Eli's Earned His Stripes

Not many people realize the extra benefit of being married to an accountant -- when you need to paint stripes on a wall, they are very good at calculating the measurements and making sure the lines are oh so straight. Welcome to Eli's new stripey room:

We're going to have his toddler bed against this wall and probably pick up an old dresser and paint it a fun color. Then the rest of the walls are going to be the grey below with pictures and shelves and curtains in the green and orange.

Now someone reassure me this is going to be cute once it's all put together.

Christmas: Everything in Between

Here are all the rest of the pictures that didn't fall into the stereotypical boy/girl categories. Poker night. Laura won.

One day I tried to take a nap three times but things kept interfering. Turns out it's hard to get some shut eye in a house full of people. Later in the week, Mary found the house quiet and took advantage of the peace to slip upstairs for a nap. Jeff devised the perfect child deterrent to keep Mary and Eli asleep that afternoon.

The deterrent worked even better than expected. As soon as the kids saw the tape, they forgot why they were looking for Grandma and got to work trying to deter their parents from the basement.

Bryan (aka Lieutenant Commander) and Celeste looking at Christmas lights.

David (aka Commander and Chief) and Mary guiding us through the Cedar City Christmas light hot spots.

Jeff and I snuck away one night for a Dairy Queen run. The great part about having so many people in one house is there's always someone to babysit!

Snow day. Eli loved watching the 4-wheeler pull the kids around the playground.

Jeff seemed to be sporting some new accessory every time I saw him.

Santa Claus came to town.

Mary had the kids sing "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer" for her talent at the Christmas Tea and Recital. She put all the grandkids' names into the beginning of the song and it turned out really cute.

Here's video of Eli dancing to Mary's talent. I'm not quite sure where he learned his signature dance move.

The program. Courtesy of Laura.

The tea. Courtesy of Jeff.

Ben's signature Wassel pose.

David and Mary in their festive shirts.

Sibling gift exchange. This year we had a yard sale/D.I. Christmas. Bryan and Celeste gave Ben and Tana an art board and an air compressor.

We gave Laura and Ben an ice-cream machine. And yes. We did use it before we gave it to them. We had to make sure it worked...

Laura and Ben gave us two lamps, two puzzles and a funny book about being a good mom. Score.

Bryan and Celeste got a book, a dutch oven pan and a little burner.

Eli gave Kaelynn a glow-in-the-dark paint kit.

Kaelynn gave Eli a road rug with cars.

Cookies laid out for Santa.

Dirk got to one before Santa could. I love this picture. I want Dirk to have a word bubble that says, "What's the big idea?"

After replacing the missing cookie, Santa left his mark!

Eli's stocking.

Pretty tree.

Here are the boys eating breakfast Christmas morning in their matching pajamas from Grandma and Grandpa. So cute. They hadn't seen their stockings yet. Austen was dying.

The mad dash.

Santa made Dirk and Austen's wishes come true as they saw Santa brought them each a bike.

Eli mostly liked the bikes, too. But he did look at what he got for half of a second.

This picture makes me happy. They are cute. And Christmas is fun.

Eli's presents.

All of our presents.

Christmas dinner. I believe in crock potting ham from now on.

As soon as we got home we put our new flannel sheets on the bed. It's a good thing, too, because we didn't set our thermostat to the right temperature when we got home so the house got down to 50 degrees while we were asleep. Eli has a space heater in his room, so he didn't know the difference. I woke up with a freezing nose and super warm toes and didn't even realize it got so cold until morning. So thanks for the sheets, David and Mary! I'm sure it will save us money on our gas bill and they are so soft and comfy.

Eli was happy to be home to a place where he didn't have to fight over toys and hit babies anymore.

Whew. That's the last of it. We had such a fun week and we hope everyone had a merry Christmas!

Christmas: Girls Will Be Girls

Mary was so brilliant to create a schedule for the week. We were each assigned days to cook, clean and think of an activity. It was a great way to get everyone involved in keeping the week running smoothly.

First activity was decorating gingerbread houses. Here's Tana making the frosting.

Here I am posing weirdly with my gingerbread house.

Mary could decorate gingerbread houses for a living she's so good.

Celeste made a darling red and white house.

Laura coordinated the sticker activity and a movie one afternoon. Unfortunately for Eli our activities usually started at 12:00...right during his nap time...so he missed out on most of the organized playing.

Laura also had the kids make these fun art projects to hang on the window. Kaelynn was punching designs through papers all week.

One night after the kids went to bed, we found ourselves huddled around our computers scrolling through the Pinterest home page. Curse you and your luring ways, Pinterest.

Making sugar cookies for Santa:

We put our Pinterest research to good use as we attempted the waterfall braid on each other.

Our finished hair creations:

Photo shoot.

Here we are pretending to be interested in what our husbands spent the week doing.

This is my favorite thing that happened all week. My Christmas presents were: a cookbook, sheets, a can opener, tupperware, maternity clothes and a sewing machine. It was a domestic Christmas.

This was our Christmas dinner table setting. So pretty.

Thanks to the girls, we had an organized, tasty and beautified Christmas.