Anya turns 17

 

Anya turned 17 while Ruth and Rachel were away from home helping Grandma get better, so Anya missed having Rachel, her best friend, for 2 weeks, and spent a large amount of her birthday video chatting Rachel.

Scripture Time

 

A Really Great Story

 

Kate sent this great story to me while I was visiting my mother in the hospital.

While dad was reading the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal, Eliza brought me a flat circle of pink playdough she had made and told me it was a cookie for me. I picked it up, thanked her kindly, and took a bite. She had an expression between shock and horror.
Later she brought two more cookies. One she gave to Anya, and told her it was a cookie for her. The second she began to pass to me, when she held her hand back and with a troubled expression informed me that, "It is pink. It is playdough. Playdough is yucky. You cannot eat it." And then handed me the playdough that was pink and not a cookie.
She repeatedly told me through scripture study that it was pink playdough and not a cookie.
At some point Rachel made Eliza a very pretty chocolate chip cookie out of her portion of pink playdough. Delighted, Eliza asked me to do the same. I promised her I would make it into a cookie. Thankfully I still had a few oreos left. I hid one up my sleeve, rolled the pink playdough into a ball, and made it appear a moment later as an oreo cookie, which I gave to her claiming I had made her pink playdough into an actual cookie.
When Eliza took the oreo, Anya told Eliza that it was yucky playdough and not to eat it. Concerned, Eliza put the cookie down in her lap and thought it over for several minutes, whether it was a cookie or playdough, before biting into the oreo and proudly declaring that it was in fact a cookie, an oreo cookie.

Christmas 2024 in Words

 This will be a memorial Christmas for sure. On Nov 30th I gathered all of my kids and asked them what they wanted to do and watch, read and eat over the Christmas season. I wrote every thing down as a day to say event, and we essentially did it all until the end. On Dec, the majority of the kids and I drove the 5 hours to visit my parents. We stayed there for two nights and talked and played with my parents and continued some of our own Christmas movie watching when my parents were sleeping and not feeling well. We drove home on the 20th. We unpacked and got back into our Christmas groove, but not for long. On Saturday my mom got very sick, had a seizure, and was sent to the ICU. I drove the 5 hours away Saturday night. When my mom was out of the woods, I drove back home the night before Christmas Eve. While there, my sister Amber, who lives in Utah gave us her ps5 for our boys for Christmas. I was pretty tired on Christmas Eve but we still did some of our back log of Christmas events and had our usual shepherds dinner. Then the kids played until 1am, then we sent them to bed. Johnny set up the ps5 and Rachel and Ruth helped me to set up stockings and anything else that was left unwrapped. Then we went to bed. On Christmas morning the kids were in my bedroom waking us up at 7 am. “We plunged into the cornucopia quivering with desire and the ecstasy of unbridled avarice.” We are very poor and never expect much. The majority of the gifts were homemade or thrift store. One thing that we did this year that worked exceedingly well was we bought $15 worth of legos from the local flea market and then Rachel and Anya used those pieces and a few of their own to make very nice Lego sets for Sam and Gideon. What they got that way would have cost more than $100 buying new sets and they would not have had the unique flair. The little boys were very pleased and have played with them a lot since then. Another great gift idea that I had was to buy 2 cords that would hook our 2 older model computer screens to newer things. That set up the Wii and the ps5 on their own screens so now more than 2 kids can play games at a time. The boys will come to appreciate that in time. They already got to enjoy that more yesterday after chores which is when they are free to play their computer games. 

All in all, and despite my mom almost dying, I think we had a lovely Christmas. I am grateful for my kids and my husband and the joy that they bring into my life.

Christmas 2024 in Pictures