Christmas Presents!

The other night before bedtime, the kids got to open their Christmas Pj's. Because they were wrapped in identical paper each tried to convince us that their present was actually their siblings. After trying to reason with them, we just let them open their sibling's present. Here they are in their Christmas Pj's.

As with any Clark kids photo shoot, the outtakes are typically my favorite. Case in point. :)

We are going to be taking a bit of a blogging break until after the holidays. We will be back with all kinds of new and cool stuff to share with you after the holidays.

 

Introducing our Christmas Tree

We are finally finishing decorating our house for Christmas. The outside lights and wreath went up the other day, but alas part of the lights flicker (and they are not supposed to) and we don't keep them on long for fear of them shorting out. Just another Christmas light saga. Doesn't everybody seem to have those stories? The pumpkins made it off the porch and into the compose pile. So, its beginning to feel like Christmas...oh wait the weather forgot the memo since its been in the 60s and 70s this past week not that I am complaining. I'm a warm weather girl. :)  We thought we would introduce you to our tree and since we have lots of sentimental ornaments we thought we would share them with you.

Chris and Megan's childhood ornaments...

Ornaments from our travels...

Derek and Brooke's Ornaments...and as I am looking at this collage more closely I realized that the mp3 player at the bottom is actually one of my ornaments that I got in high school when there were other mp3 players out there besides iPods. ha! Its one of the kids favorite ornaments since it plays music.

Family Ornaments...

These are just a few of our ornaments. :-) Decorating our Christmas tree is one of our favorite things to do together. This year Derek was so excited to "put decorations on the tree". It was really fun to watch him help. Here are my cute little helpers.

And Derek putting the star on top.

 

Making Cookies

The kids and I "made" cookies from the Nestle pre-made dough. They helped put the dough on the cookie sheet and tried to sample the dough.

Project #2

Well, we expected to have our Laundry Room completed at the end of our diy-a-thon. Alas, sickness has prevented that so instead of completed of a completed space we are happy with adjusting to it in the interim.

Here are the boys painting. We went with a slightly greyish toned color called Quill. I love it! Since the laundry room has no natural light it can be frustrating with yellowish tinted walls to tell if there really is a stain on a shirt or is it just a bad reflection. This is also as close as you get to a before picture since we are really bad about that.

Derek got to help paint and he was thrilled that he even got a little roller like Daddy's. He could care less that his spot to paint was behind the washer and dryer.

We then replace the light fixture to have 3 light bulbs which greatly increased the lighting. It is like a totally different room in there!

This is not what our laundry room looks like now. The sink unit turned out to be junk. Right after this picture we discovered that the cabinet was cheaply put together, structurally iffy, and was cracked in the back. So, we returned it. We are waiting for the kids to get better so we can take a road trip to IKEA for a cabinet.

Brooke and her Babies

While Chris and Derek took one of their many trips to Lowe's during our diy-a-thon, Brooke and I played dolls and read books before bedtime.