Merry Christmas

Last week, our children participated in the Christmas performance and Caboose was all too thrilled to be Joseph. Actually, he did very well as a stoic Joseph. He is such a serious kid and it's always a challenge to get a smile. See how much better he looks when he doesn't realize Mama Paparazzi is shooting him? LOL Here he is before he saw me with the camera:

And here is after - lol!!!

We had a wonderful Christmas celebrating with our family. I felt especially spoiled with my dh getting me an iMac - wow, I forgot how wonderful they are.

Here are a few pics from our sweet day together.

Eating our traditional Christmas breakfast - homemade crepes with Oregon raspberries. We have a new "adopted" son hanging out with us. He's in the Coast Guard and his parents were stationed with us in Maine years ago when we lived there. His parents are overseas and so we are "keeping an eye" on him.



I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and that you were able to enjoy special times with your loved ones.

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Reality Check

I made a cheesecake for Christmas and followed the instructions to a tee, but still ended up with a crack in the middle. So, when we were invited to a New Year's Eve party, I decided to try it again with a different baking method to see if the crack could be avoided. Woohoo - success!!



Until I had a little help from Caboose. It really was too good to be true. Heavy sigh:::::

Oh well, it will be topped with homemade loganberry sauce and will still have the same delicious taste. Reminds me of a verse I know - "Man looks at the outward appearance, but God looks at the heart". So true.

Happy New Years, everyone!

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Thanksgiving

We had a quiet Thanksgiving at home. Typically we have people over, but not this year. Even our eldest daughter was away, so that was sad. We will see her tomorrow, though.

But one topic of discussion came up. We are definitely food snobs. We love good food. We all decided that there is no better Thanksgiving meal than our own. Nobody has a better sweet potato casserole recipe than the one we got from Martha when we lived in GA. Nobody makes a better turkey than my husband who seems to have done away with the common problem of dry breast meat. This meal was so delicious. It was a combined effort: Tall dude made the stuffed mushrooms, dh always makes turkey/stuffing/gravy, mashed potatoes, Pearly made the sweet potato casserole, I made pumpkin pies and cranberry sauce.

Tall Dude's plate (stuffing is missing)

We tried a new cranberry sauce recipe this year: Cranberry Sauce Extraordinaire. When I saw my children shoveling it in their mouths like jello, I knew we had added a new tradition to our feast.

See the cranberry sauce cranberry sauce evidence? He was already asking for more at the point.

And this little boy decided the cranberry sauce made a nice addition to the sweet potato casserole.

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Sweetness

Walking on the patches of grass/weeds/bare spots is not such an easy task for a new walker. I love to see big 4-yr old brother helping our new little walking boy.

Bye-bye "baby" PJ and life as we knew it. It feels very strange getting rid of baby things instead of putting them in boxes on the shelf. Very . . . . weird . . . . . . after having seven children. Very bittersweet. I think I shall go have a good cry.

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Happy Resurrection Day

Not much crafting going on. Still working on the house. The portable storage unit was removed today so I'm busy unpacking lots and lots of boxes and we're having company for Easter dinner tomorrow. That should motivate me to get it done!

Pearly went to a friend's house and worked on decorating the little Easter lamb cake. She's also been busy making Jello jiggler Easter eggs. We will have 15 children and 4 adults total - whew!

I would like to wish everyone a happy Easter.

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Christmas Bonus

Sometimes it's nice to have others in the family who pick up the camera. I found a treasure on my memory card this morning. Here's a picture of my 16-yr old son and me singing Christmas carols. It's a little dark, but that's exactly how it was. This year I'm directing a homeschool high school choir and he is in it. I love singing alto next to his bass voice. Makes a mom proud!

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Thanksgiving at Our Home

We had a rare treasure - a Thanksgiving all by ourselves. As much as we love having people over for Thanksgiving or going someplace else, it's an especially nice treat to work together as a family to prepare our special meal. The children helped with meal preparations and decorations and that is always a precious time together.

Our decorations always start with these little figurines I made probably in 1992:

Next, we have our favorite menu items - not necessarily ones that I had growing up, but ones collected from the various places we have lived during our 20+ years of marriage. Here's our favorite sweet potato casserole from my friend Martha in Georgia:

Dh always does the bird and stuffing and there are always little "helpers" gathered around testing samples.

Hugs are always a pleasant interruption. The pies can wait one more minute in the oven.

What it looks like at our dinner table minus baby and 19-yr old picture taker.

And we topped it off with pies. This year we had pumpkin and pecan pies. The pecan pie was especially good. I revised my favorite recipe by adding just a bit of semi-sweet chocolate chips. I think we have a new favorite.


We have much to be thankful for. Thank you, God for all your blessings to us! We hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving with your loved ones.

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Our Family's Christmas Celebration

Our Favorite Things at Christmas

Christmas Carolers

Our 15-yr old son pieced this table runner and Pearly-girl (11 yrs) machine quilted it. I will always treasure this table runner!

The children woke up around 7:30 a.m. and opened their stockings. The stockings were stuffed with all kinds of snacks (nuts, mango, gum, corn nuts, hot chocolate or mocha packages, little gifts, juice boxes, etc). While the children were snacking and opening their stocking gifts, dh and I slept in. Dh woke up a little later and prepared our special tradition of crepes for Christmas morning breakfast.

Pearly lighting the candles for Christmas breakfast.

Dh's homemade crepes

This is what we look forward to each year!

The crepes are filled with cream cheese and cherries, topped with a drizzling of powdered sugar.

After a delicious breakfast, we sat around while Papa read the Christmas story from the children's Bible.


And, of course, could a day ever be complete without rough-housing with Papa? Not with 4 boys!



Finally by the time the Christmas story is over, it's about noon and time to open gifts. Here's one happy camper.

The rest of the day was spent playing with our new Christmas toys. Later, dh made a superb standing rib roast, mashed potatoes/gravy, peas, etc. It was out of this world. Dh was wonderful - he did all the cooking which gave me the freedom to take care of my nearly 37-wk pregnant body that is not doing so well lately! My dh is a keeper!

Merry Christmas to all of our friends and family!

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