December Part 1

December was nuts! I thought it would be a more relaxing December than in years past because we're new here and not that involved and generally not as busy as we've been in the past. But somehow I ended up being just as over-booked, behind, and sleep-deprived this year as I have been in past Decembers! Sheesh! I know it's like this for everyone. Every year I'm like, "this year I'm just going to do things simple." and somehow it all totally gets away from me! There's just SO MUCH to do, all the time, because there's SO MUCH going on. You know? I've realized that also a big factor that I never anticipate (for some stupid reason) is the musician thing. Musicians always have extra work in December. There's a Christmas program for everything! So I'm going to just start planning on being extra busy going into Decembers from now on. I hope it helps. But I doubt it will! ha ha. 

Anyway, crazy as it was, it was all AWESOME stuff we were doing! We definitely had a blast even if I was exhausted  and behind most of the time. 

Ashlyn and I took a 24-hour trip to Boise! I mainly went for my friends Chandra and Cheryl's phenomenal cookie exchange/crafting party, that has become an awesome tradition! I will continue to come back for this every year (as long as I keep getting invited! ;)  ) I also scheduled a couple of routine specialist dr. checkups for myself while we were going to be there, and my awesome friends watched Ashlyn while I went to those. She had SO much fun playing with friends. We stayed at hotel De La Cerda again, which is becoming my place to stay every time! (thanks, Lindsay!) And even Ashlyn actually slept all night there, surprise surprise. Sadly we had to leave at like 7:30am for me to make it back to Twin Falls for a rehearsal. But it was a fun trip! I miss my Boise friends SO much.

My cute travel buddy. We also went to my parent's house another weekend to surprise my mom for her birthday. I somehow have no pictures from that. But it was fun! While we were there we went out for Collin's birthday too. We now have to take the opportunity to go to Texas Roadhouse when we're in IF since we don't live by one any more. :(

 And that's Collin's favorite birthday tradition!

We celebrated Collin's 36th birthday! Wow! Hopefully we made it fun for him. It was a Monday and so far Mondays are like, hell on earth for him at work, the worst day of the week for the principal for sure. So I don't think work was awesome, but we had a yummy dinner of Creamy Italian Crock Pot Chicken (at his request) and birthday cake when he got home, and he got to open presents. I gave him new wrestling shoes! So I would say he had a good birthday.

Something that took up a LOT of my time was that I accompanied for the Gooding Elementary School's Christmas programs for every grade. That's two kindergartens and 1st thru 5th grade! 7 different programs! I had no idea how time consuming it would be when I agreed to do it. Just making it out there to rehearse with each class once, and play for the programs, ended up being 4 trips to Gooding a week. Throw in figuring out what to do with Ashlyn and the 30-minute drive each way, and that was like, my whole day almost every day. Let's not discuss the fact that my payment was a coffee mug filled with Hershey kisses..... I chalked it up to being my Christmas service for the year.

One of the times I was out in Gooding going over the music with the teacher, Ashlyn and Collin were able to go over to GHS and check out a craft fair they had there. Santa was there! He was a legit Santa too! Ashlyn was a lot happier to see him this year than last:

Here we are as we finally left GMS for the last time before Christmas break, wahoo! It was ugly sweater day and Collin's sweater actually fit right in with what a lot of the teachers wear every day, ha ha.  The last day I had to go, which was the day grades K-3 did their programs for the parents, Ashlyn just came along. I had exhausted my babysitting resources and was sick of farming her out to so many other people. She was a total gem. Seriously, what a good kid! She say right next to me during the whole 3rd grade program while I accompanied! (she was watching Yo Gabba Gabba on my ipod with headphones, but still.) She did get to go play at a wrestling family's house for a couple hours during the afternoon, but besides that she was a great trooper hanging out at the school all day. 

A couple of girls in the 6th grade at GMS made a book about Ashlyn for a book-writing project they did in their class! It was so, so cute. That day we spent at the school, she got to go into their class and they presented it to her and read it to her. They had made her a coloring book too. Look at that picture on it! I just died. How sweet.

So Collin never got anything from students/parents/co-workers besides the occasional card or small gift card over his years as a teacher and coach. Well enter being the principal.... and every night during the last week before the break he came home with craploads of gifts! Even if this job is anything but easy, at least he seems to be appreciated. Or at least there are a lot of brown-nosers..... Anyway, we seriously had so. many. treats. This is not a great shot but it's a table completely crammed with gifts people gave him. It was really nice. I hope he felt appreciated! I admit that we re-gifted just a couple things to neighbors......

Ashlyn takes a nap like once a month these days....but in December she took like 4! All the busy-ness wore her out sometimes. This was the best thing ever to find! Tipped over rocking chair, turned into a bed. So funny. The bad thing is that she still pees when she sleeps, so whenever she falls asleep I get to spend the rest of the afternoon doing 2-3 loads of bedding laundry. 

Some cute bows I made for my niece Grace. I need to make some more for my own kid!

I get these daily from Ashlyn. It's "writing." She will fill up page after page with this. She much prefers it to drawing actual pictures! 

I took this picture because she looked so grown up, "helping" me sweep. 

O Christmas Tree! Ours took up about 1/3 of our tiny living room and barely fit with our non-vaulted ceilings! At least we're just renting this place, right.

I LOVED having so many kid-friendly nativities this year. We have three of them and there wasn't a day they didn't get played with. I would find them like this a lot! I think it's a parade. :)

I made a little advent tree for us. I set it up in reverse order of numbers so that it would tell Ashlyn how many days were LEFT until Christmas. Because that's what she'd ask me every day. On the back of each bulb I had written in dry erase marker some sort of Christmas activity for us to do together. I planned it out pretty well so that there were things like, "visit friends in Boise" and "go to ward Christmas party" and "have the missionaries over for dinner" on days we already had that stuff planned, muah ha ha! I was super glad because if it really had some involved activity on days like that, it would not have happened! There were a lot of fun ones too though, don't worry.

We ended up doing so much baking this month! I didn't even have plans to, but somehow things got away from me. I found out that we live in a neighborhood where like, every neighbor brings the other neighbors a treat, so we ended up getting treats delivered like every night. Which was so awesome! But then I had to keep making treats to give back, ha ha. Ashlyn was a good little helper with some of them. I didn't take pictures of all the stuff I made, but I did take them of these for some reason.

We decorated sugar cookies together as a family one night, which was super fun!

We only had Mommy-Ashlyn preschool ONCE all month! Yikes! I had so many great ideas for cute Christmas crafts, too. Oh well. We did do one cute one for our one preschool session:

And then one night our family activity was painting Christmas pictures. Well, I colored while Ashlyn and Collin painted. I'll let you guess which pictures were done by who. :)

I LOVED getting Christmas cards this year more than ever before, I think! Probably because we are new here and still missing our old friends so much. It was so great to get a card from my buddies. And also from so many other friends and family. It's one of my favorite Christmas traditions!

Our ward Christmas party..... brought a new meaning of a "simple" ward party to me! Simplest one I've ever been to. And you know what, it was just as fun! I participated by playing Christmas music while everyone ate, which was fun. Somehow Ashlyn got 2 cupcakes, which she was pretty excited about. Santa showed up too, but I didn't take a picture of her with this Santa. She was very friendly with him and when he asked what she wanted for Christmas, she said, "presents."

I have had this little Christmas tree ever since junior high when Grandma Swackenberg bought it for me! I thought it would be perfect to let Ashlyn have her own little tree in her room. She loved it of course! It's nice that she's old enough to have something like that and I don't have to worry about it getting destroyed. We got some lights and decorations at the dollar store, and she was in heaven. It was sad after we took it down to just have to put her to bed in regular night-light light rather than the light of Christmas lights!

Just to show you what she kept doing while I was trying to get a good picture of her with the tree.

I tried a little photo shoot with my "2 kids" before Christmas Sunday. 

And these should give you a good idea of how that went:

On Christmas Eve-Eve-Eve Collin was away in Gooding doing a wrestling clinic so Ashlyn and I had a fun girls day together in Twin. I first worked out at the YMCA then showered there so we could stay in town and do some shopping. (it is definitely a pain working out at a gym that is not in the same town I live in. But let's not go down that road right now.) We had lunch at Arctic Circle and then shopped for some last minute gifts. Even though we didn't have too many errands to run, it still took us all afternoon! Mostly because traffic crawled along with Twin having pretty much one main road everything is on and all. Reminds me of what 17th Street in Idaho Falls was like back in the day. Right, right?! But having some actual traffic just made me feel right at home like I was back in Boise! :) It was a really fun day. I love that we can do things like that now.

My adorable lunch date. I found out that she will actually eat the chicken nuggets at Arctic Circle, first place she's done that in a while!

Next up..... Christmas Break!