Week in Review

The Nutcracker

We had a very busy week. It started with dress rehearsals, then two nights of Katelyn performing in The Nutcracker as a Sugar Plum Fairy. She loved dancing, and wearing make-up. She was so happy!

K

After the first performance, I went backstage to get Katelyn. She came running up to me and said, "Mom, did you clap for me?" Definitely! She glowed all night.

We purchased a charm bracelet for her (she can collect a charm for each dance she performs in, in the coming years) and gave it to her before her first performance. She really liked it, but Aunt Alyssa gave Katelyn flowers after her second performance and well....

She checks on the flowers every couple of hours to see if they are blooming more, or if they need more water. We placed the vase on her dresser, so she borrowed my stool to smell the flowers. Who knew she would love flowers so much? Dad's getting a little concerned about our little one.

Neighbor Gifts

Since I took the week off of work for The Nutcracker, I figured I had better get some things done. One of my checklist items was making something to take to the neighbors. We moved into our home a little over a year ago, and we have gained a lot of good friends and neighbors in that time. So, I needed to make a lot of neighbor gifts. The gifts I came up with were fairly inexpensive, but a little time consuming.

I started with making homemade carmels. Plain carmels and carmels with pecans. The carmels take a while to cook, cut, and individually wrap. I made three batches; and since we don't have any leftover, I am sure I will be making another batch soon. They are really yummy!

I also made a boat-load of small chocolate chip cookies. They were also very tasty.

I found these boxes for $1 and stuffed as many cookies and carmels as I could inside.

Here are a few of the boxes before we delivered them.

Merry Christmas Neighbors!

Gingerbread Houses: Round 2

Our neighbors invited us over to decorate gingerbread houses. We decorated gingerbread houses with Ammon's family around Thanksgiving. So, this was round 2. This house turned out cuter than the 1st one, and we had a lot of fun getting to know our neighbors better.

A Night in Bethlehem

For our Christmas party, we went to A Night in Bethlehem. Biblical attire requested, cans of food for taxes, and donkeys tied up at the North entrance. Here are the costumes I made. Ammon showed me a picture of the kind of hat he wanted and I think it turned out really well.



Ammon's coat covered his tunic, but I had sewn strips of fabric above the hems of the sleeves and bottom edge of the tunic.