Favorite Flowers

I have been sick for over a week. Although, I am feeling better I am still not back to full speed, but every time I look at my pom pom flowers I feel happy. I love these flowers. Thanks to Alison for the brilliant idea!

Bowl Full of Heaven

I love these tangerines sent from my sister in California. They are like candy they are so sweet and there are rarely any seeds. Oh how lucky I am!

Two Weeks Behind

I feel like it is still December even though we are two weeks into January. Where does the time go? We have enjoyed skiing and a few other things since we rang in the new year. I hope I catch up to real time soon and maybe I will blog more, too.

Every New Year's Eve we take the same picture

We also added the boys to the picture this year

The boys on the ski slopes

A happy boy #1

Some movie watching at home

Still Catching Up

I know that today is January 1st, but I am going to relive some fun Christmas season memories in this post. We had so much fun doing our advent activities and I am already thinking of some new activities for next Christmas season.

Delicious homemade hot chocolate, basically melted chocolate in milk/cream, yummmm

We did a Christmas puzzle, it is one that I received from my grandparents when I was 7 years old

Dropping off canned food to the local food bank

Organizing sub for santa gifts for two cute little girls

Food from the Christmas open house, I really did scale back and had only one table of food and desserts instead of two

Some of the pies

Lights

Last week one of our advent activities was to see the lights in the big city. We stopped by to visit Cousin S on our way there.

Cousin S and a too cool boy #1

Who knew that boy #2's hands could look so big?!

Happy boys

I love the luminaries

Family photo op

Back to Thanksgiving

I know we are all in the middle of Christmas, but I wanted to share some photos from our trip to CA over Thanksgiving.

The view as we slowly made our way over the Sierras

We headed to Chinatown where boy#1 practiced his Chinese

More Chinatown

A favorite childhood memory of mine is visiting Union Square and seeing the large Christmas tree at Neiman Marcus. Check out the stained glass ceiling that our camera doesn't do justice to

We walked towards the wharf and boy #1 had fun by the cable car turn around

We attended the tree lighting of the old oak tree in my home town

Advent Activities

My friend has a wonderful tradition of having a family activity for each day of their advent calendar. I decided to do the same thing this year. I saw a picture of an advent tree in Sunset magazine so I created my own version of it. As you remove the hanging paper each day, you add an ornament. Our first activity was to make snowflakes. We had lots of fun and the snowflakes look great on our window.

My Advent Tree

Snowflakes

The beautiful 3D snowflake that Steve made