Celebrating Christmas

This year we spend Christmas with my family in Orem again. It was lots of fun. Not surprisingly, Austin especially got spoiled with lots of gifts, particularly from my aunts and grandparents. His favorite gift from them was a train set and a car that also fits with the set. We are glad he likes it so much, but we are getting sort of sick of hearing the music and other noises it plays.

All our gifts to Austin this year were handmade except for a coat. He got a number puzzle and a couple new toy cars with a boy and girl to drive them.

I also spend countless hours of time this last year trying to make a quiet book. I have done very little sewing in my life, so it was quite a learning experience. Luckily I had some help, particularly with the zipper on the cover, from my former visiting teaching partner and neighbor down the street Jana Meecham. Some of the patterns were modified from those on imagineourlife.com, other ideas came from online pictures or my parents' old quiet book that I then made patterns for. The magic hat page was my original idea. I have other ideas and pages to make still, but haven't had time to complete them.

Since there are some who I know wanted to see how the quiet book turned out, here are more pictures of it:

Nate and I also received some very nice gifts. Nate gave me a combo belt/disc sander and tool box that I am excited about, and I gave Nate Spikeball and some disc golf frisbees.

Unfortunately, many of our plans for the past week have gone awry though. We intended to go down to Orem first thing in the morning on Christmas Eve, and then go snowshoeing with Ben. As things turned out though, we had to take our car into the shop Monday and didn't get it back until Tuesday afternoon. Thus there was no time for snowshoeing Tuesday.

We decided to go snowshoeing instead on Thursday and head back home later that afternoon. However, our car was acting funny as we drove up the canyon, and just before we reached Aspen Grove, our breaks locked up completely on us. We ended up spending a long time standing around making phone calls, and reserving a tow truck that couldn't get there for another couple hours. Then we tried to move the car again and found the breaks had unlocked, so we took the car into another shop in Springville. So much for the snowshoing though...

As it turned out, our car wasn't finished until sometime Friday afternoon. We waited around for it to get done Thursday to no avail. We had a ton to do at home, so my parents generously let us borrow a vehicle to drive home with.

We picked up our car Saturday while we were down in the Orem/Provo area again for a lunch with Nate's old roommates and for a party with Nate's extended family. While there we also got to meet our newest nephew Camden.

Camden

 

Ugly Christmas Sweater Party

Nate's boss at ATK hosted a Christmas party at his house on December 13th. Everyone was supposed to go wearing an ugly Christmas sweater, and the person with the "ugliest" won a little prize. We didn't have any Christmas sweaters, and we only found one woman's Christmas sweater at DI, so we improvised for Nate and Austin's sweaters. Nate used tee-shirt transfer paper and printed out pictures of the Grinch and the world's ugliest dog wearing Max's antler. After transferring them onto fabric and cutting them out, he had me sew them onto "sweaters" for Austin and him.

Here is the group with their various sweaters

Here we are with our sweaters

The winner was actually John, whose wife made his and her sweaters by attaching random Christmas items and decorations to plain sweaters. John's sweater featured Christmas dog toys in the front and a wreath with blinking Christmas lights in the back.

Thanksgiving Weekend

For Thanksgiving this year, we ate with Rebecca's grandmother's family like usual and then spent the night at her parents' house.  We added a meal with Melissa's, Daniel's, and Michael's families too since one thanksgiving meal usually just isn't big enough.  After hanging out at Melissa's we visited Michael's apartment in Provo and played this awesome game called Spike Ball.  It was just as much fun playing the game as it was watching the overly tired and loopy Austin laugh hysterically at everything we were doing.  We then headed to Orem for the night. 

 

 

The next day we played racquetball with Brian and Tom, then had lunch at 5-guys Burgers.  It's always fun to catch up with them.

 

After racquet ball we had dinner with the Peadens and went to the BYU museum of art to see the Sacred Gifts exhibit.  If you get a chance, you should definitely go see it.  I would recommend not spraining your ankle right before going though, and if you can leave your two-year old with someone else, that would also make it more enjoyable.

 

You might think our weekend ended there, but no.  On Sunday there were even more family gatherings!  We went to my nephew Oliver's baby blessing and had lunch with my family again, then on our way back from West Jordan, we stopped by Rebecca's Aunt Stephanie's house for Gramp's birthday dinner. 

 

In summary, we ate lots of huge meals, spent time with lots of family and friends and enjoyed almost every minute of the weekend.