Wednesday, December 28, 2011

The Christmas Tree

This year with a bigger home I wanted a bigger tree.  I had to have a small, 6 foot, skinny tree for the past 8 years in our old house.  This year I wanted it to be different - I wanted a real tree and I wanted a big tree to go in our great room.  For those of you who have not been to our house yet - our great room has 12 foot vaulted ceilings in the center and tapers down to 9 foot ceilings on the edges.  So, one icy, cold Saturday morning we all bundled up to go to the local greenhouse and pick out our Christmas Tree.  The kids loved the adventure and Jed and I had fun watching them enjoy.  We walked through the greenhouse (Jed only knocked over two trees and Kyra only knocked over one - I say only because both of them could have made the entire line of trees go down with their mishaps)!  I was crying I was laughing so hard - hey, it wasn't me, I could laugh.  :-)  So, Kyra finds this little 3 foot Charlie Brown tree that she falls in love with.  We tried to explain to her that we had a bigger tree in mind for this year - one that would hold all of their ornaments and maybe be taller than she is!  She was disappointed but kept looking for "the big one" with us.  We finally found two that we thought looked really nice and were good sized but not too big.  We decided on one and the guy working there asked if we had a pickup.  Jed turned and said, "no we have a van".  The man paused, then "okay".  The woman who was working with him rolled her eyes and then grabbed one end of the tree.  She was less than impressed with this family that was going to transport their tree home in their mini-van.  But, they got it up there and we got it tied down and headed home at 30 miles an hour so that we wouldn't lose the tree - a 15 minute drive can take forever when going 30 miles and hour (on icy roads I might add).  So, we get it home and get it into the house and so begins the fun and the mess.  As Jed and I started to lift it up into the tree stand I quickly realized that our tree that looked like just about the right size in the big greenhouse was a little too large for even our 12 foot ceilings.  So, we laid it back down and Jed started the "trimming" process - a foot off the top and a good foot and two feet off the bottom and we were ready to try again.  And as Jed is trimming it, Kyra says as serious as can be, "You know, if you guys would have picked the tree that I wanted we wouldn't be having this problem."  :-)  We had a good laugh about that - what you can say when she's right?!  As you can see in the pictures below, the whole trimming/arranging process left quite a mess on our floor (and on our hands, we spent days trying to get rid of the sticky sap on our hands - Jed kept reminding me of scenes from the Griswald Family Christmas.  Truly, it was kind of like that!)  But, even with all of the issues that we had, it was a great experience and a fun day together as a family and one we aren't soon to forget. 
 






Miscellaneous - December






Our Shining Star

Kyra's class did a Christmas play last week with their 5th grade buddies.  She liked telling people she was "the star of the show".  She was a star IN the show but we tried to teach her not to say the star OF the show!  :-)  She did great.  The first picture she is supposed to be a shy star, every once in a while you would see her peeking through her fingers to see the crowd.  :-)



Great Grandma & Aunt Sharon's Visits

We had a busy couple of weeks with visitors.  We had a week at Thanksgiving with Grandma Miller and a day later Aunt Sharon came for a week.  We love having our Ohio family come to see us!







Sunsets

One of my favorite things about the new house is the beautiful sunsets that we get to experience almost nightly.  I am not sure why this is such a change from the old house - we are in the same location (just back a few feet) but whether it is because we have more windows, bigger windows, are sitting up higher or what I do not know, but the sunsets are beautiful in our new house!


St. Michael

Gavin's class did presentations this fall.  They each had to choose a Saint, they had to research the saint, write a presentation to teach the other kids (and parents) about the Saint, and they had to come up with a costume to look like the Saint.  They had such fun with it - especially the costumes.  They all did such a wonderful job and I really did learn a lot about Saints that I did not know!  Isn't he cute?!


Thoughts from an 8 Year Old!

First of all, I apologize for the lack of blogging over the summer/fall.  I promise that I am going to work really hard to get back into the blogging in 2012!

I have a great story to tell about Gavin.  We were driving home from school the other day and it was cloudy out but as we were pulling into our driveway the sun decided to try and poke its rays through the clouds.  I hope that I can explain this so that you get a good vision but I apologize if I do not.  So, it's cloudy but the suns rays are poking through the clouds making definately lines of light shining down to the ground, I have never seen the sky do this as well as it did it this day.  It was beautiful.  The kids wondered what was making the lines in the sky.  I explained to them that it was the sun trying to poke through the coulds.  A couple of minutes later Gavin said, "Mom, I think those sun rays are God reaching down to touch us."  Yeah, even now I get tears in my eyes just thinking about what a profound thought that is for anyone, let alone my 8 year old little man.  Love it!