I know it is January and Thanksgiving was way back in November, but that’s just how things work for me these days. I get to it when I get to it.

Here are some family pictures from our trip to Idaho.  I wish I had taken photos of everyone sitting at the dinner table, of the kids playing legos for hours on end, of my sister in-law pouring over the Black Friday ads.  But, alas, I was too busy actually experiencing it all to remember to pull my camera out.

It was so fun to all be together.

One of my brothers is missing, but he’ll be in the next family picture for sure.  (And I promise my Dad really does like all of us– just not the picture taking part I guess )

Look at all those cousins!  The boys definitely out number the girls.  That’s how we do it.

And look at the babies.  My brother’s wife came down with severe preeclampsia about a week after Eva was born. There were a few scary days and finally the doctors decided they had to do an emergency c-section to save her life. Her little baby was born at 32 weeks and just 2 lbs. 14 oz. There was a scary lung colapse when she was about a day old, but since then she’s been a tough little girl. Just tiny. Here they are at 3 months old– Eva is about 15 lbs. and Savanna is 7 lbs. How fun is it that we have girl cousins one week apart?! Very fun, if you ask me.

We also visited friends on our trip and had so much fun. I think a post about them is in order too. When will I get to that do you think?

I know I am way behind on posts.  Christmas came and went and I haven’t even told you about our Thanksgiving trip yet.  Oh well.  I’ll get to it soon I hope.  Today, though, I feel like making a Christmasy post.

Every year my Grumpy sends us Christmas money to get the kids something from him.  We try to use it to create fun memories or DO something we normally wouldn’t get to do instead of just adding more stuff to our home.  This year we decided to do something we could only do in Colorado.  We took a Christmas train ride up in the mountains on the historic Georgetown Railroad.

We all bundled up.  It was beautiful and snowy and very Christmasy.

Santa found our little guys even before we got on the train.

Because of the snowy tracks the train just goes back and forth on its route around the mountain so it doesn’t ever have to switch tracks.  We sat in the very back of the train in the cattle car because that’s where it would be easiest to keep our herd together.  That’s where the most windows were too, so we got a really good view of the winter wonderland.

Santa came through the train to see all the kids and he gave them each a special Christmas bell

and candy canes.

It was a fun adventure– creating just the kind of memories we had hoped.

Thanks Grumpy!

Last year we didn’t get a Christmas letter written or a single card sent.  I was newly pregnant and oh, so tired and nauseous, with in-laws in town.  That was my excuse.  There’s always an excuse though, isn’t there?  Now I have a new baby and on top of that pink eye ravaged through our family these last couple of weeks so I couldn’t take a good Christmas picture for our card.

I faced those would-be excuses head on, went through our photos and found one of each kid that was cute, enlisted the help of my husband to make them fit right, and placed my order at Costco.  The bummer– we didn’t notice Hunter’s name was misspelled until we had 100 HunDers in our hands.  Oh well, done imperfectly is better that not done at all.  Right?

Getting them out the door was a team effort.  One big kid did address labels, another return addresses, and the third did stamps.

The little kids obviously couldn’t be left out, so they had stickers and envelopes of their own.

The littlest supervised while doing her favorite new activity– sucking her finger.

There were even a couple addressed to me

For the whole month of October I tried to ignore the fact that Halloween was coming– maybe if I ignored it well enough it would just go away?  It didn’t go away.  Everything turned out fine anyway.  We even used some store bought costumes this year! *gasp*

Brenna was an elf.

We made some pointy ears out of skin colored felt and she scrounged the scrap bag for cape fabric.  Easy-peasy.

Jonah was a fly.

Glasses from the Halloween store, pipe cleaner antennae, cheap shower curtain wings.  Easy again.

Logan was a black dragon.

He made his snout thing, got out his bat wing-cape that I made him several years ago, and Barry sprayed his hair and painted his face for him.

Hunter and Ian were Iron Man and Bumblebee.  They LOVE these costumes and wear them every day.  I figure that since they are part of their regular wardrobe they were worth the investment– and earned me some cool mom points too.

Eva was a little skeleton.

She wasn’t nearly as excited about Halloween as the other kids.

This is my kids very favorite holiday.  Jonah said, “Halloween is fun in our family.  It brings out our creative genius.”

Yeah, that and candy.  I’m glad it’s nearly all gone already.

A family of 8 needs a lot of Jack-o-Lanterns this time of year.  I made the suggestion that we get just 2 or 3 pumpkins and carve them in teams, but I guess the precedent has been set and each person MUST have their own pumpkin.

That’s a lot of guts…

and a lot of work– but traditions are so fun for everyone.

8 Jack-o-lanterns do make a much more impressive display than 2 anyway.

On April Fool’s day we’ve started the tradition of holding our “No Manners Dinner.”  We have breakfast for dinner and get random kitchen implements to use as our plate, fork, and cup.  Here are some highlights from this year…

This year one of Brenna’s friends stayed for the fun.  We decided that next year we should invite a family.  Would you come?

(Click here to remember last year, if you’d like.)

On December 22nd Barry was promoted to be a Major in the Air Force.  It was a big day and a really inspirational event.

For well over a month the kids sang the national anthem as our opening song for school just to get ready for this day.  We even divided the parts up– Ian starting with a solo on the first line, then Logan on the next line, Jonah and Logan together on the third, Jonah solo for the 4th, Brenna alone on the next two high lines, and then the grand finally with all of them together.

I know I’m probably a bit biased, but it was the cutest thing ever.  They didn’t seem a bit nervous and all sang their parts perfectly.  From where I was at the piano I could see the audience full of the biggest smiles and even a few tears of joy.  It was the perfect start.

The Wing Commander Colonel Crozier agreed to do the promotion, which was a big honor.  He really exemplifies a leader in the way he carries himself, how personable he is, and the skill with which he engages a crowd when he speaks publicly.  He pulled our family aside just before the ceremony began, introduced himself to the kids and I and to Barry’s parents, and got the scoop on how Barry and I met.

Before Barry got all the new rank pinned on his uniform and renewed his oath of office Colonel Crozier spoke for quite awhile.  He didn’t hold a single note in his hand, but went assignment by assignment through Barry’s career citing all the cool things he did– test fired an oxygen-iodine laser a record number of times, ranked #1 Company Grade Officer at every assignment he’s had, pioneered really cool computational fluid dynamics stuff I don’t know how to say, won awards, got into the super elite engineer honor society, gradutated from AFIT with a 3.77 gpa, performed really essential stuff for the Defense Satellite Program– with perfect knowledge and specificity.  It was impressive to hear how amazing my husband is in such a formal way.  I hear about things casually from time to time, but never all at once in this context.  The kids all left saying, “We knew Dad was super awesome, but we didn’t know he was THAT super awesome!”

Then we all got to help but the new rank stuff on his uniform.

When Colonel Crozier administered the Oath of Office he didn’t just say, “I, state your name” and then pause– he said the ENTIRE thing

and then Barry repeated the ENTIRE thing.  It was really moving and really got the meaning of the oath across to those of us watching and listening.  And that was it!

Barry spoke for a little bit and gave each of us little gifts, then we ate cake with all the people that came to watch.  (There were between 50 and 60 people there I’d say.  Maybe more. ) Really, the main thing he insisted on having was THE cake from Whole Foods with layers of real berries.  It was good cake.  Really good cake.

The end.

Oh and there are a few more photos on my flickr here.

was full of food,

father-son engineering,

and bike race watching.

There was some movie watching, knitting, and guitar practicing thrown into the mix as well, just no pictures of those.

We have oh so much to be thankful for, especially each other.

This year we just dressed up for our ward (church congregation) Halloween carnival and Trunk-or-Treat.  We skipped the Trick-or-Treating yesterday because it was Sunday.  It really was nice to do the dressing up just once.

Ian was Spider Man with a costume from the dress up box.  Dad did the face paint while I whipped up a SweetPea pilot cap.

Hunter was a duck who would quack and quack, but never hold still.

Brenna was a Mad Scientist.

Jonah was a fortune teller.

Logan was a ghost.

Barry was a punk rocker and in charge of the donut on a string carnival booth.

Good times.  Good times.

So, here’s our new April Fool’s Day tradition.  The No Manners Dinner.

We had friends in Ohio whose Christmas Eve tradition was to have a huge family gathering for a meal of spaghetti.  The catch was that each person got the “dishes” and “utensils” they would eat with in a brown paper bag.  Inside would be things like a pot lid, salad tongs, and a ladle and they would all have to do their best with what they got to eat their meal.

Naturally, my kids beg on a regular basis to have a No Manners Dinner of our own, but Christmas Eve just never felt like the right time.

But April Fool’s Day is perfect!

We had breakfast for dinner, of course, and instead of hiding each person’s place settings in bags I just let the boys set the table in whatever manner they chose.

Waffles, berries, and whipped cream from a steamer basket with a rubber spatula, anyone?

Or off a cooling rack with shish-kebab sticks, maybe?

How about with big tongs from a pot lid?

How about drinking out of the gravy boat?

Tonight certainly wasn’t the ideal night to do something new and crazy.  We were gone all afternoon with our homeschool group, Brenna was swimming until 6, Jonah had to be at Cub Scouts at 6, Barry got home about 5:40 and had to leave again at 6:45– but today was the day I needed to make it happen.  It’s all about the memories, right?

And so, it happened.  The kids didn’t stop talking about it all night– about how when I left to run Jonah to scouts and pick up Brenna from swimming they put salt in my quart jar of water, about Brenna eating sausage with a whisk and how it was actually fun to eat out of a cupcake pan because there are so many compartments.

It was worth the extra effort, which really wasn’t extra at all, just a little more fun.