December

 It’s the most wonderful month of the year and truly one of my favorite times to be a mom. This month I really realized I needed to adjust a lot of my expectations. When Chase and Hudson were little we had so much TIME. We did all these extra crafts, made treats, watched Christmas movies and read Christmas books, and so much more. Now we are running to a million different lessons and activities, school obligations and friend stuff. So I realized that our Christmas fun had to be snuck in between all the other hoopla, which worked out great, once I adjusted my brain a little!

Here’s a few of the fun things we did this month. The reality is that some of the sweet memories went completely unphotographed, which I don’t feel bad about. Sometimes living in the moment and experiencing the joy of it means I don’t get a pretty picture. Hudson thought it was hilarious one day to swaddle Davis and Lila up in their quilts. Davis and Lila also thought it was hilarious.

I don’t even know why they did this, but suddenly I looked over and they were playing Minecraft while wearing Santa hats. I was super proud of the festive nature of their screen time!

We got some snow! It was actually wonderful because now our district will call a late start when we get lots of snow overnight. The kids start two hours later to give time for the roads to be cleared, and we don’t have to make up the snow day! The kids hurried through their jobs and headed out to play with the Joseph boys for a good 90 minutes before school started! It was Lila’s first time really playing in the snow and I think she liked it!

We took the kids to see Santa! Lila took one look at him and started shaking her little head and saying “No!” Over and over again. We didn’t even make her sit on his lap, but she screamed when we tried to get a picture. Davis told Santa he wanted a gauntlet and Chase and Hudson told him they wanted a hoverboard to share. 

We babysat Anna and Rose one morning and it was mostly hilarious. At one point, Lila and Rosie wanted to play “napping”. This lasted for about 3 minutes.

Hudson got his yellow belt! He is SO PROUD of himself. I’m proud of him too. Karate has been a good thing for this kid.

One Sunday we busted out some gingerbread houses. It would have been a better choice to wait until Lila was napping because she had zero self control about the candy. But the boys had a grand time!

Our ward party happened! We were in charge (the RS Presidency) but the Hickmans did the theme and all the decor, so we just had to do food. It was ELF themed and so darling. Just doing the food was a lot of work. Between that, and getting the gifts ready for the sisters in Relief Society, my calling took up a lot of time in December.

We did our traditional acts of service every day leading up to Christmas. I love this tradition so much. It really helps us all focus on service and much less on getting. It brings the sweetest spirit to our month. Some highlights this year were:

• Taking cookies to widows. The boys quickly came up with a list of four widows they wanted to serve. One was their sweet 2nd grade teacher who just lost her husband unexpectedly a few months ago. One was a  lady who lives nearby that we don’t really even know, but she bought a pumpkin from my boys in the fall. They always like to take them to our doctor, Neil. And then sweet Sister Walker in our ward. I loved that the boys knew exactly who they wanted to serve. Also, when I asked Davis if he knew what a widow was he responded with “Yes! An Avenger!” (Black widow).
• We took brownies and cards to Code Enforcement of Layton City. The chief of Code Enforcement came out to get them from us and we had a sweet little conversation with him. He remembered us from the past few years and asked about Halie and her family. We love doing this for Aunt Halie and to honor her mom.
• Davis and Lila painted cards for the missionaries in our ward and Chase and Hudson wrote on them. 
• Lots of love and service happened right around our house. One day they were supposed to make someone’s bed for them and never have all the beds in the house been made so quickly! Record time! Maybe that’s the secret to getting jobs done- do someone else’s!
• They did “virtual caroling” to the Aunts and uncle out of state. It was hilarious and darling. 
• We got a good amount of snow in December and any day it snowed the service immediately changed to helping shovel. We have some good snow shovelers!
• One day their service prompt was to “serve daddy” and the boys chose to play Xbox with him as their service :)

The economics fair happened for 5th grade! Chase figured out pretty quickly what he wanted to do. He used the extra felt I had in the basement to make little stockings that he cut out and sewed and then we embellished with hot glue and more felt. Then he stuffed them with mostly leftover Halloween candy. His cost per stocking was 8 cents! Then he was able to sell them for $1.25 each and sold out quickly! So much work went into this project, but I loved his resourcefulness and creativity! I took Davis and Lila to shop the fair that morning and Davis had so much fun buying things from the kids there.

Hudson had to do a book report and chose a super long book- The Baseball Box Prophecy, written by our friend Bruce Newbold! (Aunt Kate’s dad!). It was over 500 pages and he had to work super hard to get it done. And then he created a cute little character bag to present it. I was so proud of him and Bruce was SUPER proud of him.