Christmas Parade

Every year we go across the street to watch the Litchfield Park Christmas parade. It's a fun little parade with lots of old people in old cars, lots of little kids in Girl and Boy Scout uniforms, and a few High School bands. It is a fun activity. This year Spencer thought it was great that they throw candy to you. He loved that part. He would yell at them to throw him candy and would get mad that they couldn't hear him, but every piece he did get, he would open right there and stick it in his mouth. I eventually talked him into saving some for later so that he wouldn't get a tummy ache. Lily enjoys watching it, but could do without the noise. Siena still thinks it is fun to go in hopes of buying food and goods at the craft fair afterwards. We found some beautiful glass necklaces this year, but we have to save them for Christmas. They also have snow brought in from somewhere to play in (although it didn't arrive on time this year) and they have bouncy toys to play in. All in all, it is a fun place to be for a few hours on a Saturday every December.

Santa Sightings

Spencer and Lily have seen Santa quite a few times this holiday season. They saw one at Lily's school Christmas party, TWO at the Kiwanis Club Christmas party for Lily, and another one at the mall for Lily's field trip. Then we saw him at the Litchfield Park parade on Saturday. I hear he will be at our ward Christmas party, but we won't be there to see him. I wonder how many more times we will see him this year. That's 5 and still counting...

Here's a picture that Spencer made of him. It looks a lot like him, doesn't it?

Galveston Island Clothing Drive

Siena worked on her Young Women's 10-hour Good Works project by helping to sort and box up clothes to send to Galveston, TX. Apparently Hurricane Ivan washed away a lot down there so our Stake did a clothing drive for them. From the first picture you can see there were a lot of clothes. Those piles were only the men and women's clothes. There was another wall with children's clothes piled up that high, too. We worked long and hard. Siena was complemented by many people for how hard she was working. It made us feel good to do something to help others.
The next picture was how much we got done that night.
Then that weekend she finished up her project by helping to make 8 dozen cookies for the Airforce cookie drive. Their goal was to have 1,000 dozen cookies to give to the military for Christmas. The base is a big part of our community since it is less than 2 miles from our house, so we were glad to be a part of that.
I must say that I am very proud of Siena for working so hard to complete her goals. She is such good person and I enjoy spending time with her in doing such meaningful work.

Giggles

Lily had the giggles when she came home from school on Tuesday. Of course, she stopped as soon as I grabbed the camera, but then she got going again. Lily's giggles are so funny because she laughs so hard that it is sometimes a silent laugh and you wonder when she will take another breath. Then she laughs so hard that they turn into cries. Not happy, teary cries but unhappy, moaning cries. While she is laughing though, I laugh along with her. It's quite contagious.

It was dark in Paul's office, so it might be hard to see.

Turning Lemons into Lemonade

We have long awaited the day that our dwarf lemon tree would produce lemons. We began to think that even though it looked like a lemon tree and smelled like a lemon tree that maybe our barren little tree wasn't really a lemon tree. However, this last spring and summer after about four years of waiting, we noticed that it might actually produce something. Saturday, we had our first taste of the wonders of living in a warm climate (even though it happened to be the coldest day of our Fall season). The kids made some delicious lemonade. It was gone all too soon, but guess what? More were ripe today! So this afternoon Spencer and I made more. Even though this first year of production is small, we will probably have a hundred or more to enjoy. Looks like I had better look up some lemon recipes or we will be drinking lots of lemonade.

Look what else I saw in our yard. The cat scared it away before I could get anymore photos.

Family pictures

Every November we take family pictures to send out with our Christmas cards. This year I sent my cards out early with a picture of my kids. Generally, I like family pictures better, but the children's pictures were so cute, I decided that this year I could live without the family picture. However, my mom has been pleading for current pictures of the families of all her kids so she can frame them for her wall, so despite not really needing a family picture this year, I knew we had to do it.

Usually we are too cheap to have any professional to take our pictures so we do it ourselves. Every few years we invite friends to come with us so we can switch off- they can take ours and we can take theirs. But that usually takes so long that you end up going crazy, or losing the light, or having a kid throw a tantrum. So most of the time we just take a tripod and do it ourselves.

I don't know how most families are about getting pictures, but ours seems to be pretty difficult. I hate to give most of the blame to Lily, but she is the hardest person to get a good photo of. We have to take literally hundreds of photos to get one good one of her. She is always looking down, drooling, yawning, floppy, or throwing her hands around. Don't get me wrong, I don't get mad at her because I know she can't help it, but it is very distracting for everyone else. We are all talking to her, tickling her, wiping her mouth, readjusting her just to get her to look up by the time the timer goes click, but then we all end up being contorted.

We don't have a remote to the camera, so Paul runs back and forth sweating and running out of patience. He is always willing to take pictures, but I think he would prefer to pull his own teeth out with a pair of pliers, so that underlying tension is always there.

Siena tries hard to help, but usually ends up getting in an argument with Paul. Spencer is at the stage of cheesy smiles and playing around- which he then gets yelled at for not staying still.

I am juggling everyone's attitudes and trying to keep the peace, organizing where everyone should be, yelling at everyone to stay calm and smiling, making sure Lily's head is up and that my double chin is not showing. We are all worn out by the time Paul refuses to take another shot, but I'm still begging for more.

It is a good thing Paul knows how to photoshop anything, otherwise, you would know the real us! Every year he ends up having to switch heads on at least one of us. However, this year despite the switching of heads, it still isn't that great. But you get what you get and you don't throw a fit! At least no one got killed.

Which reminds me of when I was little. We were about to get our family picture taken when one of our dogs got run over. Is that right, Mom? Or did a hamster get squeezed to death? I can't remember exactly, but we were all bawling our eyes out. You can see in the picture that we all had red eyes, but I think we faked the smiles pretty well.

Now you see the real us. Here are a few of the 124 taken.

Picnic weather

Sometimes when you're in the house you forget about how nice a day it is outside. We watched a lot of TV and played too many PS3 games over the Thanksgiving break until I was sick of it. So we decided to go out and enjoy the outdoors. It's finally nice weather in AZ so we like to have picnics at the lake and play at the park. Last Saturday we took Paul's remote control sailboat out to lake and enjoyed a little bit of cool air and sunshine. Paul sailed his boat, Siena read a book, Spencer fed the ducks and the pigeons, and Lily and I enjoyed watching and participating in all of it. It was a great afternoon.