More Christmas

More pictures from Christmas

Christmas

Christmas with our families

I take a lot of pictures.  A lot!  But I tend to only take them of my children.  This year I wanted to take some group pictures of our families.  I did pretty good.  All of mine, most of Max's, and well sadly just some of Jann's. 

Week 44

It's November but man it feels like September today.  We spent the day outside as much as possible playing soccer and riding on Dad.

Reflections winners

After a month of doing a lot of reflection entries, the girls hard work finally paid off.  More trophies and medals to display and show off.

Week 43

It's Halloween!

Welcome to the dark side

I took the girls to the pumpkin walk and met my brother and his family.  It's always a special treat for me.  My grandpa started it 35+ years ago in his yard.  We went every year as kids to help.  Now I just go and try to share a little bit if my childhood with my girls.

Week 42

Sneak peek of Halloween.  Mollie isn't going to be a elephant but her costume wasn't ready for this Halloween party.

The wild west

We have been getting Lagoon season passes for a long time.  Ever since Mirabel was a baby.  I've been meaning to get our family pictures taken in Pioneer village but we just haven't.  I finally broke down and actually did it.  I'm not a huge fan of how they turned out but it was fun.

Week 41

This week was UEA so the girls and I went to Wyoming and surprised Nic at his door.  He was really surprised.  While we were there we went kayaking down the Green River.  The girls were really excited until our adventure lasted more than four hours instead of two.

Week 40

Mollie's birthday was this week.  Ugh my baby is two and not much of a baby anymore.  She wants to use the potty, do everything her sisters do, talk non stop.  But she will say "baby.  No big girl"  when she wants her binky.  She only gets it when she sleeps or in the van.  It works out great because when it's time to take a nap I just have to ask if she wants a binky and she always does.

Week 39

This summer Nic worked a little bit on his friend's farm hoeing pumpkins.  As a thank you, his friend said we could go pick a few pumpkins.  Mirabel wanted the biggest one she could find.  Harper wanted the littlest one and Mollie, well she just wanted a pumpkin she could carry.

Great to be 8

For our great to be 8 we passed out these donut sticks in the shape of an 8.  Then displayed them in a cute bucket.

David and Goliath

It was my seven year old, Mirabel's, turn for family home evening and she knew exactly what she wanted to do.  She got out the pictures of David and Goliath that I got from my sister years and years ago, but are still a big hit.  Then she told us the story about David and Goliath. 

Goliath is made up of six pieces of paper to give him a bigger look.  We put him together like a puzzle with a shield and it makes for a good comparison.

Here's the fun part, to help explain it to her for year old sister, Mirabel got marshmallows out.  They picked out five marshmallows and pretended they were the five smooth stones that David got from the river.  Then they pretended they had a sling shot and threw a marshmallow right at Goliath's head. They loved that.

After Mirabel finished the story and explained the moral of it all, they started throwing marshmallows at random at Goliath.  Which turned into a marshmallow fight, followed by Dad being Goliath and the girls both being David and threw stones aka marshmallows at him until he fell over and died.  All the while my one year old crawled around eating the marshmallows as fast as she could.

To top it all off, Harper, 4, had made rice crispy treats for dessert.  A fun, and hopefully educational family home evening for all.

Ice cream invitations

Here is the the invitation that we used for our Get the scoop on you new teacher party.

Ice cream poster

For our Get The Scoop On Your New Teacher party, the girls and I made stacked ice cream cones for each primary class.  We got a few colored pieces of paper and a cup from the cupboard.  We traced circles and cut them out except the bottom.  I free handed the bottom of the scoop so that no two scoops were identical.  Then we wrote each child's name on the scoops and put them into their church classes.  We also made cones and wrote their new teachers names on them. 

I can't believe how cute and fun they turned out when I stacked them all up.  And to top it off I made cherries for the top of the cones and put the name of each class on it.

At the party we let the kids find their names and put their class cones together.  It also was a good way for each teacher to know which kids were now in their class, even the ones that couldn't make it. 
The night before our activity I decided it needed a little something else.  So I took the scraps from the cones and cut out WE ALL SCREAM FOR ICE CREAM.  I think it just completed the ice cream wall and didn't take to much extra time.

As the kids were stacking their ice cream cones, they were giggling and fighting for the top scoop.  It was a hit.  It doubled as table then wall decorations and an activity for the kids to do.

Get the scoop on you new teacher

We survived our first meet your new teacher activity for primary this morning.   We decided to have an ice cream party and go with the theme Get the scoop on your new teacher.  We didn't want to use too much of our budget at the beginning of the year but had to plan on about 50 kids.

INVITATIONS
One of my councillors made these fun ice cream cone invitations.  I love them.  They turned out really cute.

TABLE DECORATIONS
I wanted something on the tables so when the kids came in they could see right away which table was their class.  I looked around for something ice cream but couldn't find anything so I just made ice cream cones out of paper and wrote the class names on the scoop.  All my scoops I did free hand because I wanted them all different.  I traced a Tupperware for the circle of the big circles and a cup for the smaller wall ones.

ACTIVITY
Along with the big cones in the center I made smaller scoops and wrote all the kids names on each one.  The cones had the teachers names and the cherry on top had the class name.  We scattered them on the tables and when the kids came they knew where to sit and who their teacher was.   Then we let the kids come by classes and make a class ice cream cone. 

TOPPINGS AND ICE CREAM
We had 40 kids and 10 teachers show up.  We ended up using 3, 5 quart buckets of ice cream.  Vanilla, chocolate and Oreo.

Toppings:
Gummie bears (biggest hit)
M&M's
Chocolate syrup
Carmel syrup
Chocolate & vanilla wavers
Marshmallows
Chocolate chips
Tons of sprinkles
Whipped cream in a can
Cherries

I had no idea how much of everything I needed and so I guessed.  And I guessed way wrong.  I had tons of everything. 

BALLONS
One gals assignment was balloons.  She found on pintrest how to make balloons look like ice cream cones and it just completed the toppings table.