My boys

With all the fun Christmastime craziness happening at our house this month, there have been very few moments of absolute peace in our home. That's why I hurried and took this picture as soon as I realized that my two boys had been quietly reading on the couch for at least 15 minutes. I snapped a couple shots because they looked so cute together and so very serious, and then it hit me .... Kutter totally cannot read! He has his own set of scriptures and keeps telling me he reads them every day and I just smile and humor him. Apparently, I should take him more seriously! He was totally deep in concentration, turning the pages and everything! What a nut!

Here Comes Santa Claus

Santa crashed our ward Christmas party on Saturday night, and boy did he make an impact! I have been wondering how Brielle would do when she saw him. Last year she was just curious and mildly amused. This year she started bawling the second she saw him. I think she somehow knew that I was going to force her to sit on his lap for a picture. She is no longer amused.
Breje and Trayson did better. Breje manged to jump up there and run off before Jody could even snap a picture (small sigh -- how is she already too old for this?) Trayson just climbed right up and rattled off a whole list. You can totally see him thinking hard to make sure he doesn't leave anything out! Kutter originally ran right up and got in line with all of the other kids and waited patiently for his turn. Apparently nobody actually told him what he was waiting in line for, because the poor kid nearly fell apart when he finally got up there! He finally did toughen-up (I think he saw the candy Santa was giving out) and agree to get in line with Brielle and I -- if he didn't have to actually sit on Santa's lap and if we'd go up there with him. He was still pretty unsure about the whole thing (maybe Brielle's complete meltdown had something to do with it?)

He finally pulled through and found a quick smile for a picture. Brielle, however, did not! (She did manage to peek through her tears real quick and snatch the goodie bag from Santa in the middle of her tantrum. That's my girl!)

It's FINALLY beginning to look a lot like Christmas!

We put out our Christmas decorations last weekend, and spent our FHE last week decorating our tree as a family, but it still just didn't quite seem like Christmas. Our favorite decoration was missing, because we donated our nativity to display at an annual creche exhibit that our stake does. It's a really wonderful thing for our community, but we're happy to say that our nativity is back home and we were able to set it out for FHE tonight.

Our nativity set is almost exactly like the one I set out with my family when I was little and one of my very favorite things. It's handpainted by my parents and our usual tradition is to set it out before any other decorations to remind us what the focus of the season should be.

The tree is another of my favorite traditions, even with all the arguing over who gets to put what where, it always ends with everyone smiling. I think Brielle had the biggest smile of all. I'm sure she was imaging how much fun she'd having taking it all apart again -- over and over and over!