Creepy

Paul loves what he calls "giant spider movies" so I had to get this remote control tarantula for him for Christmas. I sort of forgot about the fact that he hates real spiders and is sort of chicken when it comes to seeing them in the house or under the house or out in the garage or storage bldg. He got a kick out of the gift but it is scray to find the spider in dark places around the house from time to time!

So long 2010...

I love this picture of the boys.

The Children's Christmas Play

The kids were in their first Christmas play this year and did a great job. The Bethlehem Project was quite an undertaking and turned out really sweet. Mallory had a solo and was able to do it despite a bad cold. Michael did pretty well even though he was the youngest in the play. He twirled that red rope the entire time!

Merry Christmas!

Christmas Mice

I saw these on the web and thought it would be cute to put them out with Christmas dinner on Saturday. It's a cherry dipped in chocolate, a Hershey Kiss, and almond ears. The site I saw them on had them served around a cheese ball. The caption said that if you put the mice in the fridge over night make sure to cover the cheese tightly or the mice would eat it! Cute.

Better Late Than Never

We have two fireplaces in our house but have never got either up and running in the almost 5 years we have lived here. We felt like Michael was old enough to understand not to play in the fire so we called a chimney person, got it all OKd to use and got a load of wood delivered. We're enjoying the fire in the family room during this cold, Christmas season!

Hanging of the Greens

Michael and Mallory bringing in their little pieces of the nativity at the Hanging of the Greens service. Mallory saw Michael's picture and said, "he looks tired".

Finger Spacing

Mallory has been learning in school to space her words when she writes. She is being taught to use two fingers between words. They call it finger spacing. I thought it was too precious to see her writing this letter to Santa at Macy's.

Christmas Treat Bag Idea

I signed up to bring something for the goodie bags for Michael's school party. I love these wooden ornaments from Jo Ann's. They have them every year and they are only .99 cents normally but are usually on sale. I got these for .39 cents each. I had originally intended to paint them for the kids but ran out of time and I think this idea was better. I made up a little poem telling the kids to paint them for something to do while home on break, printed it on big labels and trimmed around the ornament for a nice fit. Mallory's class doesn't do gifts for each kid which is fine but it's fun in preschool to do little things like this.

Expensive Air

The kids wanted to do this Hurricane Similator at the mall Saturday while Paul was holding our place in line for Santa. It was two bucks for about 30 seconds of air blowing at them. I don't think it was even working right, nothing ever came up on that blue screen but they seemed to think it was fun. Of course the hair was a mess for the Santa pic but I did have a brush for touch ups!

Aunt Carole's Fudge

My Aunt Carole, my dad's sister, has always made fudge at Christmas. I can remember it all the way back to my little girl days. She would always give it out as gifts at her Christmas Eve party that she had for years and years. We all grew up eating it and loving it. I'm sure her girls can make it too but tonight I made it for the first time and it came out just right! This stuff isn't easy to make I don't think. You cook the sugar, cocoa, milk and salt to soft ball stage. I can just picture Aunt Carole dropping some of that hot syrup in a cup of water to check it. At least I took that guess work out by using a candy thermometer. Then after it's at soft ball you add the vanilla, butter and nuts and she puts the pot in cold water to cool it down faster so I did that. Then you start stirring and you stir and stir and you think "is it time to pour it? is it time to pour it" stir some more, stir some more "oh no, is it time, it's getting stiff, have I stirred it enough? oh no, do I pour it now? eeeekkkkkkk, I need to pour it now and boom, it's hard. The end. Very stressful making fudge. I need to eat the whole batch now to manage the stress. Check back with me in 44 years and I bet I have it down like AC does.:)

Aunt Carole put the recipe in our wedding cookbook that friends and family contributed to. She told me a couple of years ago that her famous, double secret family fudge recipe was the one on the Hershey's Cocoa can.:)

Here's the buttered platter I poured it out on. I remember Aunt Carole buttering her platters getting ready to make fudge.

And the pot with all the stuff that got too hard to make it out. AC always scraped that stuff and kept it in a bag and we all would get handfulls of the crumbs to eat!

This all started when I asked Paul to bring me some sugar the other day and he got a 10 lb bag. It's his fault I am now in to making fudge. He really likes it so that's good. Hey, it's Christmas!

So sad

One of our McDonald's burned down last night. We only have two, one on the East side and one on the West side. This was the one on the East side. We drove by today and it was terrible. Apparently it happened around 11 p.m. and no one was hurt thankfully. If you look in the last picture you can make out the Redbox in the rubble. (you can click on the pix to make them bigger)