My Week

Apparently I've used up my free amount of picture storage for my blog.  Not sure what to do next.  Fellow bloggers, what do you do?

Little Miss and Pumpkin each came home with colds from school last week.  Hubby & I both came down with it soon after and as much as we tried to avoid it, so did Champ.  Needless to say, this week has been pretty rough.  Poor baby still is in the getting worse stage.  Right now I'm monitoring him to make sure it doesn't go into his lungs. :(

We're almost ready for Christmas.  We have to finalize our menu for Christmas Eve dinner and Christmas brunch and pick up one last gift tomorrow [at the mall! three days before Christmas! EEK!]  How are your holiday preparations?

Hubby's family is getting together for their usual New Year's celebration.  With some unexpected help from others [another post] we were able to put together Christmas, pay bills, and save some gas money to make the drive.  Now we just need baby boy to get over his cold, otherwise Hubby and the older kiddos will travel without us.

How's your week?

Our Christmas Meal

I can't really call it our Christmas Breakfast this year (2011), as we didn't eat until 4PM.  You can see that our traditional family meal for Christmas is breakfast related, it was merely delayed due to attending church services in the morning.

As mentioned in previous Christmas posts [here, here, and here], we have a large breakfast/brunch on Christmas morning.  This year was only different in the time on the clock.  We asked for everyone's participation an input and we had a feast.  Those that needed to had a small breakfast before church and snack after; everyone else took the time to fast.

Our Christmas Meal:
Waffles
Eggs
Hash browns
Sausage links
French Toast [non-dairy]
Biscuits and Gravy [non-dairy]
Cream of Wheat [non-dairy]
Orange Juice
2% Milk
Almond Milk
Condiments of ketchup, fake and real maple syrup

18 Grandkids!

I am eagerly awaiting the final set of pictures from my sister-in-law, for now I wanted to share this. 

 

My in-laws with 18 of their grandchildren [Hubby's older daughter was the only biological one missing].  Eighteen of twenty-two, blended families included, grandchildren from my mother-in-law.  My father-in-law has five grandchildren.  Thus making the total grandchildren for my in-law's 27!

Would you like to know another fun fact about our family pictures?  Some of the adults had wanted to just wear jeans; go casual.  After the big pictures, they wanted to have the children change back at the house for more pictures in their new duds.  The kids decided they wanted to wear their new clothes for the big family pictures.  That made me feel really good.

Sewing - Christmas Vests - All Together

Here are the vests all together.  All. Twelve.

I used Burda patterns 9812, 9781, 9990, and 9732.

Sewing - Christmas Vests - Black & Red

We're down to the final three.

Here we have our red vest.  For this vest I used Burda 9781.

 Then, we have the two black with red detail vests.  I used Burda 9812 to make them.

 

All three together-

 

Whew!  Tomorrow we leave for Arizona!

Sewing - Christmas Vests - Blue

One of the twelve year olds, nine year olds, and five year olds each love blue.  Here are their vests.

For these two larger sized vests, I used Burda 9812.

 

For the smallest blue vest I used Burda 9990.

 

 All three blue vests together -

Pumpkin's Finished Quilt

I had the patchwork side all finished and pinned to the fleece side in time for Pumpkin's birthday.  Here is my previous post about the quilt.

With all my other sewing I had hoped Hubby would finish his yarn knots to attach the two sides so I could finally put the binding around the edges.

After running out of thread for my first vests we headed back to JoAnn's and let Pumpkin choose his blanket binding.  Over the Christmas weekend I paused on finishing the vests and attached the binding to Pumpkin's quilt.  I then finished the yarn knots.  To be fair Hubby did about 1/4 of the quilt, he later told me he was impressed with my time saving technique that I had learned at a previous Relief Society meeting.

On Christmas evening the family was playing a game of Qwirkle; in between my turns I worked on the knots.  I did not hand sew the binding, I machine stitched it.  If you look closely you can see the area where the sewing machine and I did not get along.

I really wanted Pumpkin's blanket done so he could enjoy it.  With pins still on it he was hesitant to do much with it, so it just sat and was forgotten about. [Maybe this was part of Hubby's delay?

 

 

Ready for Church on Christmas

I really enjoy having church on Christmas.

Growing up my family went to either the 7pm family service or the 1145pm late night Christmas Eve service, and again for the 10am Christmas Day service.  Well, at least one of those but the intention was to go to both Christmas Eve and Day service.


On Christmas morning we all got up and showered and went to church, actually Sacrament Meeting. 

After church and before everyone dispersed into the house I asked if we could take a picture on our back steps.

 

Christmas Eve 2011

This year we invited our missionaries over for Christmas Eve dinner, a newer tradition our family started after moving to San Diego.  Before bed we kept with our tradition of reading from the scriptures about Christ's birth.

 The only pictures of Hubby on Christmas Eve were this one, one you could see up his nose, and a third with is leg and foot.  As you can see we are all gathered around for scripture reading.

Sewing - Christmas Vests - Silver

We only have one silver vest for the group.

 

I used Burda 9812 to make this vest.

Sewing - Christmas Vests - Bronze

Ok, so there's some orange on the first one and gold/brown tints on all three.  I'm not sure what the main color(s) should be considered on this set. Everyone so far has liked the look.

The fabric for this vest was picked to go with the green.  My nephew's favorite color is orange and this was the best I could find.  Again, I used Burda  9990.

These two vests are made with the more brown & gold fabric.  This was the last fabric picked out.  It has the same pattern as the blue vests. The top vest is made with Burda 9990.

  This vest, the smallest of the twelve to be completed, uses Burda 9732.

All together -

Sewing - Christmas Vests - Green

As you can imagine there has been a lot going on the last two months since the fabric was purchased.  Long story short, I finally have the first two vests completed. I used Burda 9990 to make them.


Here I am modeling the very first vest to my brother-in-law with the help of Skype; the vest is for one of his sons.

Here is the second green vest.  The nephew receiving this vest is cousins with the other green vest recipient.  Fun times keeping track of every cut piece, size, color, and pattern :)

Similar to the dresses and skirts I wanted to avoid, if possible, having more than one member of the same family have the same color.  If you remember I ended up with both blue dress in the same family instead of spread out amongst the cousins.  No worries though, their parents are thrilled either way.

Both green vests together -

Our Christmas Tree 2011

It's the second weekend in December.  Time to pick out and decorate our Christmas tree.  This year we found a Douglass Fir.  We decided to search for our tree after the kids were done with school on Friday, then decorate it on Saturday.

 Edited to add the decorated tree:

This pic was closer to Christmas Eve.  Last year we switched to re-usable bags, so we delay placing the presents under the tree.  Munchkin and Little Miss heeded our warnings to not snoop and Pumpkin could have cared less.  All in all, it was successful and low key.