Family

My side of the family enjoyed celebrating Christmas last night. We rarely all get together, so we made sure to get a family picture.

My brother, Joe, is sitting next to Momma. Daddy is holding Adrian and Megan.  My sister Lauri’s family is on the right.

Sleeping Beauty

We woke up to some snow!  I decided to take the kids to the park to go sledding before it got too busy.  We were there for awhile before others came with the same idea. When some “big kids” came, we left.  We took a walk in the woods and the kids made a snowman.  By the time we got to the car, Megan was cold and wet from falling a few times.

We got home, stripped off her wet clothes, bundled her up by the fireplace and she fell asleep wrapped up in Daddy’s warm shirt.

Caramels

We worked on finishing the caramels yesterday. Since we have never tried these candies, we made half of two different recipes. They made a lot! Everyone helped to wrap them until we got tired of that. When we had company come last evening, I asked (made) them help finish wrapping the candy.

We are very pleased with how the candy turned out. We learn how to make a new candy almost every Christmas and now have a good selection of “favorites”.

A Christmas Tree First!

We almost always cut down our own tree. For awhile we had a very realistic fake one, which is probably being enjoyed in Swaziland again this year.

We went “shopping” for our tree late this year. The timing was bad, or it rained the days we could go. We went on Saturday and thought the chance of getting a good tree would be slim.  We told the kids to watch out the window and to shout out if they saw something they liked.

Mark shouted out almost right away. I took the kids while Allan stayed in the car with sleeping Megan. We all liked the tree immediately.  Andrea told Daddy we found a tree while the rest of us roamed around just to make sure. This is the first tree we have all agreed on and had cut down in less time than it took them to shake the needles out and bind it up for us!

 

Wonderful Memory

A little while ago, we found a roll of film while cleaning.  We had no idea how old the film was, but assumed a few years old. I took the film in to get it developed and found this wonderful Christmas memory!

The year Adrian was born, the McGuire boys decided to have a beard growing contest. There was no “winner” but we all enjoyed seeing all the fuzzy faces 🙂 Adrian is about 9 months old in this picture.

Christmas Baking

We are working on some Christmas baking today.  Andrea helped me make some Gingerbread and Dark Chocolate Caramels. Mark was our “slave” and did most of the stirring.  Tomorrow we will finish them up by wrapping them in wax paper. Today, the kids sampled them, and as Megan said, “MMMMMM.”

The kids are complaining that Megan is coming up to them and stealing their spoons to eat their candy 🙂