Brotherly Love

Adam absolutely loves his little brother.

Learning From the Little Ones

Rachel needed some new casual dresses to play around the house in, her old ones were getting very worn. I have tried to find cute, modest, casual dresses in the stores but could never find ones she liked, so I finally decided I would attempt to make a couple dresses for her myself, I have never sown using a pattern before but it did say EASY in big black letters on the package. So, with pattern in one hand and Rachel in the other we braved the holiday traffic and made our way to the fabric store to take on this new project.
Rachel loved seeing all the people and had to say hi to everyone we saw, a few people were even kind enough to say hi back. We wondered around the store gathering all our supplies for about an hour then grabbed our number and stood in line waiting for our turn. When our number was called we put our fabric on the counter and I told the lady how much fabric I needed. She measured and started cutting when Rachel began talking to the woman, "Hi my name is Rachel, I like your scissors". She just giggled a little and told her she could have some just like it when she got older. Rachel of course liked that idea. After a couple minutes of silence Rachel leaned up on the counter, looked at the women and said with her big toothy smile, "you know, you are really doing a great job with that". The woman stood up a little taller, smiled real big, and said, "thank you I haven't heard that in a long time".
I just stood back and watched this woman's face light up with this sincere, simple complement. It really made me think how I need to say thank you more often for the simple things people do for me. What would the world be like if more people gave sincere compliments on the little things that are done in life? Wow, wouldn't that be a great place to live. I can see why the Savior tells us to be like the little children, humble and sincere. I learn so many important lessons from raising my children, their pure hearts are such a blessing to me. :)

Christmas

Christmas is my other favorite holiday. We don't spend much time on the big Santa thing, we still do presents but we work as a family to concentrate on the Saviors birth and serving others. We started the months out making service chains. Our whole family made their own paper count down to Christmas chain. On each chain we all wrote down a secret act of service we would do for a member of the family. It really changed the mood of our house because everyday 6 people were doing nice things for each other, it was great. Around the middle of the month we made our own Christmas tree, the kids had a great time doing that. On Christmas Eve, after the little kids were asleep, Jennifer and Adam helped put together Rachel and Joseph's presents and on Christmas morning everyone woke up around 9:00 a.m.. Eric and I made our traditional Pumpkin Pancakes with Apple syrup and we all ate and talked. After breakfast we all sat down and opened presents, it was very relaxing morning.
In the evening we had the missionariess and a newly baptised family over for dinner, we had a great time laughing and enjoying each others company. Here are a couple pictures of our friends. The missionary posing with his hand on his chin is Elder Jenkins and the other is Elder Stanger. Our Friend sitting by Jennifer is Luz Calone and let me tell you she kept us in stitches all evening, she is a hoot. Luz also has a 9-year-old daughter but she was in the other room with Rachel. We love them all and were so thankful for friends to spend the holidays with. We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas. :)

What can you make with old telephone and jewelery wire?

Our Christmas tree didn't make it to Florida. Our moving van was stuffed to the brim so Eric kinda, gave it away. We planned on buying a live tree for Christmas but then we saw the prices of trees and all we could afford was a Charley Brown tree and the kids really didn't like that. So, I thought we would make a tree, I figured it would be a very good bonding family activity. So Eric got some old telephone wire and I grabbed my jewelry wire. We molded the telephone wire into a spiral shape and used the jewelery wire for support along the sides of the loops. We thought it would be a quick project but it was a lot more difficult than we thought it would be. It took us two days to get our tree to kind of hang right but the kids were now really excited about the idea of making a tree so we kept plugging along. We figured it didn't need to look perfect they just wanted something that resembled a Christmas tree so Eric ran to the store and grabbed some green garland and lights so we could wire it to our tree. We were so happy when we finished and hung it up. The kids love it because they worked so hard to create it. It also is very nice because when we take it down it will collapse and fit into a pizza box :) that's Eric's favorite part.

First Word

Jacob loves to babble, he is constantly trying to communicate with those around him. We have noticed he says one sound blend a lot "daddy" at first we were thinking it was just his favorite blend but then we noticed when Jacob wants Eric's attention he cruises over to him, pats his leg, and says daddy until Eric gives him attention. It is so much fun watching him learn to communicate.
It's interesting, all but one of our children have said some form of daddy as their first word and Joseph's first word was Adam. Adam thought that was the greatest thing in the world. :)

Jennifers 15th Birthday