Joyfully Weary

We has such a good Christmas this year. I actually feel like we are still in the midst of it, Jer has until January 2nd off. Having him home is such a joy!  Everybody is happier when he's at home, and everything just feels slower and more peaceful. I wanted to share a few...ok maybe not a few... pictures of our Christmas. I'm also going to throw in some from the weekend we spent with Jer's family. You can see some pictures from the holiday celebration we had with my family here . The kids' favorite activity we did with Jer's family was building gingerbread houses. Some of the kiddos have celiac so we used gluten-free graham crackers . Each of the kiddos had their own tray to build a house, but Mini Man and Big Buddy decided to work together. They made a fort - it was really just a group of little boxes to dump candy aka weapons into. We packed a lot into the weekend. In addition to gingerbread houses we also went to see the Nutcracker, exchang...

This week the kids did a simple craft and made a nativity silhouette to hang on our windows.  The materials needed for this craft are: vellum, watercolors, a paintbrush, a glue-stick, scissors, and a nativity silhouette cut out of black construction paper. I found our silhouette through Google images and then Jer tweaked it a little bit and used a laser cutter to cut all the details - there is no way I would of been able to cut this out by hand.  😬 A simpler nativity would work just as well.  The first step to this craft is to paint the vellum. I cut the vellum a little bit larger than the nativity silhouette to make gluing easier. Vellum won't work for detailed paintings, but is great for skies, etc. Little Lady was the inspiration for this craft; she's currently very into painting sunrises and sunsets.  Once the vellum has dried, use a glue stick to attach your nativity. Then you can trim around the edges to make the final product look a bit nice...

This year, for my extended families Christmas get-together we rented cabins at a Backbone State Park in Iowa. Since both my sister Sarah and I have larger families it's become a bit cramped to host all of us in one house. This ended up being the perfect solution. The park was about midway between everyone's respective locations so the drive wasn't too bad. The park was beautiful and we were pleasantly surprised by the cabins. They were pretty inexpensive to rent so it was nice to find them bigger than we expected. They were clean and the furniture was comfortable; we really couldn't of asked for a better place to stay.  I should of taken more pictures of the cabin, but I  didn't really think about until we got home. I did, however, make sure to get some pictures of all the cousins.  My oldest niece is the sweetest...I hope my kids are the same way when they are teenagers. Jeremy and I would not have probably given in to the Hatchimal craze, but ...