Christmas Traditions

Christmas is by far my most favorite time of the year!  There are so many things that we do together as a family that make it special to me. 

 

 

Decorating the House

We almost always decorate our house for Christmas the day after Thanksgiving.  This year we had to make a little change.  Clayton needed to fly out to California for his Uncle Clint's funeral the day after Thanksgiving so we started decorating the day before.  We turn on Christmas music and pull out all of our Christmas boxes from storage.  We then completely mess up our house trying to find a place for everything.  The kids love getting out all the decorations (especially all the kid friendly nativities) and decorating the tree with their special ornaments.  I love the feeling of our house after all the decorations are put up, the house is cleaned up, and the only lights on are those from the Christmas tree.

 

 

 

 

Festival of Trees

When I was younger, I was in my 5^th/6^th grade choir and we would always perform at Christmas time at the Festival of Trees.  This is where my love for it began.  I love looking at all the trees and feeling all the love that people have for others.  As I have gotten older (and lost two babies) I am not able to look at all the pictures of little babies with tubes or stories of children struggling with illness without tearing up.  I now have to avoid looking at some but I still feel so much love as we look at the trees.  One of Clayton’s favorite parts of the festival is the scones that they sell.  We always stop and buy a few. 

 

 

Child Family Christmas Party

Each year we have a Christmas party with my dad’s side of the family.  This is such a fun time to catch up with all the cousins that we don’t see as often as we used to.  For as long as I can remember we have acted out the nativity.  It is so fun to now see our own kids as part of this tradition.  We also have a visit from Santa’s Elf.  Growing up my grandpa (my dad’s dad) would dress up as Santa for our Christmas parties.  Now that he is gone, my dad has accepted that job.  The kids all love getting a gift from the big red bag, which is actually now two big red bags. 

 

Is this not the cutest cow you have ever seen? 

 

 
Zoolights     

We love the zoo!  At Christmas time the zoo is decorated with lights everywhere.  We bundle up and meet Grandma, Grandpa and our cousins there.  It is so fun to walk around and see all the lights and decorations and spend time together as a family.  This year we were lucky that is wasn’t as cold as it normally is.

 

 

 

Temple Square

I guess we just love Christmas lights.  We try to make it to downtown Salt Lake to see the lights on Temple Square.  We bundle up and walk through the temple grounds looking at all the beautiful lights and nativities that depict our Savior’s birth.  This year we were lucky enough to get tickets to the Mormon Tabernacle Christmas Performance.  Their special guests this year was the Muppets and the guy who voices Prince Hans in Frozen.  Because of this, children were allowed to attend.  Our kids loved it.  It was so fun to watch Ben’s face as he was watching the performance.  People around us kept looking at him because he was so cute and excited.   

 

 

Letters to Santa and Reindeer

After our kids wrote letters to Santa, we went to Thanksgiving Point to mail them.  They had a special Santa mailbox there.  We always go and see the reindeer there so we decided to just mail our letters there too.  And we are so glad we did.  There is a sign by the mailbox that says to include your return address in case Santa has a question with your letter.  A few days after mailing our letters, each kid got a personal letter from Santa in the mail and mom and dad got the kids letters mailed back to us so that we could save them.  They were so happy to get their letters.  They reread them many times. 

 

 

Cookie Day

We always have a cookie day with Grandma before Christmas so that the kids can make some cookies to leave for Santa.  My mom is so great to help all 6 grandchildren roll out the dough, cut the shapes, bake and decorate the cookies.  Her kitchen is covered in flour by the end but she loves it. 

 

 

Desert Star

This is the one thing we do each Christmas without our kids.  My family has been going to Desert Star (a musical dinner theatre) every Christmas for a long time.  We have a great time booing and cheering along with the show.

 

A date night! 

 

Lego Christmas Village

This year a new tradition started in our family.  Clayton has always wanted a Christmas village.  Earlier this year, he decided a Lego one would be the best because of the kids and his love of Legos.  He ordered all the past pieces and we are now up to date with what is available and hope to add to our collection every year.  It was fun to see how excited Ben and London were to help build and then play with the final creations.

 

 

Christmas Sing

Another new tradition that began this year was going to the school and watching Ben’s Christmas Sing.  He was super excited to sing for us and he was the cutest one there…in my opinion.

 

 

Gingerbread House

The kids saw this kit at the store and wanted to build a gingerbread house.  We bought it and the kids and Dad did a great job at building it. 

 

 

Visiting Santa

We were lucky this year because Clayton’s sister Helen had her store grand opening and had Santa visit.  Our kids are a little nervous around Santa (and all new people) but they both did a great job…as long as dad was right there with them.  This Santa was great too.  He took time to really talk with each kid.

    

 

 

This Christmas season was amazing.  I love all the things that we do to celebrate! 

 

(Christmas Eve and Christmas Day posts will be coming soon.) 

 

Lego Binders

Ben is a lucky boy as he has inherited many many Legos from my own childhood.

 

A few years back we separated all the different "types" into different boxes. There is a box for Pirate Legos, one for Castle, Star Wars, City, etc. The instructions were just floating in these boxes or in zip locks with the hope that they would be safe. However Ben was still too young to follow most of them by himself. So we eventually threw them all in some page protectors in one big binder.

 

Well, he's older now and we wanted him to have better access to the instructions. So we decided to make binders for the different boxes. The results was this:

 

 

The "Friends" one is for London and her Legos, there are not many pages yet, but she'll get there.

Here's the cover of her binder:

 

To make these I searched for images online and downloaded them. I would search for example - "Lego Logo" to get the red Lego image and then I searched for "Lego Darth Vader Minifigure" to get the image of Darth Vader. I also grabbed images off of Lego's website. Then in Microsoft Word I created a page with columns and placed the images. I used this site to create the words using the Lego font. (link) You type all Caps what you want and then you can right click the page and save the image to insert into Word.

 

 I uploaded my Word documents here so you can download and use if you would like.

 

Lego Binder Documents (link)

 

(you will also find the Duplo pages I made to go into that binder, most Duplo sets don't come with instructions so we found pictures of the different sets we have and made pages to put into the binder so when they want Mom to build something she can remember what it was)

 

 You will want to download the files and then open in Word on your computer to edit and swap out pictures. In Word you can crop the pictures and then resize them to be the width of your columns. We used one inch binders so my columns are one inch wide. (The City binder is bigger, but I just left the print as one inch, you could increase the column width if  you wanted). Also, I printed the spines on card stock to make it easier to insert into the binders.

 

 We used three different size page protectors. Full page, and then photo pages that have 3 pockets for 4x6 photos - Like this:

 

 

 Then many of the sets now come with instruction books that are 5 by 7 3/4 inches, so we found some pages that have two - 5x8 pockets. No stores carry them that we could find (coin shops might as they are made for currency), but you can get them on Amazon: 2 Pocket Currency Binder Pages (link).
 

 They turned out nice - and with Ben only being 6 I am sure this is just the beginning.

 

Now we are going through the boxes and re-separating as needed and finding out if we need to order any missing pieces.

 

After Ben went to bed the other nights I built all the Star Wars sets and set them up for him.

Yes - I still love playing with Legos myself!

 

 

 

 

 

Hoping to Adopt!

As many of you know we are hoping to adopt. Adoption has always been a part of both our lives. Lisa and myself both have siblings that became part of our families through adoption. We also have cousins and other family members that were adopted. With this we have talked about adopting since the beginning of our marriage and then due to events we have had over the last couple years we have decided that growing our family through adoption is the path for us. We are hoping to find a little brother or sister for Ben and London. Thanks for the support we have received from so many related to this. If you are a birth parent looking to place or know of someone that is, we'd love to be considered and are happy to answer any questions you might have about us. You can find a short bio about each of us at www.happyinutah.com. Our email is theguys@happyinutah.com.

Christmas Trees and Home Depot

We went to Home Depot again yesterday so the kids could build something. We love their Kids Workshops! Yesterday it was holiday yard decorations. Not a lot of "building", but the kids had fun with the stickers they provided so they could create faces on them.

Ben hammering his gingerbread boy onto one of the yard stakes.

London showing us she can smile just like her snowflake.

Loving their Home Depot aprons as they hold their finished creations.

Another fun things about Home Depot is they give the kids a pin each time they finish a project. Yesterday they had a special pin for kids that have done 10 projects which we have, so that was awesome for Ben and London.

 After dinner last night I was able to finally finish some Christmas trees for our porch. The kids thought it would be fun to use their new Home Depot creations for ornaments on one of the trees. Then I made some light bulbs for the other one. I think they turned about good.

I made them out of an old fence we had.

Finished tree with the kid's Home Depot creations.

The 2nd tree with the light bulbs I made and painted.

The 2nd tree once moved outside.

I love Christmas!!

STOP!

So last week I was driving up to my in-laws and was lucky enough to be able to meet one of American Fork's fine Police Officers. I rolled past a stop sign.

Totally my fault, not trying to argue that point. It was as a T-intersection and I was turning right and was the only car in the intersection, but never the less, I choose to treat the sign more like a Yield than a Stop. Where my real complaint is - why are some traffic laws enforced and others totally ignored. After this friendly chat with the officer I tried to obey all traffic laws for the rest of that day. However, there are two sections of Interstate 15 where you are transitioning to the 215 that the speed limit drops to 50 MPH. If you actually slow down to 50 MPH you will however most likely be rear ended by cars still going 70+. This happens both getting on to 215 from the 15 and the again getting on I-15 from the 215. Is this ever monitored? And if not shouldn't it be, or at least reviewed to see if the 50 MPH really is what it should be marked as.

Other complaint - with everything being on computers these days why do I have to wait a week before I can call the police station to get information on my ticket, like cost and traffic school registration. I could understand a one day delay because they might need to sync things at night, but a whole week?!

Thank You Notes

I came back from vacation last week to find a thank you note sitting on my desk keyboard. It was a hand written note (written by a co-worker's wife) thanking me for thinking of them when getting rid of Ben's old bike. It was no big deal, we had recently given Ben a bigger bike and were going to get rid of his smaller bike - it would have ended up at DI. Instead I found out a co-worker had a son almost 3 years old so asked if he wanted it and gave it to him. I was glad to do it. Getting the thank you note was awesome - I wish I did things like that. I need to be better at just saying thank you - my new goal is to try and start hand writing thank you notes. I added some to my Amazon.com wish list so I will remember to actually get some.

I hope you will do that same - say please, remember the thank you and for those real special times write a hand written note. It will make you happier and I promise it will make the recipient of the note happier too - it's like giving away smiles.

Missing Mom

I don't know if it's because I don't feel good, or if it's because I feel like I have fallen off the wagon related to getting healthy (have not eaten good in 2 weeks) but I'm a little emotional today. I saw something today and not sure why but it really made me think of my Mom and how much I wish I could talk with her and see her. Nothing like crying a little inside your office at work.