January

 Our January was filled with family, friends, school, and activities!  Pictures included....

iceskating

learning minecraft from Javonte

They escaped from the escape room with minutes to spare!

hot chocolate date

When the youth group winter retreat was cancelled due to Covid, Summer had 3 of her best friends over for a sleepover!

These girls are such a blessing.

All 4 love the Lord, and and love and pray for each other so well!

All 3 friends love to act, and are very creative.  They wrote and performed a play together, including props, costumes, songs, sound effects, and a multimedia twist, all in a few hours.  They amaze me.  Click here to watch it.

Summer and friend Allegra sledding

Larkyn loves to practice at school (when she can use the keyboard) while Summer has cheer practice.  Click here for a clip of her practicing.

Colton loves basketball, love to practice, loves to play, and is improving a lot!  He is #2.  Click here for a video of his game-winning overtime shot.

Summer is loving being a cheerleader!  She gets to cheer for all varsity boys home games, and cheering fits her gifts of encouragement, love of the stage, fantastic memory, and natural enthusiasm perfectly!  She is a natural!  They have been working on a halftime show set to music that will debut at this week's homecoming game, but for now I'll include a link here of the halftime cheer that they did at their last game.

More Cheers:

Dribble

Boom Dynamite

VICTORY

Take you for a ride

We've Got Spirit

Cheering section for the cheerleader!

Family

I got to chaperone Summer's middle school ski field trip!  It was single digit temps, but still so fun!

Happy half birthday to Larkyn!  As a summer birthday, she celebrated her half birthday at school.  She has been counting down the days until she could bring treats and be celebrated at school!  Happy 7.5 years, kiddo! :-)

It wasn't only Larkyn's half birthday this month!  It was also her spiritual birthday!  We celebrate the day that she chose the SHE wanted to follow Jesus!  She gets to pick a meal to make for the family (she went all out with rainbows and sprinkles this year!), we re-read each of her spiritual bday blog posts as we remember and praise the Lord for her decision, her spiritual growth, and the ways we celebrated in year's prior, and she gets to open one gift that will further her spiritual growth.

We are LOVING this book so far - amazing stories, illustrations, and thoughts to discuss and share, along with an amazing prayer in each story. Larkyn and I still do our daily Bible reading each morning when I wake her up (from our One Year Devotions book), but we have loved reading these stories as bedtime stories.  Highly recommend. 

Christmas Fun!

Merry Christmas!

 This post will be divided into 5 parts:

1. Random Christmas Fun
2. Christmas Eve
3. Christmas Morning
4. Christmas in Woodbury (Kirkwood Side)
5. Christmas in Boston (Tommerdahl Side)

Random Christmas Fun

Our annual tour of neighbor Mr. Ken's "Christmas museum" :)

Our annual neighborhood Christmas caroling

Loved helping with Larkyn's class Christmas party

Grandpa K played at the mall for donations for the Salvation Army bucket

Kid's annual homemade gift this year was woodburning kitchen utensils for family members

Christmas Eve

This years annual graham cracker houses

This year's new Christmas Jammies

Merry Christmas Eve!

Christmas Morning

We had such a sweet morning celebrating Christ's birth, starting with our traditional reading of the Christmas story and the kids acting it out with the little people nativity.

All the kids were very generous this year both with each other and with us!

After we opened the "kid bought" presents, Mom and Dad had 4 small gifts for each kiddo, and the main gift - taking the family skiing at Welsh Village!  Each kid opened a set of books, a new wall calendar, an activity book, and a personalized gift (Colton roller blades, Larkyn rainbow crocs, and Summer the upgraded Geocache app).  They are the sweetest kids ever.

Our family Christmas gift, skiiing, happened a few days later, and we made SUCH great family memories we all agreed it might have to be a repeat gift next year!

Christmas in Woodbury

The kids got to gift their homemade gifts

The kids' main gift from Grandma and Grandpa was a Nintendo Switch, along with Mario Kart and Minecraft.  They were ecstatic!

This year, our traditional Christmas carol sing along included Summer on the trombone, Colton on the trumpet, and Grandpa on the piano :)

Cousin Jammies

New hats!

Pizza night!

So blessed!

Christmas in Boston

This year we flew to Boston to have Christmas with Auntie Sarah, Uncle Ty, Owen, and Elton!  It was amazing getting to have all the cousins together!  We got creative on gifts this year, as most of us were flying, so we pooled our money to donate to Compassion International this year to help girls at risk.  We are already so blessed.  Grandma and Grandpa found ways to creatively gift the kids all month instead of just one morning ;)....they gifted them a ski lesson at Thanksgiving, new magazines (Highlights, National Geographing, and Sports Illustrated) that will come all year, gave them fitbits out in Boston, and had a bag of goodies/books waiting for them when they got back to Apple Valley :)

We are beyond blessed with amazing family, and are so grateful that God calls us family, because he was willing to send us his Son at Christmas to reunite us with him.  Immanuel.  God with us.  We celebrate Jesus this season.