Elf is back and an almost finished tree!

We bought our Christmas tree last Saturday, but we could decorate it because things have to be more exciting in the Scott househould... we had to have an adventure to the ER.
So Sunday we decorated the tree.

As we were starting, there was a mighty knock on the door! We opened it quickly, but there was not a soul in sight... but three beautifully wrapped presents!
The kids both screamed, "Elf is back!" I love that they remember him..
Last year we started the tradition, Elf on the Shelf! It is so fun, if you don't have it, go here and buy a new family tradition!
But wait! There is more?.. what could Elf have brought us!

CHRISTMAS PA-JAMMIES!
(Elf told me last year, that he was going to change up tradition for this year. He said he would make them some pa-jammies so they could wear them all month long, instead of on Christmas Eve.)

Ahh, Finntree! We missed you!

After Fintree's disruption it was off to the tree to decorate...


I finished the tree topper! This has been on my list forever, but I could never find something I liked... and I LOVE this!
(It kinda looks like a brain... huh?)
And here is our finished tree!

AND I am almost done with two other projects to beautify our tree, but until it is finished, it is top secret!

My house smells...

like cinnamon, the heater is on (which smells like burning dust right now), I am bundled in my sweats, hoodie, and moccasins. The lights are dimmed and I can also smell a hint of pine...
Why?
We got our tree, and what an adventure it was....

We are leaving for my parents house in the middle of the month, so to make the tree worth it, we wanted to get it as soon as possible!

So we went to this quaint little tree lot called Home Depot... hehe
and I couldn't find one I liked. They all looked funny to me. I am picky about my trees.
Plus there were these crazy kids jumping on them all, so I wasn't excited to buy one that had been smashed by some teenager.
Tyson just wanted to pick one, but I wanted to leave to go to another Home Depot to find a different one. It didn't help that we went with our neighbors and they just grab a bundled one and go. (Awesome tradition, but I can't do that.)
As we were leaving, I got up the nerve to ask the tree guy if we could have the display.
He said yes! I love it.
It is beautiful!


We get home, start rearranging the furniture, set up our nativity, and the more we do, the more hyper the kids are getting...

They are running around in circles when Berkleigh trips over her feet (a daily occurance).
She falls to the ground and hits her head on the bookshelf. We tell her to get up, and when she does she has blood oozing down her face, and I mean OOZING.
When she moves her hand, this is what we see:
Are you kidding me!!!
The cut was SO deep, you could see her skull (which made me want to faint), it was bleeding, and WAY longer than Merrick's.

Oh yea! Don't you remember this? It must be a twin thing... Berkleigh must have been sad she wasn't going to have a scar like Merrick. She needed her own.

So off to the hospital we go. I was just praying it wasn't going to be the same doctor...
We get there, get right in, and lay around for a bit while the medicine kicked in.
Berks had to be put in a baby straight jacket to keep her from moving.

An hour later and 7 stitches later, we leave the ER.

We didn't get around to decorating the tree...
But that is ok,
"Afterall, tomorrow will be another day!"
(name that movie)

Thanksgiving 2010

Wow, have we been busy!! I have not been able to stop and rest since last Saturday!
Monday and Tuesday I taught preschool...
Monday was also our Stake Temple day, and Tyson and I went at 3pm. Then we went out to dinner with some friends, and then went to Disneyland with those friends until 11 pm. It was a marathon date! It was so much fun but I was so unprepared for preschool the next day!

Wednesday, we went down to Tyson's parents for Thanksgiving! We had lots of family and friends to hang out with! It was lots of fun.

We did the usual things, but without them they wouldn't be Thanksgiving!

Kickball and Breakfast Burritos in the park!


The adults played kickball and the kids played at the playground and made sand angels.

Then it was back to the house to prepare thankgiving dinner and hors d' oeuvres!


Then the eating began, along with the shooting..
I think sometimes people don't believe that this is an actual tradition, but it definitely is. Tyson's dad saves old soda from his work, and old light bulbs so we can shoot them in the backyard on Thanksgiving! Best tradition ever.

This year we shot...


And the gunmen/women...
I hate to brag, but I am quite the shot! :)

Then Thanksgiving dinner!
This year I was in charge of the table decorations because Mackenzie is on a mission...
so I made, with my neighbor, these cute little boats that we found on the PB kids website.
They turned out super cute, and we filled them with trail mix and candy corn. The number of candy corn in your boat was the number of things you had to say you were grateful for.
I also used my Giving Thanks candles that I made last year. I just really liked them!

And to end our wonderful Thankful month, we have our full Thanksgiving turkey. Thanks for participating. The kids loved getting your feathers in the mail.

On another note, we also took our family pictures by my friend/awesome photographer, Kim, (Stay tuned for those bad boys soon), and I went to Target for Black Friday shopping at 4 am to get the portable DVD player we have wanted forever!
This has been a busy month!

Wagon Wheel

My kids (and some of their friends) were enrolled in the HB city preschool. It was the cheapest preschool we could find, and we were all excited to have our kids enrolled together. It turned out to be not so good, so we all canceled (poor teachers didn't know what hit them when half the class didn't come back for the second session).

My friend Ginger and my new friend Nora decided to start a little class with our kids. We rotate every two weeks, and we all have degrees in teaching, so we might have gone a little overboard, but it is so fun.

Do you watch Modern Family? Do you remember the one about the preschools? Well, I was in charge of coming up with a name. So I did Wagon Wheel... hehe.

Anyways, here is our first week of preschool!
The theme was Fall Fun. We learned about the letter F and all things Fall!

This is where the magic happens.
We do the calendar, days of the week, patterns, weather, and counting when we do the calendar.

We have reading time.
They each made a mat with their name on it, and that is what they sit on for reading time and carpet time.

We have the Question of the Day.


We have Centers.
These are their center charts. They have to go to all 4 centers, and after they show me they have been to the centers and done their best work, they get a "re-usable" sticker to put on their chart.
(This was the biggest problem to me from their old preschool. They would play the whole time, and never do the learning centers, and who wants to pay for their kids to play? They do that all day for free.)
We have a Writing Center, ABC Center, Dramatic Play Center, and a Math Center.

In the ABC Center we:
had to be detectives and find all the "f"s around the house, and write an 'f' on their paper everytime they saw one.


The next day we played File Folder Games.

In the Writing Center we:
practiced our Fs by doing some rainbow writing!

In the Math Center:
we picked a card with a number on it, identified the number, looked on the wall and found the group of leaves that had that number, stood back, and threw a ball at that group of leaves.

and the next day we sorted leaves by size and shape.

In the Dramatic Play Center we:

played blocks and trains!

Then we have snack, music, and storytime and
Story time is linked with Learning activity.

In our Learning Activity we:
read Fall is not Easy and then had Leaf Races!
After we raced our leaves we got out the tape measure, and measured how far each leaf went and counted the numbers on the tape! It was so fun!


AND
read Leaf Man and went outside found leaves and made Leaf Men.

In Art Time we:
water colored leaves one day and did leaf rubbings the next day!

Then it is play time!
It is really fun. The kids love each other, and get along SO well!
I am glad we started this and got out of that horrible preschool.