More Gingerbread Houses

When we were at Julie's for Christmas, Deb gave us a homemade gingerbread house. It is super detailed and really beautiful so we got another chance to decorate a gingerbread house.

Like last time, it was a quick operation of decorate it and then eat it.  Probably some year we will make the house and have it sit out for a few days and then eat it, as most people probably do, but for now our gingerbread houses have short lifespans.

Cocktail Sauce, Chili's, Child Labor, Christmas, 'Cats, and Competition

Today was a busy day.  This morning I took Joshua to soccer. On the way home we needed to pick up some cocktail sauce for the appetizer we needed for tonight.  Joshua enjoyed carrying it through the store.  He also enjoyed me foolishly letting him hold it in his car seat while we drove to our next stop.  It was closed and sealed, so I thought it would be fine.  But soon I smelled the pungent scent of cocktail sauce, and I knew I had a problem on my hands.  Well, not so much on my hands, but all over his car seat, which through the cleaning process ended up being on my hands I suppose.  We then went home, and since Clara and Hannah were still with Mom and Ron, Meghan and Joshua and I went to lunch at Chili's.  Joshua chowed down on some mac 'n cheese.

We still have some ice on our driveway, and since the weather was a little warmer today, I wanted to try to get rid of some of it while it was easier to scrape away before it refroze.  I used my snow shovel, and I invited Joshua out to use his new snow shovel that he got for Christmas.  He immediately went for the remaining snow pile in front of our house and went to work transferring snow randomly around the pile.

In the evening we went to Julie and Andrew's for Christmas with my Dad and Deb, my siblings, and our families.  Here Dad spends some quality time with the girls.


We had a really fun evening.  We had great food, and we all somehow managed to cram around a single table without feeling cramped.  Meghan then had to take the kids home to get them in bed, but I stayed to continue the festivities.  K-State's played in the Buffalo Wild Wings Bowl tonight, though it had a really late start.  Thanks to some technological workarounds, we were able to watch it on the TV, even though Julie and Andrew don't have cable.  K-State beat Michigan handily, capping a season that started poorly but ended quite well.  During and after that we played games, including a baseball trivia game and a fun game called TriBond.  We don't get to see Dad and Deb all that often, so it was really great to get to spend time with them, and it was all-around a really fun day.

One Last Date Night for 2013

One of our favorite restaurants is The Melting Pot.  We don't get to go there very often, as it's not a place you can take small kids, and it's quite expensive.  But tonight we had a date night, and my company gave everyone who wasn't able to attend the corporate Christmas party (it was in California at our headquarters) the option to expense a meal out at a restaurant.  Armed with a night free of kids and free restaurant money, we headed out to The Melting Pot.  The total bill was over our allowed expense, so it wasn't totally free for us, but it was much better than it would have been.  The food was great, as always.  Sometimes this blog is really useful.  I remembered we had a great experience last time, but I couldn't remember exactly what we had.  But I also remembered I mentioned it in the post, so I used my phone to look it up, and we then ordered the Bananas Foster dessert fondue.  It was a great meal, and the only regret is that I only had my phone to use to take the pictures, which is why the quality of the photos is a little lacking.

Happy Christmas Eve

Today is Christmas Eve and we had a nice day and evening. We just hung out in the early part of the day. Then we had an early dinner before church. I normally like having seafood on Christmas Eve and this year we had cioppino (an Italian seafood stew or soup) with garlic and herb bread, which was really yummy. Then we got dressed and ready to go.

We attended Candlelight Christmas Eve service at Church of the Resurrection as we normally do. This year, the Fouts family and Peg and Ron were able to attend with us. Though I really look forward to the day where all my kids can attend Christmas Eve service with us, we aren't there yet. So the kids went to the nursery and Joshua at least had a blast and they all seemed like it was reasonably fun. It was a really special service and was a great sermon that Jason and I both got a lot out of.

Though Clara has grown a ton in the past year (Finally. Her height is actually sort of on the chart now.), she wore her same coat from last year, although I think the arms were just a bit short. Also like last year, she loved running around the roomy atrium after service. Joshua also was very active.

We had such a special time at a very meaningful service with our family. Then we went home and immediately put the kids to bed since they were super tired and wrapped presents in preparation for tomorrow. Though as a child I certainly loved Christmas the most, as an adult Christmas Eve may be my favorite. I love everything about it and this year was no exception.

Merry Nicholl Christmas

Today we celebrated Christmas with my mom's side of the family.  Meghan had picked out great outfits for the kids.  Unfortunately, I'm apparently out of touch with girls' fashion, as I totally botched their shawls when I was taking the kids' picture while Meghan finished getting ready.  Once we got to Mom and Ron's house, we got things corrected, and I snapped a quick picture of the grandparents/grandkids while Nick was taking his.  This was a notable picture, as Benjamin has joined the party this year.

We decided to try a picture of the grandkids/cousins by themselves.  This quickly went from not too bad to, well, bad.

Hannah still fancies herself to be a baby sometimes, and she saw Benjamin's baby swing and desperately wanted to get in it.  She happily swung for quite awhile in it.

Clara seemed to have an especially fun time this year.  She got to spend time with various relatives and even got to hone her photography skills when Nick, who is fantastic with the kids, let her take a picture with his camera and then view the results, which delighted her.

We then enjoyed an excellent Christmas meal.  It was one of those meals where literally everything is good.  We had such a large crowd that we broke into two full tables.  Thankfully with Mom and Ron's new house, you never feel separated from anyone else, as all the living spaces flow together on the main floor.  This was one of the reasons they moved, and I think it definitely paid off.

Later we did presents.  The four cousins all received quite a few things, but that didn't stop Joshua from immediately eyeing Clara's loot to see if it was something he wanted to take for himself.

Meghan took the kids home so they could nap, and I stayed for a little longer to play games and to eat shrimp cocktail and more of Grandma's Christmas cookies (this year cooked by Guest Chef Uncle Brent).  It was a super fun day.  I am looking forward to next year's Christmas being less of a reunion than it normally is, as we are expecting and hoping that the parties traveling from Iowa and Texas decrease and the parties coming from within the state of Kansas increase.  Having more of our family closer is always a good thing!  Merry Christmas!

Home Builders and Home Wreckers

As we did last year, this year we decided to make a gingerbread house as a family. Except this time our gingerbread house was actually a gingerbread house and not a gingerbread train.  The first phase of the project was the decorating.  The house itself came already assembled, which was nice.  It included the candy, the icing, and the fondant.  I started off decorating it like a gingerbread house, but I realized one of the main purposes is for the kids to be able to decorate it, so I changed my strategy to just create as much icing surface area as possible to give plenty of places to stick on the candy.  It went fairly well, but the small candy balls were hard to handle, and the dogs were the beneficiaries.

Here is the finished version of the house.  I didn't have a great place to use the red and green fondant, so I put some stripes on the roof and made a small chimney and a green door.  But I just slapped the green on the front of it, as everyone was anxious for phase 2 of the project.

We then wasted no time in beginning the destruction of the house we just built.  One plan could have been to break it into small pieces and then eat the pieces, but I decided a better plan was for all of us to just dig in and bite chunks off of it.  Hannah was too small to do this, and Meghan seemed to think this wasn't the best approach, so they each ate their portions in the more traditional manner.  It was another fun time, and I look forward to next year when Hannah can join in the decorating process.

Christmas Cookie Delivery Service

This year for Christmas, Meghan decided to bake some cookies for the neighbors on our street.  She baked several different types and loaded them into boxes.  But she wanted me to deliver them.  I'm certainly not nearly as shy as I used to be, but in some ways I'm still the shy kid, as I was very much not looking forward to going door-to-door.  There's no reason I should be apprehensive, as everyone is friendly, and I'm delivering a box of cookies.  It's not like I'm dropping off subpoenas or trying to convert them to be Jehovah's Witnesses.  So it's sort of an unreasonable emotion, but I can't help it.  I was kinda hoping she'd forget, but last night when I got home I noticed the 12 boxes on our counter, and I knew I was on the hook.  So tonight I loaded up Joshua and Clara in the wagon as well as the 12 boxes.  We went to all the houses on our street, and only one person didn't answer the door.  I talked to everyone else, and it went totally fine, of course.  Hopefully that'll make me more comfortable doing it next year.

Extreme Cleaning

I am very thankful that Meghan does the vast majority of the regular cleaning of our house. But some tasks are a little beyond what she'd prefer to handle.  Today she asked me to clean two areas that don't need to be cleaned frequently, but that do need attention every once in awhile.  We have a vaulted entryway.and there's a coat closet with a weird platform on top.  I guess we could put plants or a statue or whatever up there, but we haven't.  It's also carpeted, which is a little odd, but I guess that keeps it from looking dusty.  Anyway, Meghan wanted it vacuumed, and I was excited to take on the task.  I could have just stood on a stepstool and reached across, but there's no fun to be had there.  I decided the only reasonable way was to climb up to it and vacuum from up there.  I'm not sure if it's made to withstand a man's weight, so I made sure to stay on the edges where it was supported. We also have a window high above the front door  Meghan asked me to clean and dust it, so I broke out my super handy Little Giant ladder and took care of it.  While I was up there, I also scraped off a small bit of paint.  This little bit of paint is significant in our family, because during the day it looks like a black speck against the light background, and Joshua has many, many, many times declared it to be a bug.  Often it would be the first thing he'd announce to visitors as they walked in the door, even when he was only saying one word at a time at that point.  "Bug!"  "I don't think that's a bug, Joshua."  "Bug!"  "I think it's just a spot."  "Bug!"  "Okay, yes, it's a bug."

Facial Hair Is Not For Me

I'm not a hairy guy.  Which is good, because I like Meghan, and she doesn't like hairy guys.  I couldn't grow a real beard if I want to.  There have been a few times where I didn't shave for awhile, and my cheeks ended up with not much more than sparse hairs.  It's just not meant to be.  But that's okay,  Since my car has been in the shop for a week or so, I've been working from home most days, and that combined with laziness meant I didn't shave for several days in a row.  I think Meghan wasn't terribly pleased with this, but she didn't complain.  Today, though, I decided enough was enough, and I shaved.  I wish I had taken a "before" picture to show the full scraggly glory of my "beard", but I didn't.  For fun, though, I started by just shaving it down to a goatee.  Here it is in this picture, though you can't see it well because of the shadows.  Okay, that's not really true.  You mostly can't see it well because there's barely anything there.  And this is after something like four days of growth.  I showed it to Meghan, and she actually said it didn't look too bad.  I expected her to hate it, so I guess that's good.  Still, I'm not going to do this permanently, because I don't really like the look.

Before I shaved it completely off, I decided to try a mustache, just for comedy's sake.  There are people that can pull this off, I suppose, but I'm not one of them, and nor do I want to be one of them.  Meghan was decidedly less enthused by this variant, not surprisingly.  I moved into better light, so at least this time you can see it better.  Oh wait, no, no you can't, because there's still hardly anything there.  But what is there is unacceptable because it's a weird mustache.  So off it went, and I spent today with my appearance as it should be: free of facial hair.

Blockfest: Daughters Edition

Today is another ridiculously cold day; the type of day where you never want to leave the house.  But we had planned to go to Blockfest today, and God made hats, mittens, and heated cars for a reason, so I decided to carry on with our plans.  I've now been to Blockfest three times, once with just Joshua, once with Joshua and Clara (and Julie), and today with Clara and Hannah.  They both liked it a fair amount.  Clara enjoyed building towers, with the unit cube blocks and the big foam blocks being her favorite.  Hannah isn't yet able to build things, but at the colored unit cube station, I suggested to her that she could put the blocks in the tub, and she thought that was a great idea.  She spent the entire time grabbing every block within her reach (in true Hannah style, she wasn't interested in crawling around to find others) and putting/throwing it into the tub.  When she had them all in, I would dump them out, and then she would happily start over again.  Hopefully when we go next year she'll be a little more into the building aspect of it, but it's always good to have a kid who likes to clean things up.