Second Half of December

Our friends the Wilcox's have season's tickets to the BYU basketball games, plus the food tent vouchers, and they invited Scott and I to go to a game with them. At the dinner before the game I saw Sheri Dew! She's amazing, and I wanted to go talk to her but I couldn't think of anything to say, so I didn't. Looking back I would've asked her about her morning routine :). 

And Scott saw this guy crouching behind us that he thinks is pretty cool. His name is Chad Lewis.

Thanks Brian and Maren for taking us along! We had a great time and BYU's team was so fun to watch!

Elisabeth had her piano recital where she played O Come O Come Emmanuel, the solo version, than 2 days later she played it in church as a piano/cello duet with her young women's leader (and our neighbor) Cami Tranter. They did a Beautiful job!

We got a Fombag (pronounced foam bag)! My sister has one of these but even bigger than the one we got, we got a 6 foot and she has an 8 foot. It's huge and we love it! 

Here are our Christmas angels from over the years. We missed a couple of years but we picked it up again this year. On a FHE before Christmas, we each decide what one (or two) things we want to give to Jesus this year, like a sacrifice of time/talent etc, or something we give up to better follow him and we write it down on an angel and we put it up on the tree. After Christmas we take down our angels and put them in an envelope with the year printed on the front. It's been fun to look back over the years at our 'gifts to Jesus' and see our progress. 

Nora and Jane had a 'show what you know' assembly just before the Christmas break where they recited Christmas poems.

Jane recited the entire Poem of The Night Before Christmas by Clement C Moore. It was 4 minutes long and amazing! I even took a video of her after.

We decided to invite some neighbors over for a Christmas party this year. We ended up inviting 10 families. 8 showed up so with our family we had 18 adults and over 30 kids! I stressed a little bit leading up to the party, okay, a lot of bit, worrying about having that many people in the house and it seems like the last couple of times we've gotten together with other families, the kids get rowdy and someone ends up bleeding (nose bleed or mouth bleed from someone not paying attention and running into something or getting a door shut in their face etc.), but after a lot of prayer and preparation, things went really well. I got all my kids on board, asked them to help make sure kids were following our house rules (no running in house, no slamming doors, no climbing or standing on furniture etc) and then asked them to help with the little ones and play games with them. We decided to set up several games in the basement the kids could play, plus we had a Christmas movie going at all times (the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas and then The Santa Claus). This is the game my older kids wanted the most: saran wrap ball that's filled with lots of treats, gum, etc...you unwrap until someone rolls doubles, then you pass it.  

In the guest room we had Christmas Bingo and a Christmas matching cards game, plus some worksheets for the older kids to do if they wanted with Christmas Scattegories and a Christmas word scramble (all of these game/activities were things I already had stored away from previous school christmas parties).

We had 'pin the carrot nose on Olaf', a game we played at Annabelle's birthday party 3 years ago,

And we had a craft table set up for kids to make candy cane reindeer.

The kids helped fill these little cups with 10 gummy bears each for our Bingo game (we put lids on them as well). The party started after dinner, at 630pm and went until 9, though most stayed until 930ish. We asked everyone to bring either a snack or treat to share. We had tons of food and everything went really well. 

The adults played a white elephant gift exchange part way through the night. We said to spend a max of $5 per gift and that regifting was encouraged. It was fun and we had some good laughs.

My favorite gift was one I gave which included the movie Nacho Libre (at walmart for $3), a bag of tortilla chips, and this picture, 8x10, in a frame(I reused a frame I had). 

We haven't gotten very much snow this year, but when we did get even a little, the kids wanted to go out in it. Nora wanted to be completely covered. 

Okay, I know this is gross but I want it documented. You may not be able to see but I actually have 4 warts on this foot, three of which are on my big toe. It's pretty horrible. And can you imagine running with these monstrous sized warts? Ugh. When the first one came probably a year ago, I didn't think it was a wart, just some sort of hard callous or something from running so much. But then over the past few months I've gotten more and they've gotten bigger and more painful. This last month I finally started some self care. I put wart remover liquid on it daily and I scrape them and keep them covered always. Charles has one on his toe and Jane has one on her hand, and I'm the primary caretaker for them all so we've been spending a lot of time in the evenings cleaning, scraping, medicining and wrapping warts. These little buggers are resilient and I asked my brother Fred, who is a physicians assistant, if I should keep doing what I'm doing or go into a doctor and he says to just keep at them and they'll eventually go away, that I could go get them frozen, but I'd most likely have to come back for multiple treatments and it's more painful (and more expensive).

Elisabeth had Sydney over during Christmas break and she helped us make sugar cookies. Yum! I love sugar cookies. Skylee and Saige helped too...well Sage ate more of the dough than helped, but we all had a good time, and she didn't get sick so that's good.

A few days before Christmas Scott had his work party and this year it was at the Megaplex theater at Thanksgiving Point where we had dinner in the banquet room, picked out $15 worth of snacks, and then watched the new Star Wars movie. I also won a $50 gift card that night...it was taped under my food tray! So we've seen a lot of movies over our Christmas break. But really, such a fun and cool Christmas work party. They're usually pretty awkward, but I think everyone was so excited for the evening and for the new movie that they were all happy and talkative during dinner and throughout the evening. And it was fun ordering snacks and having them brought to our seats :).

Scott put the wall lights up in the guest room downstairs and they look great!

Christmas Eve dinner we had our traditional Strombolli. Because we have a lot of Italian and Mexican blood in our history, we like to do an Italian dinner of Strombolli on Christmas Eve and then Tamales on Christmas day.

After dinner we acted out the nativity which is also tradition. 

After the nativity we sent kids upstairs, they brought some games up to play and were given strict instructions not to come downstairs for any reason for the rest of the night. Then Scott and I set out gifts, Mark and Stacey came over and brought over a Ping Pong table they bought for the kids(the gems!), and Scott and I set that up and then we got to work on filling the stockings while we watched part of A Wonderful Life.

Christmas morning we told the kids not to wake others until 6am but that they could open their stockings on the main level before 6 if they were up. At 6 we all went down to the basement where the gifts and ping pong table were. 

The kids opened up an envelope with our flight itinerary to visit family in North Carolina, plus pictures of the beach house we'll be staying in with them.  Nora got twin babies and a double stroller from Granny Garnica and Grandma Smith which she loves.

We've had lots of fun with the ping pong table already.

Grandma and Grandpa Smith got Charles and Elisabeth matching BYU sweatshirts which they love.

I love having Scott in the kitchen with me helping me make tamales on Christmas day.

For one of the Christmas gifts we got tickets for the family to see the new Disney and Pixar movie Coco.  This movie is particularly special to us for a few reasons: 1) My cousin Jack is one of the artists for pixar

2) It was a movie that focused on the family and our ancestors and at the end of the credits, was this page: "to the people across time who supported and inspired us" and it had pictures of the artists ancestors...

Including a picture of my grandparents, Dorothy and Fred Grazzini (pictured in the middle together, just under the brownish looking circle picture)

3) It took place in Mexico, which is where my dad is from. So much of the movie, the food, the music, the traditions, flooded my mind with sweet memories and I found myself laughing and crying throughout. 

I told you we saw a lot of movies with that $50 gift card! We went on $5 Tuesday with the whole family which helped us spread the money further, and so I had enough for one more ticket and since Elisabeth's date night month was November and we didn't get to it then, and she really wanted to see The Greatest Showman, we used it for our date night....but we started that date night with Scott over at the temple where we did some work, then dropped him off at home and came here after using her Menchie's frozen yogurt gift card :). 

A big day for me: December 30th, I finished reading the Doctrine and Covenants and Pearl of Great Price, but it also meant I finished something I started 2 years ago in December 2015, which was to read ALL of the scriptures and take notes/write down principles/lessons/applications. I started with the Old Testament, then went on to read the New Testament and Book of Mormon and then what I mentioned above. It was my first time reading through a couple of the books; I'd read parts but not cover to cover til now.