Christmas Eve

Christmas Eve in my family was always a big deal; we’d have an amazing dinner by candlelight and have Mannheim Steamroller playing softly in the background. Once dinner was over we’d clean up and grab our scriptures and head out to the living room where we would read the story of Christ’s birth. And then when we were younger each of the kids opened one present most likely pajamas to sleep in that night or when we were older we would open a family game to play that night. Then we would top off the night with a Christmas movie. This has always been a cherished memory of mine.
This past Christmas when we visited with my family in Oregon, things were a little more exciting than usual simply because of the three nieces and one nephew, and having the whole family together after three long years. Our Christmas Eve sort of followed the same structure but this year we went to the Stephenson’s to play the chimes and then home for the amazing meal Mom had prepared. Once we were done with dinner we gathered in the living room for the Christmas story but this time there were some twists, the girls wanted to act it out. Here is a cast of characters

Mary...................Tia
Joseph & Donkey........Jordan
Baby Jesus.............Maeli
The Angel..............Hayley
Innkeeper..............Jason
King Herrod............Clay
Narrator...............Dad

And since these videos are too massive to post on blogger, here are some links.





There is one more but I'll have to add that when I get home from work tonight.

DI Drive

This past weekend our ward had a DI Drive, and we found it to be a perfect opportunity to make our apartment look like it was well taken care of. We went through our closets and drawers and found clothes that we haven’t worn in over a year, we also found some appliances that we had ruined but still kept in a drawer in the kitchen. I even have a dresser that we should have taken to the DI but I forgot about it until we had already dropped our stuff off. This one DI Drive caused us to go through almost the entire house and get rid of things we no longer use or need, we had hampers full of stuff from when we first moved in that we finally went through. Now our apartment looks clean…at least until tomorrow. Another reason why we wanted to clean up the apartment was to make room for our new piece of furniture. We decided that we had too many dvd's and they didn't all fit in the DVD case that we had so we purchased one of these stands and thought we calculated enough but no, we couldn't fit all of them in there so we had to go back for a second one. Now, after organizing here is the finished product.




And I think he's cute while doing his homework so here's a quick picture of Jason doing Math.