"...And To All A Good Night"

I grew up celebrating Christmas on Christmas Eve, and that's still what we do, so Friday was our big day. Started out by making the big Christmas dinner (which we ate at lunchtime because it just worked out better). I let the girls have real champagne glasses for their sparkling cider and they thought that was pretty cool. After lunch, Sedona took a nap while Sierra made her cookies for Santa. I let each girl make her own batch of cookies and she got to pick what she wanted to make. Sierra insisted on making mint chocolate chocolate chip and she did just about all of it herself. cracking eggslearning a little about fractions while searching for the right measuring cupMelting and mixing in chocolate for the first time

When Sedona woke up, it was her turn to make cookies. She picked pumpkin cookies. I didn't get as many pictures of her because she needed a little more help. I was pretty proud of her--at the end, everything was mixed up and she looked in the bowl, then picked up a bag of chocolate chips and said, "it needs some of this in there. He likes chocolate". I told her never be afraid to change a recipe and we dumped a healthy handful in.Cracking an egg all by herself. Didn't even get any shells in there!Adding the flour

Once cookies were made, it was time for presents. It should've been dinner time, but we completely forgot to feed our children (and no, I'm not joking), yay us!
Plotting their attack
Sedona opened this present and inside, it was wrapped in construction paper that was taped together. She got all excited and yelled, "Tape!!! I got tape!!!!"
Princess Sierra
Secora couldn't wait to open her presents
No, really, she was totally enthralled
Sedona finally got a pillow pet of her own
Sierra was very excited about getting Despicable Me
Sedona opening a new baby doll
Sedona working hard on her new computer
Walking around with her favorite new toys

Leaving milk and cookies for Santa

No pictures of them getting their stockings because I haven't uploaded them yet. We had cinnamon rolls for breakfast and spent the day playing with new toys, watching movies and eating leftovers!

Now it's time to get ready for another week! Long Christmas breaks might be the only thing I miss about grad school!!

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas.....from "sugar and spice"

We had a great day here yesterday, I'll get a post up in a day or two!

Back to Baking

Recently, the big girls helped me do some baking. We made Mini Gingerbread Cakes (which only need half the amount of frosting they tell you to make) and Chocolate Cupcakes with Peppermint Buttercream Frosting (which need the batter doubled to make bigger cupcakes)



I forgot was too busy eating to take a picture of the final product

Gingerbread Houses

For a little while now, I've been helping the kids make gingerbread houses each year. I always make and build the house from scratch, and then they decorate. They're nothing fancy, but maybe as the girls get older, they'll choose to do something more elaborate.

Hundreds of years ago, Nuremburg, Germany became the "gingerbread capital" of the world. Master bakers, called Lebkuchler, would create and sell Lebkuchen. It was in Germany that these gingerbread treats began to be used to build houses. When German immigrants settled in America, they brought the gingerbread house tradition with them and seeing as how all things German remind me of the areas of Texas I absolutely adore, my Christmas in Montana is NOT the year to skip the gingerbread houses, even if having a newborn around makes it a little more difficult.

So, Saturday night, I set out to make the houses.

Big fat failure. I couldn't find my regular building gingerbread recipe, so I tried one I found online. Based on reviews, I guess it was baker error that messed it up, but really, I'm no amateur baker, so at the very least, this is no recipe for beginners. I got a mess that I could tell from picking it up would just have me cussing within the hour if I tried rolling it out. Way too cookie-like for a building gingerbread recipe. I was frustrated and hunted more for my regular recipe.

And then I came to my senses. The kids don't care if it's a gingerbread house or not, they just want to stick candy all over something. So I built my very first set of graham cracker houses. My plan was to use 6 whole crackers for each house. I started out by using one cracker as a guide and cutting gables on another cracker I used a steak knife (any serrated blade will do) and a gentle sawing motion (don't press down) to do the cutting. Then I stacked that piece on another cracker to get two matching gable pieces I realized later I made a mistake here...I should have made that line go all the way down to the half way point on the cracker so it would match up with the side of the house. Since I didn't do that, I ended up piecing together a roof.

For my cement, I used a basic royal icing recipe: 2 egg whites, 3 cups powdered sugar, 1/4tsp cream of tarter. Normally I use meringue powder instead of egg whites, but I was out. Since I'm not doing anything fancy, I just put the icing in a sandwich bag and cut the corner off to pipe it on.

I assembled the houses and let them dry overnight.

Sunday afternoon, I laid out various candies and let the girls go to town decorating their houses.



Gingerbread...er...graham cracker success!

Ornaments

I had the girls make their own ornaments this week. First, I glued popsicle sticks together and let them decorate them
And of course we had to get out paint, because everything is better with paint
When they were done and dry, I printed a picture of each girl and glued them to the frame. Voila! Instant Christmas ornament (not sure why the pictures look washed out, they're not like that in real life)

Big Socks to Fill

In the past, we have always used stockings that have a bit of family tradition behind them. You can see them in the background of this picture (yes, my dad got a popcorn machine that year...the girls love it. The plain stocking on the end is the dog's) My grandmother made us all these stockings when I was a kid. Right after we got engaged, my mom made Josh his own stocking that matched for our first Christmas together. And after Sierra and Sedona were born, I made them stockings. With Secora being born so late in the year and us not settling on her name until after she was born, I just haven't gotten around to making her's yet. At first, I thought we'd just buy her one for this year. Then I saw the Pottery Barn stockings and I loved the look of them. We decided we would just buy a set for the whole family and I will make Secora's traditional stocking next year. We may alternate between which stockings we use, or we may start celebrating St. Nicholas Day and use one set of stockings then, and put the other set up for Christmas Day. Haven't decided yet. But, for this year, we are using these stockings and I will still make Secora one that matches our other ones.

I was anxiously awaiting these stockings and they finally arrived today: I'm very happy with them. They seem quite sturdy and they were only $15 each! The embroidery and shipping were free. Okay, so it's not super cheap, but for what they are, I thought that was a good price. Here is a more close up shot of the names (you can pick the color and font that you want)

When the box was delivered, Sedona asked what was in it. I told her it was stockings. I guess she's forgotten about stockings from last year because she started jumping up and down and said, "my feet are cold! I want stockings!" I laughed and explained to her what they really were, but when I pulled the first one out of the box she looked awe-struck and said, "wow! My foot go way way WAY down in that socking!" I have a (probably reasonable) fear that I will find her on the stairs tomorrow trying to stick her foot in the stockings.

The Hill Girls

As soon as a new baby is born, the "who do they look like?" game begins. To make it easier on everyone, I finally got around to putting all the girl's baby pictures side by side. They are in order here, Sierra, Sedona, then Secora. They are all 1-2 days old in these pics too. For the record, everyone (us included) thought Sierra looked like Josh as a baby and she's now a carbon copy of me.

I think Secora looks more like Sierra. The biggest difference though is that she has a lot less hair and A LOT lighter hair than the girls did. She's also more pale than they are. I think she may end up being even more blonde than Sedona.

Baby's First Thanksgiving

I'm behind on posting and there's quite a lot to report, so we'll back up and start at the beginning.

Things worked out so that we were set to start our trip back last Friday. That means we got to spend Thanksgiving with my parents. They were kind enough to cook dinner and have the crazy Hill girls invade their house for the day. They even kept the big girls so Josh and I could go see Harry Potter after dinner.

Secora's first order of business was sneaking a turkey leg off the table:
We shouldn't have been surprised, Sierra tried the same thing at her first Thanksgiving (she was a month older at Thanksgiving than Secora was):

After dinner, my parents asked the girls if they wanted to pull the wishbone. I'm a slacker mom...my kids had no idea what a wishbone was or why they would want to pull it apart. Further more, the wishbone was already broken, so we had to rig the contest and give Sedona the broken side (because let's face it, she's still too young to really "get it" anyway). They seemed excited and ready to go:
But it turns out Sedona didn't understand the concept, so she just kept letting go when Sierra pulled: And Sierra thought she had to say her wish out loud, so she shouted "I wish for my own house! I wish for my own house!" (and yes, she meant HER own house, without parents around...)

All in all, it was a fun day!

Something's Going Right

You know something's going right when you write a note on your child's napkin and rather than throwing it away, she writes back and puts it in her lunchbox for you to findAnd you know something's going right when your 3 year old finds this much joy in a couple powdered sugar donuts

The Look

Sedona has inherited my mad face. Actually, she had already started to get a little happier by the time I got the camera out. I forget what she was pouting over.....probably because I told her 5 more minutes until snack time.

Marshmallows for Breakfast

Our children don't understand the concept of a weekend. They also see no reason to "waste" a perfectly good morning by sleeping in. Fortunately, Sierra is getting older, more independent, and more capable of taking care of herself. So when two WAY too awake children came running into our room this morning, we hit the parent's version of the snooze button and told Sierra to make them both a bowl of cereal and leave us alone.

Then I heard this conversation from the kitchen...

Sedona: "Sister! We could have lucky charms!"
Sierra: "Hey! That's a GREAT idea!"
Sedona: "Hoo-ray!!!!" (followed by the sound of shuffling feet that goes along with her "hooray dance")

Fee, Figh, Foe, Fum....

Didn't post yesterday because I spent a good chunk of the day getting ready for, going to, and researching details about Sedona's speech evaluation. We had been referred to a speech therapist at the rehab center when she went for her 3 year well check. I felt like her speech wasn't quite where it should be, but I wasn't sure if she was just at the tail-end of the normal range or if she was actually delayed. Her understanding, ability to form sentences and vocabulary are fine, but she's actually WAY behind on the pronunciation part. This is slightly fascinating because I understand her perfectly well and didn't actually hear all the errors she's making until I sat through the evaluation and really paid attention to the sounds they were testing her on. I think it's almost like I've learned a foreign language...she's very consistent in the sounds she uses, so I have no problem with it, but they're the wrong sounds, so people who aren't around her a lot will have a harder time understanding her. It's also slightly annoying because I've been asking about her speech (to every doctor she's seen, at well and sick visits) for at least 18 months now and just kept getting brushed off even though she never spoke for them.

She cooperated with the speech therapist wonderfully and even asked to go back today, so I think that's a good sign. Out of 61 sounds they tested on her, there are 38 she can't say correctly, so she's got a bit of work ahead of her. We'll be starting with therapy twice a week and we'll scale back if she picks it up quickly. We're starting with the "f", "v" and "th" sounds and she's already figured out how to make the "f" and "v" sounds consistently, but it's going to take her more work to put them in a word (she wants to use a "p" sound instead of "f" and a "b" sound instead of "v").

I'm glad we got in for an evaluation now instead of when she's older and I'm glad she's able to easily communicate with Josh, Sierra and I (usually one of the three of us understands her and can translate if there's confusion). Also glad she seems eager to work on it. Sierra has told her this will help her talk better so everyone understands her easier and she actually seems to like the idea and to want to get started making progress. It's gonna take a lot of work to get her back up to average for her age, but there are sooooo many worse things in life than pronunciation problems, I'm glad it's an easy, if time-intensive, fix.

Success

I think
it's safe to say
Sedona enjoyed
her birthday

And another tidbit of information...pregnancy might be one of the worst possible times to royally fry the skin on your shoulders. You can't lay on your stomach because the baby's in the way. You can't lay on your back because it makes you feel icky and it's bad for the baby. Laying on either side is the only option, which requires you to just suck it up and deal with the pain of smooshing your sunburned shoulder into the bed. My arms and legs are fine now, but my shoulders are still very red. They feel bruised and are starting to blister. But all it took was some pink frosting, a jar of sprinkles, a new nightgown and blindingly shiny shoes to make a 3 year old's day, so life is good.