It's that slow week between Christmas and New Years. We don't have kid's activities (well, except Sydney's cheer team has to do extra practices this week) and I'm not teaching. It's relaxing and sometimes a little slow. I get tempted to take down the Christmas decorations, but I like having them up during New Years, so they are staying up.
Look at this cute face so proud of his gingerbread house he made at school. This house isn't going to make it to the annual Arveseth gingerbread house burning on Saturday/Sunday night. He's eating it piece by piece!
My birthday was last Wednesday. It was the kid's last day of school and I was feeling really panicked. I wanted to have more wrapped, all the last minute things purchased and be ready to go, and I wasn't. I ran to get birthday pedi's with Elise and by the time I got in the car to go meet her, I was near tears. I'm sure it was just relieving stress and the pedi helped. That was the last time I was stressed out before Christmas! We also went to lunch and met a few friends. It was a small group and bordered on a spiritual experience! We were talking about having a support system around you of women who won't go talk about you behind your back, etc. We talked about trying to be good mothers to our hardest kids. It was just a nice, supportive chat and I'm lucky to have these good friends!
That night, Mike took all of us to sushi and then we had my traditional Mrs Backer's cake! YUM!
Here is Amanda modeling the cleaning gloves that Natalie gave me!
Evan & Jamie came into town on Tuesday. We were so busy, we weren't able to go see them, so they came up here for a bit on Thursday. They took a ride with me to pick Amanda and her friends up from snowboarding and we were able to show Jamie how they make man-made snow. :)
Saturday, after we caught up on our shopping, we headed to Tepanyaki to pick up sushi for the Gibson Christmas Eve party. My family all has Chinese food from Dragon Diner, but we always feel sick that night after eating, so we just bring some sushi
Sydney and Brandon were losing it from low blood sugar, so as we waited for our take-out, we had some miso and a tempura appetizer. We even had to give B a couple more pieces of sushi as we were leaving because he was seriously cranky!
Here is the cousin gift exchange at my parent's house. We did it by family this year and it was really fun to see the cousins get excited about giving and getting....
Here is the December birthdays group! Cozette on the 25th, Mom and Carsyn on the 8th, me on the 21st, and Evan on the 29th. Below is Evan doing a stupid face!
We also had cake to celebrate and our traditional Gibson rendition of the Happy Birthday song that made Easton cry. It's his first experience with us as he's only 6 months old! He's so cute! We were also so excited to meet Peyton who is 2. It's sad when family lives far away and we can't see them often. It was so fun to have them here and we miss them already as they left to go home today.
I snuck in and took some pictures of the kid's presents before the chaos.
Mikey's were all wrapped in Christmas Story paper.
Manda excited about her Ninja Vanish t-shirt!
So, about a week before Christmas, Amanda's phone broke. She gave many hints of wanting a new one for Christmas. Mike & I decided to surprise her, so it took some carefully orchestrated half-truths. We told her she was getting a new bike and that we wouldn't be able to get it for her until after Christmas. We even called her as we were out getting her new phone, to ask if she wanted a mountain bike or a road bike-pretending that we were at the bike shop. She was mad at us, silently-because she didn't want to hurt our feelings, when we told her that we've already paid for one phone and she'll have to buy another one since she broke it.
We have the kids open their gifts one by one. While Amanda was watching her siblings open a gift, Mike called her new phone which was still wrapped up. She found the ringing package, still not knowing, and opened it and it took just a second for her to figure out that she got a new phone! So excited and we got her!
I got a new camera! A really fancy one! As soon as I figure out how to download the pictures from that new camera, I will finish up Christmas! I love it and it's going to be so fun to learn all it can do! Thanks, Mikey & kiddos!
Docking stations for the girl's iTouch/iPods.
Max even got some treats!
B got lots of legos!
"Here's your perfectly normal pancakes, kids!' Our kids got me a Kid History apron and Mikey is showing off his new sunglasses!
Bunny slippers! He wore them to all the family parties and was a big hit with the 6 year old and younger crowd!
We had a fast breakfast and headed off to church. It was a great service and was really nice to bring the Spirit to Christmas. Brandon was not happy and was kind of a pain all morning, but he eventually got nice again. He wouldn't even go up to sing with the Primary kids....Too many late nights....more to come!
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