12 Days of Christmas

Some of you may not be aware that we have a very clever person or group of people that have decided to adopt us for Christmas and each year for the past 9 years they have done the 12 days of Christmas to our family. No seriously it is one of the most clever things I've ever seen and something that we all look forward to.

So this is how it works. Each year we get something from the pear tree phantom on the first day, Mr & Mrs. Dove on day 2, Pierre on day 3, Birdbrain on day 4, Frodo on day 5, Mother Goose on day 6, Odette on day 7, Bessie on day 8, and now Clara on day nine. Because this is the ninth year days 10, 11, and 12 were also from Clara because the remaining numbers haven't been given a character name yet. Make sense? Each year the masterminds behind this huge undertaking think of new ways to out do themselves! Each gift is very cleverly thought out and planned down to the smallest of details like the matching cards and wrapping paper! Amazing!...or as Bessie would say "wooooonderful!!" (she's a cow get it! Teehee!)

Next year I will take pictures so that you can see just how crazy amazing they are!...I told Josh I'm so tempted to stay for at least 3 more years so we can finish the twelve days of Christmas and see if they reveal themselves or if we have to keep guessing!

Okay to help you better understand what I'm talking about here are a few things we got this year alone...

Day #1 Pear Tree Phantom - 4 dessert plates with pears on them

Day #3 Three French Hens (Jacque, Pierre, & Yves) - Forget Paris, Chicken Run, Rooster Cogburn & the Lady, and a rooster

Day #5 Frodo -Lord of the Rings Journal, and 5 Lord of the Rings bookmarks with attached rings

Day #6 Mother Goose - Santa visited our house calling my kids by name and delivering stuffed animals (geese) and a beautifully framed picture of little kids and geese with the saying "Our greatest possession, and thus our greatest gift, is simply our time that we share with others."

Day #8 Bessie - delivered a cowlander (calendar) and 8 cow notepads!

Day #9 Clara - 6 tickets to see Mountain West perform the Nutcracker!!!! I wasn't sure if Bronwynn would sit through the whole thing but she LOVED it!!!

Day #10 Clara - 10 movies (step up 1 & 2, Foot Loose, Save the Last Dance 2, Barbie and the 12 princesses, White Knights, Dirty Dancing, Dances with Wolves, & a movie with Ginger Roger and Fred Estair), 3 books by Anita Stansfield about dancing, a dancing guide book with DVD, and they were delivered in a ballerina basket.

Day #11 Clara - Bella Dancerella Swan Lake, Pink Leotard, Tights, Shoes, Hair Ties, Tutu Book, Nutcracker sticker book, Maurice Sendaak book about the Nutcracker, 9 dancing stuffed dolls in tutus, all delivered in ballerina basket.

Day #12 Clara - Toe Shoes signed by Silver Barkes, two Ballet West sweat pants, two ballet west sweat shirts, a pair of dancing snoopy p.j.'s, a beautiful plate with a dance saying on it that my mom says she swears she heard in the last women's conference we had, a framed dance saying, Tree Ornament, Nutcracker Collectible Egg Music Box, Bronze Ballerina Statue, a Barbie tutu, all delivered in a ballerina basket.

I know I've missed a bunch of stuff but I wanted to give you a little glimpse into how completely spoiled we have been for the past 9 years! These people are amazing!

Our cute little B is so delighted that we have so much girl stuff she has been asking everyday to do her ballerina training! In fact she was so cute about it I had to take pictures and post them here! This really has been an amazing journey! I'm not sure how to thank whoever is doing this except to post it here in hopes they will somehow find it! Thank you whoever you are!!!

Christmas Card

This Year's Christmas Card!

Thanksgiving

We tried something new this year at our Thanksgiving Party...I'm not sure we will do it again because it made for a very hectic day but here it is...
We've been trying to teach our kids to be grateful for what they have and trying to help them be aware of people less fortunate than us by looking for opportunities to serve others. This has been a yearly focus for us, which is a lot easier now that Bronwynn is a bit older. Some of the little things we've done have been to stop our car and ask if people need assistance, usually this means pushing cars (Don't tell my chiropractor!), helping people bring stuff in from freakish wind storms, and offering assistance to mom's with strollers, and of course our Thankful tree. In general just trying to be aware and preceive the needs of others. With Thanksgiving approaching we wanted to do something a bit larger and focus on people without homes since we try really hard to be grateful for our one bedroom apartment.
We found a homeless shelter downtown that was in need of hygiene kits and scarves and decided to focus on them this year. We obtained the necessary items for our project through the Bishop's storehouse and were able to get enough stuff to do 40 hygiene kits and 73 scarves! Hooray! We set it up so the kids could put together the hygiene kit and once that was done we had the older kids move on to scarves. It was a lot of fun and even our youngest (2 years old) had a blast helping out.
The only problem we ran into was that with all of us working on the service project there was no one to help in the kitchen. Ooops! That left my mom a little frantic and frazzled by the time dinner came around.

Perhaps next year we will have it more prepped and ready before the party begins.

Thankful Tree

Here is our finished Tree! Don't you just love B's scallywag face!

Thankful Tree

Josh and I were trying to find a way to help our kids be a little more grateful for all of the blessings we have when we came up with this thankful tree. We've seen many versions of this but decided to make it large so we could put leaves up all month! Now at dinner each of us gets 3 leaves that we can name things we are grateful for...no repeats! It has been fun to see what our kids Elijah (6) and Bronwynn (2) have come up with so far. We have the bionicles and toys of course but we are also getting things like countries and clean water. Our goal is to fill the tree by Thanksgiving so I'll repost another picture before we take it down. I think this just might make it into our family traditions pile!

Katie's Baptism

My sweet niece Katelyn Sea Schmidt was baptised tonight! She looked beautiful in her white dress that was made by my mom! Andrea's sister Kristen gave a talk on the importance of Baptism and I got to give a talk on the Holy Ghost. Aunt Anna made yummy treats and Andrea's other sister and sister in law gave the prayers. What a wonderful evening and a perfect way to end a Sunday. I'm so grateful to have family close and to be a part of their lives! What a blessing!

Halloween Night

We love halloween at our house and I have to remind myself to be patient and wait for halloween to get here. Otherwise I start to get ready for halloween in July! Josh started the kids day with pumpkin pancakes and chocolate chips to make the jack-o-lantern faces! Cute daddy! Then he brought them to Macey's to see Mommy at work and to do some trick or treating at the store. We went home to jack-o-lantern pizza, trick or treating in the neighborhood and watching the halloween classics like Garfield and Charlie Brown! I started work at 6am that morning so Bonnie and I were out for the count by 9:30! Oh, I almost forgot...Elijah is a Bionicle (thank you Ebay), and Bonnie is a witch!

Schmidt Family Halloween Party

With so many of us this year we needed a large space for us to all be. We decided to take the same idea we had for Elijah's birthday party and buy paper by they yard to fence off the messy parts of the garage and create a spooky feel! We used mostly orange and then relied on Josh's artistic abilities to creat bats and a haunted house! He did a great job! We used dead flowers for the centerpieces and lots of halloween lights to set the mood!

Here is the whole "grand kid" gang at the Schmidt family Halloween party! This year was extra special because Jared's family moved here from Northern Cali in September, my brother in law JR got to come since we were celebrating on Sunday, AAAAND this is the first year that my 6 year old niece Sarah got to carve pumpkins! Sarah is my sweet niece who is allergic to so many things. She has been having NAET treatments for her allergies and we have seen HUGE progress with her! So exciting!

We usually try to do some kind of gross grub for dinner but kept it pretty mild with Centipedes (meatballs in bread dough) and Lizard Gizzards (chicken strips in winger's sauce). Yummy! It was a blast to have all the cousins together for the holiday.

Alta in the Fall

This is the last picture I have of me with blonde hair!!! Now it is...you'll just have to wait and see!

I love being in the mountains especially in the fall when the leaves are turning colors. Because of this love of the mountains and because school pictures are so insanely expensive, I followed my sister Anna's lead and took my kids to the mountains to take my own pictures! Haha! I'll show you expensive photo place! Of course the first time I took my kids in, my cute son protested because he thought we would take "fun" pictures not serious ones! Sheesh! It was horrible and he ended up sitting in the car by himself for 15-20 minutes while I took pictures of my girl. Second time around, I caught on to what he meant and here is the result! So you guessed it, Elijah got to wear is batman costume for his school pictures! Sigh! Of course this is my fault because he and I have loved dressing up since he was 2 when it was his Aragorn costume and wooden swords! I love it!

Elijah's Birthday Party

Okay so I'm a bit behind, but I wanted to share what we did for Elijah's birthday party this year. Elijah requested to have a Ninja party so we found shirts from China Town in San Fran and bought enough for each child to have their own. Then we cut them to try and make them look like ninja uniforms! Yeah, we love costumes! Our apartment is way too small to have the party at our house so we borrowed the church and then created a scene out of poster paint and a whole lot of paper by the yard stuff. Thank goodness Josh is so darn artistic! We also created a big poster with a picture of each kid as a ninja to say "Happy Birthday Elijah". Macey's was a great resource for our ninja swords and the pictures for the cake and cupcakes. Man I love those guys! I also want to thank the guys from backyard FX on youtube for showing how to make fake glass and cool ninja outfits. We made a few sheets of glass as a test run and when Josh got cut from his lethal blow we decided sharp objects and 16 little kids was not a good combo...maybe when they're older!

Oh, I almost forgot we found breakable boards online and I must say that was a huge hit! All in all we had a great time and Elijah had a very happy birthday!

Testing, Testing, 1, 2, 3???

Hello? Is anyone out there?

Okay so we have finally added our first blog posting! As you can tell by the picture we started this blog thing a while ago but never did anything with it! So today we are finally throwing caution to the wind and adding something! It's not much but it will have to do...at least until we stop potty training the girl!!!!