Kim & Steve's family: December 2010

The kids are playing with their new toys, and the to-do list is winding down. After Christmas will hopefully be as care-free as before-Christmas was stress-ful! (Ha!) Christmas at the Asp home started the day after Thanksgiving. After getting some much needed rest from some middle of the night black-Friday shopping, we started to deck the halls! I love that Steve is almost more excited than me to get the tree up. He and the girls did most of it while I pulled out the ornaments. We sure love looking at our home-made family ornaments we make each year. We saved those for last. I finished decorating the inside of the home while Steve worked on the outside lights. He outdid himself this year! He always gets a few new strands at the after Christmas sales, and even though he has to throw a few out each year, we still end up with more! I sure love our home in the Christmas time. Especially since I had two new shelves to use to hold my Santa collection.

Then, two weeks ago for FHE, we had a lesson about the Savior and the gifts he's given us. I pulled out a beautifully wrapped gift that said, "To the Savior from the Asp family." There was a slot on the top to insert "love-notes." As any of us did any loving acts, we got to add a "love-note" to the box. We were trying to give the Savior as much love as possible for his birthday this season.

The girls put on a fun Christmas concert at school. Ella and the kindergarteners sang, "Rudolph" and "Up on the Housetop." Emily and the 2nd graders sang, "I saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and "Rockin' around the Christmas Tree." Very cute as usual! I also got to plan the 2nd grade Christmas party. Man, were they ever hyper!!

We enjoyed a ward Christmas breakfast again this year! Santa came and we got to get pictures with each of the girls. Eden had the classic "get-me-away-from-this-guy" screaming going on! Steve was able to take the girls to the Tanner family Christmas party. I had just started my new job at Sylvan Learning Center and wasn't able to ask for the time off. But he said it was a nice time and was very happy about how long Santa was able to spend with each child!

I've been as busy as ever as Santa's little helper. My Christmas planning started last summer as I started saving yard-sale-finds for Christmas gifts. And since then I've been using my couponing skills to find all our gifts on sale or with coupons. Steve helped me out this year and had all his gifts (Megos) delivered right to our doorstop! I just intercepted them and wrapped them up! He's never gotten any for Christmas before from me because I really don't know what he had/wanted! So he scored this year! I also enjoyed purchasing a few things from Walmart.com and Amazon.com and also getting those delivered!!! However, there was one unexpected item on our doorstep from an angel in our ward. She took on our family this Christmas and helped us out with a generous check and then ordering a GIANT MANSION barbie-house for the girls to enjoy!! They sure were excited to open that on Christmas (and Steve was excited to spend his afternoon putting it together!) Steve was always very good to help me with evening wrapping marathons.

Christmas Eve was fun because Steve had the day off. We did some errands in the morning and then had Lynn's family over for games and treats for the afternoon. After they left, the girls were super excited to get ready for bed!! We watched a few youtube videos about Jesus and then read the Luke 2 story. We all got new jammies to wear to bed! Since we were ready so early, we played Wii bowling together for awhile!

After the girls went to bed, I spent awhile "fluffing" the presents. It's my favorite thing to do because I make it all look pretty and BIGGER! Steve spent awhile putting together some presents for the next day. We were able to finish and get to bed on time! I was exhausted and fell right asleep. But after Eden woke me up at 12:30, I had a hard time sleeping after that! Steve and I woke up around 6:00 to get ready and wait for the girls to wake up. I went in their room to get them ready so Steve could video-tape them coming out! They were sure excited, but appeased their mom and dad by doing everything in the order we wanted!! First we opened our stockings and then had some breakfast (yummy monkey bread!) Emily found the pickle on the tree this year and got to open her Santa present first. She'd been asking Santa for a Fur-Real Friend dog and she was good enough to get it!! Ella really wanted a Pillow Pet and she got that. Eden got a Tickle-Me Elmo, which pretty much scared her. Steve got some Mego-toys and Santa brought me a kitchen floor tile with some floor plans designed by his elves! Looks like I'm going to get a new kitchen floor this year!!! And our family present was...a new digital piano!!!!! I sure was excited to see that Santa brought it for us despite me saving every penny from my online sales, and other odds and ends income! :) It looks beautiful and I'm surprised I can actually still play the piano despite the fact that I need a lot of practice!! Emily's excited to start lessons once she turns 8.

Somehow we spent a whole hour doing our Santa gifts and were excited to get started on the family gifts. I like the tradition of Steve handing out the gifts one-by-one (well, I told him he's the puppet and I'm the puppet-master:), but Emily had other ideas. She'd sneak under the tree and find a present for herself and hold onto it until it was her turn again! We were sure blessed this year and we all got wonderful presents!! Ella was so gracious with all her gifts and wanted each one opened right away to play with!! That sure stretched things out! We finally finished opening the last gifts at 12:00. It was quite the morning!! We then got to talk to Mom and Dad on Skype and the girls wanted to show them all their new gifts! Steve took a rest while I cleaned a little and got started on assembling the dollhouse! Steve was nice enough to finish it while I got dinner ready. I'd forgotten to start thawing the turkey early enough to have a turkey Christmas Eve dinner (so we had pizza!), so we had it for Christmas instead. As it was it took longer to cook than I thought! The dinner stipulation was that I didn't care WHAT the kids ate, I just cared HOW they ate! I just wanted a happy dinner! At dinner we talked about all the loving things we did for the Savior during the season and what we wanted to do this coming year to show our love to him. We then opened the present and saw how full of "love-notes" it was! (And it was a good lesson except for all the fighting about who got to open it and she did more and I can't reach it...) After dinner we had fun playing some new games and getting the kids to bed!!! MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

Ella and Emily enjoyed looking under the tree each day to find the new presents and sort them into piles!

SNOW DAY!!

Emily made this one by herself!

Making Christmas cookies!!

On Christmas eve, Steve got ambitious and made homemade caramels. (Although we had to borrow corn syrup, evaporated milk AND a candy thermometer from a neighbor to make them!) Here's the girls (and Steve) helping wrap them in their new PJs.