Julia is always good for raising the excitement level. She enjoys things so thoroughly and in such a big way. It's fun to be around her when your celebrating because her enthusiasm is contagious!
Checking out the goods!
The 3 year old gingerbread kit that I finally broke out and let them decorate! It turned out pretty cute this year, or I guess technically it was last year :)
Don't we all look fabulous in our Christmas PJ's. It's a long-standing Christmas tradition at our house.
Here are the four oldest waiting to be allowed downstairs to see what Santa brought.
Haddie wasn't quite done sleeping. We let her continue to sleep while the other kids discovered their goodies from Santa.
I crocheted this baby cocoon and I thought it turned out pretty cute. I actually came up with the pattern all on my own! One of the sweet sisters in our ward let me use her beautiful little girl as a model. I was trying to figure out the pattern for my brother Derek and his wife Cristina's new little girl. So, Cristina, do you want one and a hat to go and get Alice's pictures taken in? If so, do you want the same color, or one with different shades of light purple? Please let me know :)
Julia auditioned this year for the 4th grade honor choir and made it! This was their Christmas concert.
Here's Jules with Libby and Garrett, they call theirselves the three musketeers.
Knowing that we have three kids with birthdays in November, I wanted to get a jump on their afghans. I started Ben's in August. And right away I could tell that this afghan was going to be a doozie! I set it aside for a couple months because I was SO frustrated with how slowly it was working up. AAAHHHH!! You have to change colors almost every row. And it has a row of popcorn stitches and then a row of single crochet. Each of those two rows took me 18 minutes to complete. There ended up being 24 blocks of red-blue with 11 rows in each block.
Anyway, I finally finished it yesterday and did some calculations. This afghan took me 72 hours of actual crochet time to complete. It cost me $52 dollars for the 15 skeins of yarn that I used. And I ended up using almost 4,000 yards of yarn. But it is a thick and snuggly afghan and Ben loves it! I also made it extra long because my guess is that Ben will end up around 6'5" and I wanted him to be able to use it for years and years to come!
Here is the afghan I made for Julia for her birthday.
I made this one for Emma for her birthday. She specified the colors and...
wanted it to have arms so that it was like a snuggly that are so popular right now.
