Christmas, New Years and everything in between.

The spread on Christmas Eve.



Complete with Christmas-themed jello.



All Lily wants for Christmas is her two front teeth.



I flew to San Diego late Christmas night to attend my grandma's graveside service. She had passed away two weeks before and it was great to gather with cousins and aunts and uncles to honor her and find joy in her being reunited with my grandpa.

The fact that my in-laws live there and I got to spend a couple of days with them was an added bonus. That, and the 70+ degree weather.

The spread on New Year's Eve:



The annual New Year's Eve big-screen slideshow of 2011 pics and videos.



Goodbye 2011. Bring on 2012!

Family visits.

We visit family more often than my blog would indicate - we just don't take a whole lot of pictures because we're enjoying each other too much to bother. My parents and sister came up a few days before Christmas. Among other things, we went ice skating. As if taking pictures of people ice skating wasn't hard enough, my camera batteries died within minutes on the ice.




Grandma, in characteristic style, always brings a little something to entertain the kids. They enjoyed Christmas bingo before bedtime.



Thanks for coming, guys - though the pictures scarcely prove you were here!

A Joy School Christmas. Take six.

Out of six years of Joy School, I've managed to teach during the holidays four times and hosted the Christmas party five times. I should be better about awarding myself a bonus for being the "CEO" and take a year off.
Instead, the kids gave me a bonus this year and sang all three of their songs all by themselves. Bravo, kids. Your parents don't want to hear me sing anyway. It was adorable. Rachel made a beautiful Mary and Eve got in on the action as the angel. You wouldn't have known (but for her size) that she was not a Joy Schooler herself - she played the part so well.

Family picture 2011.

I procrastinated this year on family pictures (among other things) and waited until mid-November to tromp my kids out to Kathryn Albertson Park for a photo shoot. You can't tell by our noses, but it was freezing. Thankfully, the girls mostly cooperated and our friend and photographer managed to get some real gems. Aren't we cute?

Gingerbread houses.

I've got some serious catching up to do. Every year (at least the years we visit my side of the family), my mom breaks out every candy known to man so the kids can decorate gingerbread, er, I mean graham cracker houses. Here's a few shots of the action in 2011:

Birth control.

I still toy with the idea of five children. I've not closed that door, though it's safe to say we are leaning heavily toward quitting while we're ahead. Every once in a while, like this morning at Anna's 3rd grade holiday music program, I spy a sweet little baby girl and am reminded of the baby phase with a wee bit of longing. Babies bring so much joy.

Other days I get whiffs of that phase that take me in another direction. Like when I decided to brave the post office this past Monday with a stack of boxes and cards and two little kids in tow. At lunchtime, no less. They held up pretty well, actually. That is, until it was finally our turn and the two decided that scaling the counter and running circles around the work island made a whole lot of sense. Combine that with the noise they generated in screams and giggles and protests as they tackled one another and we gave a whole lot of line-waiters a bit of bang for their buck. Those times remind me that I used to tackle such tasks with not two, not three, but four kids age 5 and under.

Add to that the fact that I've been up in the middle of the night every night this week nursing some ailment (or figment of someone's imagination). And I wonder if I could still be called sane if I wanted to hit the reset button.

Ah, maybe.

We're going to the zoo, zoo, zoo. How 'bout you?

This past Saturday we went the the zoo. It's not the first time we've gone in the dead of winter, but the wind and cold often beckons us elsewhere. Like someplace indoors. Saturday promised sunny skies and minimal wind so we packed up the kids and enjoyed the afternoon with the animals. The zoo is a completely different place in the winter. There might have been about 10 other people there. Animals that sleep the summer away in response to the heat are ready to rock and roll when it's cold outside.

Take the snow leopard, for instance (affectionately called "Tai Lung" by me and the girls). Tim played a few rousing games of hide and seek with him. He(meaning Tim) hid behind the poles and then jumped out to surprise the little fellow, who came bounding down from his own hiding place in the bushes and crashed into the glass with his paws, growling and clawing all the while. The kids loved the show. But I started to feel like he was getting a bit agitated and put a stop to the whole thing, as entertaining as it was. Fortunately, the zookeepers assured us that it truly was a game for him and that his teeth-baring, menacing behavior was still within the playful range. Still, I was grateful for glass that day. Wish the camera batteries hadn't died so I could have gotten some footage. I'm not sure who was more entertaining - Tai Lung or Tim acting like a five-year-old. Still I got a few pictures of the girls.

The corner.

This is the mending pile. We affectionately call it "the Corner". If something ends up in this pile - there's good reason to believe it will never resurrect. My goal for this winter is to eradicate "the corner" from its current state. Last weekend I rescued two shirts, two dresses, and two holey pairs of jeans. The pile looks about the same as ever. I'm not sure who to blame for the overwhelming state of the pile: the kids, for their, shall we say, "active" nature; myself, for my procrastination; or China, for making cheap clothes. Today, I think I'll blame China. And save the corner for next month.

Sugar. Honey, honey.

My Joyschoolers are singing a song in their Christmas program that goes like this:

The very best part of Christmastime, the very best part I know
is not the tree and not the treats and not the lights that glow.

Wait a second. Back up a bit. It's not the treats? You sure? I beg to differ. You see, if there's one part of the holiday season I am compelled to never, ever omit, it's the treats. I just can't help myself.

Even when I was 6 months pregnant with my firstborn, was working forty hours a week and topped it off with a 30 hour a week performance/rehearsal schedule for Savior of the World in Salt Lake.

Even when I had a 4 week old baby (and two toddlers) keeping me up all hours of the night... and day.

Yes, even when I was in charge of the Relief Society Christmas program, teaching Joy School, and hosting the Joy School Christmas party (within the same week and a half).

Treats are important, people.

This year's plate brought hand-dipped mint truffles, caramels, toffee, peppermint bark, sugar cookies, gingerbread men, and pecan bites. I had another 3 delights on my list but at 2 in the morning on a Saturday night, I called it quits.

Maybe next year.





P.S. If you didn't make the short list for the Egbert Christmas goodie plate, all you have to do is move to my street, serve with me(or my husband) at church, teach Joy School with me, or join my book club. See, it's easy!

Lily's idea of eating right.

There is one area of parenting in which I find myself a complete and utter failure. Okay, there are many, but I'm trying to limit this post to 10,000 words or less. My kids are rotten eaters. One takes the cake (no pun intended), but they all(except the blessed two-year-old) are exasperating at least once a day when it comes to eating their vegetables.

When the girls make their lunches in the morning, I don't even enforce any rules about packing anything green because I know it's going to get tossed. I just make them eat the healthy stuff in the limited hours they have at home. It's not an ideal system, but trust me when I say I know who I'm working with here.

The kids are indoctrinated in the ways of healthy eating. And, as most kids want to know the whys of eating greens, they've been taught the relationship between sugar and sickness and what one's poo should look like when they're eating right (which, inevitably, it never does). It's not as if I'm not trying.

Failure is inevitable, I've decided. With two parents who boasted less than stellar records at trying new foods as children, I shouldn't be surprised at how mine turned out(we're still holding out hope for Eve!). Still, it's demoralizing.

Anyway, just the other day Lily was for the five.thousandth.time asking me why she needed to eat her vegetables, I set aside the textbook answers with which my food science class in college had equipped me and told her that it is a commandment. Our bodies are a gift from Heavenly Father and he expects us to treat them well. If we do, we are blessed. If we don't, they go to pot. Simply put.

So tonight, here's what she came up with for our Family Home Evening treat. In her words, "Mom, since we're trying to take care of our bodies, I thought it would be better if we just had a little treat." They're called rainbow cakes. AKA: smashed Skittle sandwiches.



I had to beg Tim to suck it up and ingest one.

The halls are decked.

All my memories are of fake Christmas trees. By the way, I don't care for the word fake in regards to Christmas trees - it is often said with such disdain. I fully understand the merits of real trees. The smell alone is enough reason to fork over the cash year after year for a mess-making machine. Did that sentence adequately profess my allegiance to said "fake" trees?
Anyway, I grew up overseas, and though I can't be sure that there weren't real Christmas trees to be had, I'm fairly certain that fake trees are the only ones made in China. So fake it was. Tim's family didn't adopt the real Christmas tree tradition until long after he left home.
We bought our first fake tree at at 70% off after-Christmas sale at Target the year Anna was born.
The girls single-handedly assembled the Christmas tree at the beginning of December. It took us about two weeks to string lights and ornaments on its fake boughs.
Now it's December 28th and I'm finally posting pictures. Enjoy.

High five.

Rachel turned five this week. Her request: A rainbow cake. "A rainbow chip cake?", I asked, desperately hoping that an affirmative answer would make the job ever so much easier than the rainbow cake I had made for her sister a year or two earlier.
No luck. She wanted a rainbow-shaped cake. Thanks to my best friend, the internet, and the lovely people who post their creativity thereon, Rachel got her wish.



This year she got a "family" party where she got to choose a special activity as a means of celebration. We went horse-back riding. After dusk. On the coldest day of the year, thus far. The girls didn't seem to mind.







Even Eve got in on the action.



I cannot say enough good about you, Rachel. One of our favorite family stories is of your birth - you landed on the bed, thanks to a couple of nurses who thought I didn't know what I was talking about when I said you were coming. Eh, it was the night shift, so I cut them a bit of slack.

You are a peacemaker (but not a pushover), you love to help your mother, you keep a tidy room (can anyone else say this about any of their children... anyone?), you are smart, and fun, and beautiful, and agile, and affectionate, and gracious and, and, ... Like I said, I cannot say enough about you. Happy fifth birthday, my dear. Now just stop growing up, will you?

Road trip Sunday.

Tim is the new Scoutmaster at church. Which means monthly campouts til' the end of kingdom come. We've dabbled in family camping while here in Idaho, but haven't scoured the area for good sites by any stretch of the imagination. Enter a new family tradition: Road Trip Sunday.

The first Sunday of each month is now dedicated to driving to various recommended areas and staking out a couple of possible campsites for upcoming scout trips. Super fun.

November's road trip took us out to CJ Strike Reservoir. We did a whole lot of wandering, snacking on leftover Halloween candy and chips, getting lost, and bonding over Family Story Hour and Scripture Rock on the CD player.

A few highlights:

Eve taking a leak for the first time in a vault toilet.

Anna offering a silent prayer in the backseat after we told her we had no idea where we were.

Eve mentioning at bedtime that we never did make it to Grandma and Grandpa's house (apparently the length of the trip suggested to her that's where we were headed).

Girls weekend.

Fifteen minutes before I walked out the door, Eve peed on me. What a send-off. I was looking forward to spending time away from my girls and getting together with my other girls (aka: high school buddies) for the weekend, but she really sealed the deal.

I listened to conference all the way down to Orem. Then I enjoyed a 3 1/2 hour drive down to St. George catching up with three of the five friends I'd be meeting up with. And then the party began.

We booked the Honeymoon Suite:





Notice the transparency of the shower glass - add to that the fact that there was no door to the bathroom and that translates into some serious bonding. Not that we were wandering around with nothing but a towel on our heads but we did take a moment to compare stretch marks.

I slept on the floor both nights. Make that one night. The first night, after chatting until five in the morning I decided to pull my very first all-nighter since I was about twenty and headed to the temple. So much for pulling an all-nighter, if you know what I mean. :)

We attended Time Out for Women, which was refreshing in more ways than one, did a bit of shopping and eating out and called it quits. Darned families actually missed us.

Two main things I came away with over the weekend:
1. I need more music in my home. I need my children to develop a love for good music. Thank you Jenny Oaks Baker. You were amazing.

2. Women have great potential to strengthen one another. It's unfortunate that we often cast judgment at one another's methods when we could learn so much from each other. My friends and I are as different as can be. We don't feel threatened by the fact that some of us are creative geniuses, others are organizational fools, and still others possess an uncanny emotional intelligence. We simply appreciate what is good in ourselves and take notes on what is good in others so that we can improve. Duh.

It was AWESOME. Next year can't come soon enough!

A Christ-centered home.

My house is about as far from a page out of a Pottery Barn catalog as one can imagine. The cheapskate in me takes a wee bit of pride in the bareness of my walls and the mismatched furniture. Somehow, I've never been able to justify spending money on aesthetics. Add to that the fact that I've little talent in the area of interior decorating. And, I've spent much of the last eight years cleaning crayon off the walls - why would I invest any time or money into something that is destined to be destroyed by little munchkins?

Then I read a talk that counseled us to hang a picture of the temple in each room of the house. And I listened to other talks and lessons that advised creating a Christ-centered home, one with visual reminders of what we hold dear.

Decorating is by no means the only way to establish a Christ-centered home. It just so happens to be the area in which I am utterly lacking. So I'm proud today to say that I am one step (or one wall, if you will) closer to having a Christ-centered home.

Here is Exhibit A:



Ta da!

We had a series of family home evening lessons several months ago on the paragraph in The Family: A Proclamation to the World that outlines all the principles upon which successful families ought to be based. I decided I wanted these displayed somehow. Thanks to a friend with way more design talent than I, the word cloud was created, printed, matted, framed and now fills one of many bare walls in my house.

Hopefully within the coming months I will have an Exhibit B to blog about.

Signing off.

I give it my all, every day. I put up with the messes, the tears, the screams, the endless chores, and alas, the disobedience. For crying out loud, the disobedience! So when it continues after that magical hour of eight o-clock when all the little ones are supposed to be tucked into their beds, I make no promises of patience, or kindness, or even civility, for that matter. Oh brother, I do my best yelling at night. It doesn't help that Tim is gone for two, sometimes three nights a week, leaving me to handle baths, scripture study, and bedtime stories for four girls all by my lonesome. Man, how do single moms do it?

So, if you want to break down crying and tell me you had a really bad day at 8:30 (while at the same time, biting your sister's head off and ignoring my polite requests for you to march yourself off to bed), my sympathy is limited, at best. In fact, I may just lose it. Come to think of it, I just did. I'm sure I'll feel very sorry about it when you're zonked out from your sugar coma and, in my somewhat decompressed state, I find you sleeping peacefully. Yes, I'm sure I will like you more then.

But, in the future, please remember that this mom turns into a pumpkin at 8:00. Sharp. Poof!

And now for the onslaught of pictures.

Tea Pah-ty.

Joy School Halloween Party.

Anna's Halloween party with friends.





Halloween trick-or-treating.


Lily took her sweet time eating dinner and doing her after-dinner chore so she missed the first street. Lucky for her, they came back just after she finished applying her face makeup to head out again.

One and a half hours later:

Happy Halloween! Phew. Fun as it was, I'm glad that's over.