Acivities in December

Decembers are so full of activities its almost impossible not to get behind on updates. This will be a bit of a picture dump and brief explanations so I can get to Christmas Day.
First set of pictures: Weston and I playing for the Lindon Elementary Orchestra concert, we had fun learning "Twas the Night Before Christmas" and "Rest ye merry Rock ye very" for this concert. Weston is getting much better at accompanying on the piano.

Fiora's good friend Kimee Puckett

 Sav taking selfies and making holiday nail art.

Weston had a Cold Turkey gym meet, a meet where judges come in and they go through all the events, but they don't have a formal warm up or awards, its kind of a practice meet to see where they are before the real meets start in January. He still did very well I thought. We were not in a good position to see all the events, but I was close for Parallel bars so I'll add that video, he scored a 9.9.

Weston with his team waiting his turn for the P bars

 We visited the Live Nativity in Alpine this year with our friends the Heims. It wasn't too cold thankfully but it was super crowded!  It was fun to see all the animals and people dressed up like Romans and Hebrews. Took me a minute to figure out the flash made the pictures purple/worse.

 

 I made some fun desserts this month, pies and tarts and pistachio covered chocolates, they have turned out pretty good, and I've tried to shared when I had extras.
 

Fiora made a 3D model of a plant cell for her class, out of bread and candy. I thought it was very clever. The day it was due she had a problem with her CRT lenses and couldn't open her eyes, so we went to the eye doctor instead of school, but the next day her teacher was very impressed.

 We also had a ward Christmas party, celebrated my sister Holly's birthday, and Jared and Justin Schauers hosted a business Christmas dinner which was very nice, but I don't have any pictures of those events.

Holidays

I am so GRATEFUL this holiday season! Here are a couple pictures from our wonderful thanksgiving feast with the Barrett family. Heidi and Gabe treated us to a short lip sync concert after we ate, the subject of which was a parody of the gut pain I experienced in Jerusalem.  It was very hilarious and I laughed a lot!  Wish I could get Jared to get up and dance like Gabe does, ha ha. So grateful for family, I hit the jackpot with the best parents and siblings in the whole world.

Dad never leaves the kitchen, always cleaning something

Carpenter family lip syncers

Jared in a post-thanksgiving feast coma

selfies with Great grandma Rappleye!

I made another gingerbread house this year. It took me seven days to complete, my kitchen was a chaotic art studio all that time, and a lot of other things got put on the back burner for that week.  Let me tell you putting up the christmas decorations seemed like a breeze compared to the work this gingerbread house required. But its fun to create and be artistic once in a while.

Step 1: Creating the floor plan and baking the gingerbread panels

Step two: decorating the panels

Step 3: making frosting and erecting the walls

Step 4: accessorizing the interior base floor

I later added a little clear straw with frosting that looked like a cup of milk, it was too cute!

Step 5: Taping lights to the ceiling/floor divider and erecting second floor walls

Step 6: decorating interior of upper floor

Step 7: cutting roof panels, taping lights to ceiling, frosting roof, adding chimney

.Step 8: finishing touches to exterior, frost and decorate the yard

All done! (Fiora's and Weston's ginberbread house on sides)

The kids just love this whole process and have to make a little house of their own while I do my big one, that really added a lot of work to my load since I had to make three more floor plans and panels and frosting for them, but I loved their enthusiasm.  I was pretty burnt out of gingerbreading by the end!  Here are a few pictures of Savanna's ginger bread house and her preferred art form--fingernail polishing.

Savanna doing holiday nail art!

Isn't that a cute snow man she made!

November

What happened to November? Well we survived it at any rate. Let's see if I can remember what happened.
Savanna had to see her school play "Once upon a mattress" and her good friend Aislyn had a part in it so it was fun to go see. Sav tried out but didn't make it, but she was a very happy and supportive friend despite this, in fact its been a long time since I've seen her as enthusiastic and cheerful as she was that night!

 Savanna also had young women's in excellence, a night of celebrating what the young women have accomplished in personal progress throughout the year. Sav had done a project over the summer but none of the value experiences, but was very humble on the day of the program to get out her journal and finish the value experiences so she could earn her Knowledge award.  She even made some sugar free gluten free bread for her display.

 Savanna gets a hold of my phone once in a while and gets some selfies taken. I don't even remember where we were going when she took the ones in the car, oh yes I do, we went to Kneaders to meet my parents to get tickets to a play at BYU.  Jared and I got to see "Our Town" and it was an excellent play with a great message and it woke me up to appreciating my life. I get so busy surviving I forget to live!  I vowed after seeing it that I would not ruin one more today by worrying about tomorrow. So far I've been able to keep the challenge, and its a nice way to live, we'll see how long I can keep it up.

 Weston, Fiora, Savanna, and Jared took a day trip down to Gunnison to see Grandpa Neil and Grandma Bonnie, Jared and Weston hauled some wood and helped take down a tree and the girls played games and watched movies. I spent the day at home catching up on some much neglected housework and started this year's gingerbread house, I worked a little too hard, that night my adrenaline level was so high I couldn't sleep.

At it again, lots of work, but lots of fun!

Weston won 2nd place at the Turkey Trot (1 mile race) at his school this week. He has some pretty good endurance to sprint that long. He won a 20 lbs turkey and was totally wiped out the rest of the day. Way to go Weston!

This turned out great...non sweet gluten free Strawberry coffee cake!

P.S. Thank you to all who offered prayers on my behalf this month as I've been back to the doctor for some more tests to try and determine why I can't seem to absorb my food. Nothing has been found conclusively yet, but I will write a full update if /when we ever find out why I'm bloated after every meal, can't gain weight, get nauseous when I eat and when I'm hungry, and have weird little ulcers and inflammation in my duodenum. I'm functioning fine despite it, ever sick but never dying! :)