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