"...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)

Another One Bites the Dust

Sierra lost her second tooth a few days ago. Kinda hard to see, it was the bottom right one. The grown-up tooth on the bottom left is already about halfway in and I think it pretty much pushed the other baby tooth out of the way. I was sooooooo sick of hearing about that tooth. Several times a day, every day, for weeks she would start talking about how loose it was. And she was right...it was hanging by a thread and she refused to pull it. Now that it's out I thought I'd finally get a break, but now she insists one of the top teeth is loose (it barely wiggles) so I think we'll be hearing about wiggly teeth for a while longer.

Side note, bunk beds are a little bit harder for the tooth fairy to visit. I'm just sayin'...

Tree Trimmin'

Last weekend was tree decoratin' time in the Hill household! Secora can't help, so she cheered from the sidelines. This was her inaugural ride in the same swing we used with Sierra Here's Sierra in it, for comparison's sake Secora promptly fell asleep and the rest of the family set about decorating the tree In no time at all, it was all done. You may notice areas where 3 or 4 ornaments are clustered together on one branch. That's because we gave the girls free reign and Sedona seemed to think they would get lonely if they were each on their own branch And you'll also notice the patch of blue lights at the top of the tree. That's what happens when momma's nursing and daddy takes over light duties (I'm pretty sure this is the first year he's done it since we had kids). Whatever. The kids like it and it's unique. Since these pictures were taken, we've also added count down chains. The girls each made their own out of construction paper (how is it a 3 year can go through an entire glue stick on one tiny project??) and draped them on the tree like tinsel.

Oh, and my brother-in-law's already fussed at me about hemming those curtains (in a loving way ;-) I'm working on it. I aim to have them all above the heaters before the weekend's over!

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!

Teaching Money Management

Josh and I choose to follow a budgeting system very similar to what is laid out in the book America's Cheapest Family. I keep the budget on paper because we used a computer based system for years and it just wasn't tangible enough for me to keep me accountable. I briefly explained the system back when I first implemented it.

Sierra knows we have a budget book and has asked me questions about it and I've explained the basic idea to her. She's been dying to have a budget book of her own, but didn't really have any significant amount of money to apply a budget to.

Lately though, she's had a birthday, and the Tooth Fairy, and she and I have also been going to the medical school here in town on a regular basis to be "standardized patients" (we pretend to have a certain ailment and the med students practice their examination and diagnostic skills on us). The standardized patient thing in particular pays quite well. I keep some of the money because I'm the one who really has an involved story to memorize and act up, but if she's the actual patient (which pays more anyway since two of us are "working"), I give her part of the money. All of this has added up to quite a substantial sum in the world of a six year old and I decided it was time to put an end to the "can we go to the store so I can buy something?!?" and help her set up her own budget.

The first thing we did was a fairly quick explanation of percentages (by drawing a circle and showing her what 100%, 50%, 25%, 20%, 10% and 5% are). Then I dictated that she has to put money in savings first and since she is young and doesn't HAVE to buy anything herself, 50% of what she gets will go into savings.

From there, she got to take over. I explained to her what types of categories we have in our budget and she thought about what categories she wanted. She came up with: toys; candy/food; vacation souvenirs; books/learning; crafts/art.

Next I asked her what category was most important to her and which was next important, until we had prioritized the list.

Finally, we split the remaining 50% between the categories she had picked depending on how important the category was to her and how expensive things in that category are.

The final product was the decision that money she gets will be split as follows:
Savings 50%
Books/Learning 20% (p.s. how awesome is it that I have a 6 year old that not only came up with this category on her own, but also made it her number one priority with no input whatsoever from anyone else?!?)
Candy/Food 5%
Crafts/Art 5%
Toys 10%
Vacation Souvenirs 10%

There are some changes I would like to make, but I'd rather focus on her being excited about making and following a plan for her money instead of trying to push too much on her right from the beginning, so aside from the savings thing, I left all the choices up to her this time.

Snaggle Toothed

The last time Sierra went to the dentist, he looked at her x-rays and proclaimed that her adult teeth were "right there" and she'd start losing her baby teeth soon.

So, of course, the next 5 months consisted of "WHEN am I'm going to lose my baby teeth?" and incessant wiggling of teeth that were definitely not loose.

Until Thursday night rolled around. After brushing her teeth, she let us know one tooth was kind of sore. A quick poke confirmed that she finally had a loose tooth.

She wiggled it all day Friday. She was excited to wake up Saturday and show us how far she could push it out of place. Every time I walked by, she was standing in front of a mirror wiggling it some more. She was even more excited to wake up Sunday and show us she could now push it side to side. She buckled down and got more serious about the wiggling.

Thankfully (oh so thankfully!) we had let her know that if she was eating something and bit down on something hard, she should make sure it wasn't her tooth. I mean, who wants to swallow their first tooth? She looked a little grossed out and said, "you mean, it'd be in my poop?!?" and I confirmed her suspicions along with letting her know that we would not be retrieving said tooth if that happened.

So on Sunday afternoon, when she bit off a piece of the lolly pop she was eating and it didn't quite feel right, she spit it out in her hand. Then she popped it right back into her mouth ('cause we wouldn't want to give up a single morsel of sugary goodness). It still didn't have the right flavor though, so she spit it out again, which is when Josh took notice and said, "hey! it's your tooth!"
To say the least, she was very excited
She was very reluctant to give up the tooth to the Tooth Fairy though because she wanted to have it to show everyone. She left a note to that effect with the tooth when she put it under her pillow. And wouldn't you know? That ol' Tooth Fairy not only let her keep the tooth (along with a note saying she had to let Josh and I keep it safe for her), she also left behind a generous $5 for it being the first tooth.

We got a loose tooth break for the rest of Sunday and then yesterday she started trying to loosen up the one next to it. The girl's on a mission and she may just get all those front teeth out before Thanksgiving...

Pierced Ears

When Sedona was born, we bought Sierra a "big sister gift" (which happened to be her first bike). We've been thinking about what we will do for big sister gifts this time around and finally decided that for Sierra, we'd let her get her ears pierced. We had originally thought we'd have her wait until she was about 9, but she's been asking about it and we thought it might be a good time to reinforce the idea that she's the oldest and there are some privileges she gets that go along with the stricter rules she has to follow. Also, the timing works out that she will be ready to take out the starter studs just before Christmas, so we can buy her more earrings (studs only if any friends/family have the same idea!!!) for Christmas gifts.

After Josh and I had talked it over and made the final decision, I let her know we were okay with her getting them pierced if she wanted to do it. Then we took a trip down to the store and had them explain how it works and show her everything and she took a few days to think about it. She finally decided she did want to do it.

Then the day came and we walked into the store.

She got SUPER anxious and changed her mind and wanted to wait another day. She was getting herself more and more worked up, so I finally convinced her if she wanted to do it, it was better to get it over with. I had brought the camera to take pictures, but she needed a little hand holding and tear wiping instead, so there are no pictures. By the time we got to the counter to pay, the tears were gone and she was fine. She wanted me to take her picture as soon as we left, so here's the evidence:
When we got to the car, she told me she was glad she did it instead of worrying over it longer, so I guess I didn't flub up too much by pushing her a bit :-p I'm determined to have them heal up well, so I've taken charge of cleaning them several times a day and so far things look good, they haven't been red at all and are comfortable for her.

Sierra is Officially Six

It's been 6 years since Sierra joined our family. My, how time has flown!!one week oldFirst BirthdaySecond BirthdayThird BirthdayFourth BirthdayFifth BirthdayAbout one month ago