Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas from our family to yours. Hope your day is full of fun memories, I hope you are surrounded by friends and family, and I hope you take time to remember the reason for the season....Christ's birth.

Love all five of us Turners!

Cookies

I had this brilliant idea to make some cookies with the boys the other day. I figured they had reached an age where they could actually have fun and help, as long as I didn't mind what the cookies looked like. I found an easy recipe for candy cane cookies, which are simply sugar cookies that you divide in half, color one batch red, and twist the two colors together to create candy canes. Simple enough, right? The boys LOVE playing with play dough and they tend to always make snakes with the play dough, so I figured this would be PERFECT for them:-) Let me interject some advice now learned: play dough is EXTREMELY different than cookie dough.

So the boys started rolling their *cookie* dough into snakes, and the fun event quickly turned frustrating for them. Then the frustration turned into anger, and then we went from anger to tears. My joyous night of cookie making was not going as planned (does it ever with kids?!?). Then the boys came up with the idea that they wanted to make snowmen with their *cookie* dough. I knew that snowmen would never survive cooking in the oven, but why not make the most of the situation I thought. So, instead of having a nice plate of cookies looking like this:

We had this:

One by one we watched the snowmen "melt" like Frosty the snowman. Ryan and I had a little contest going on which one would survive, and I am proud to say mine was the winner...all the way in the back right (yes I gave up and made snowmen as well!):

Oh, and if you have ever made these candy cane cookies, please PLEASE tell me the secret. Because while I managed to put together one sheet of them, they turned out like this:

Not too appetizing, but they taste really good!

Santa Pictures

So we have a little tradition of going to see Santa at the outlet mall every year. I LOVE that it is the same Santa every year, and he looks soooo real. It started when Ethan was a baby, and the first picture was absolutely priceless (the image quality is horrible because it's a picture of a picture). It reminds me of a Norman Rockwell painting, the way Ethan is looking up at Santa.

The following year Drew had entered into the equation. He did pretty well with Santa, only because I think we were super quick about it and he wasn't fully aware of strangers yet. Yes, he did cry a little, but at least we were able to get a picture of him sitting on Santa's lap.

Fast forward to the next year. Drew did NOT do well with strangers, let alone his parents:-) He was in that "funk". This was the time he was having major troubles with allergies/skin issues/sickness, etc. Needless to say this picture is priceless as well, because it captured him during that time of his life so well:-)

This year I had to idea how the picture would turn out. Sissy does pretty well with strangers, but babies are so unpredictable. Drew has been very good lately (see below post), and Ethan never has a problem meeting people (he will go through the grocery store introducing me to people..."this is my mommy Julie"!). Anyways, look at how wonderful it turned out! All THREE SMILING!!! I couldn't believe it. I even was able to play "peekaboo" behind the camera man to get Elise to smile. Drew sat there with a smile pasted on his face, and Ethan gave us his "camera smile".

So now that we've captured that one picture with all of them smiling, I don't care from here on out:-) In fact, bring on the crazy pictures, I love those! We'll see what next year holds.........

School festivities

Where do I begin? I am so far behind now I don't even know where to start. Needless to say MUCHO has happened since I last blogged (over a month now!). We've had birthdays, mini-vacations, and major Christmas festivities going on. I guess I'll take it one piece at a time, so I don't get overwhelmed:-)

I'll start by talking about the boys Christmas festivities at school. They had their Christmas program last Thursday, and I was so excited because I had two children participating this year. Last year Ethan was the only one in the program, and boy did he put on a show for us. He got up on the bleachers with all his little friends, and then decided he couldn't be seen from there. He climbed to the highest bleacher and sang his little heart out from there. It was hilarious! The teacher eventually saw him and had him come down (much to our disappointment). You can see him hanging at the top here.


Anyway, we could hardly wait to see what this year would bring. Unfortunately Ethan decided to do the exact opposite this year: NOTHING. He just stood there, playing with his tongue once in a while (his new thing!?!), not singing, not doing any motions. He's on the top row to the left of the cowboy.

See that look on his face? That's what he did the whole time. And by the way, yes they were dressed as cowboys/girls and angels (I still don't get that part?!?). Oh well, Drew Drew made up for that. Drew AMAZED us. He's a very shy person usually, he takes a while to warm up to someone. So I thought he would be freaked out by the large crowd. I thought he would be the one up there just staring into space. But check the video...it's very blurry and you can hardly tell Drew apart from all the other angels on stage, but you can tell he's doing all the motions (he's on the top row, two to the right of the teacher in black):

I was soooo proud of him!


Here's our two angels:


The boys had their Christmas parties at school this past Monday, and when I entered Drew's room this is what I found:

How funny is he?! What was really funny was the fact that none of the other kids were wearing those hats. So I asked his teacher if it was his special birthday hat (his birthday is Dec. 30th so they celebrate early). She said no, all the kids made them, but he was the only one that wore it! Go Drew Drew! He was mighty proud of his hat:-)
Ethan's class decorated a cake and sang happy birthday to Jesus. Here's Ethan with his turn putting some frosting on the cake:

Mmmmmmmmm, doesn't that look yummy? Ha! They never actually ate that cake (it was quite disgusting as all the children ended up using their fingers to decorate, and then licking their fingers to get the frosting off, etc).

So that's the update on the kid's Christmas parties/program. Still to come: our trip to Chattanooga, our trip to North Caroline (and a future court date....), my 30th birthday, more Christmas festivites, and much, much more.............