. Louis on a business trip for a week. He was helping to close the company office in St. Louis and Ben had to go take care of some stuff, mostly stuff I don't understand. While he was away, we had a special package arrive. Inside was Charlie, a little elf. Charlie watches the girls during the day and then reports back to Santa at night. Every morning he is in a different spot, the girls love to look for him before school. We also started on one of our favorite Christmas traditions. We read a Christmas/winter book every night after we read our scriptures. The girls love to take turns picking the book. Ben is back home and hopefully won't have to travel again for a long time. The girls are staying busy with school and I'm just staying busy with everything else. Maren is my little mischief maker and I am constantly finding her somewhere she shouldn't be. All in all, we are doing good and we're all happy. I have nothing to complain about. Now it's off to make dinner, help with homework, and teach the boy scouts CPR tonight. Then, I'm going to slow down.