Happy New Year!

This year has been filled with a lot of fun times, and a lot of struggles! I just wanted to take a few seconds and thank everyone for everything that they have done for me this year! You are all great and wonderful and I don't know what I would do without all my family and friends in my life! You are great examples to me, and I look forward to connecting with you all through our blogs! I'm so thankful that I started this blog! I have been able to vent, catch up with some old friends, and get closer to some of my cousins!! Thanks to everyone that reads and comments on my blog!

I hope that you all had a great year! I also hope that next year will be just as great, if not better than this year! Love you all!

Our big fun Christmas!

Oh Wow what a great Christmas we had this year! Sorry I haven't posted about Christmas yet, but we have all had way too much fun playing with our Christmas gifts!

This year our Christmas fun started on Christmas Eve! Darin had to work on Christmas Eve night, so he missed out on the first part, but luckily he did have Christmas day off!! Well anyway on Christmas Eve we headed over to my Grandma Gines' home for our fun Christmas Eve party! I love going to my grandma's house! I have some of the funniest, craziest, fun cousins and uncles in the world! I just laugh the whole time that i'm there! If you have ever met my dad or my brothers, just picture a bunch of them sitting around telling jokes all night! It's great! So anyway back to christmas, we had dinner and then we played our white elephant game, which has gotten crazy long!! We had 38 people play this year, and it took us almost 2 hours to play! Then Santa came to visit us. He sang and danced and gave all the kids presents. Then we all gave grandma our gifts and then it was off to my mom's to do our christmas together! Unfortunatly, we ended up getting to my mom's house around 10:00 thanks to the white elephant game, so everyone was tired. We still had fun though! At my mom's house all three of the grandkids took turns opening up gifts. MyKelle and Gage both got way spoiled from jo jo this year! Some of MyKelle's favorite gifts were her leapster ( and games to go with it), her coloring table with everything that she needs to color, and her new blanket and stuffed animal! Gage's favorite gifts that he got from jo jo are his basket ball hoop, all the trucks with a car mat, and his new blanket!! Then it was my turn to open up gifts. All the rest of my family took their husbands to a football game for christmas and my mom helped them pay for it, so that was their christmas. Darin couldn't get the time off, so we didn't get to go on the trip, so that's why I was the only one to open up the most gifts! ( my mom did have other gifts for eveyone, like aprons, a cookbook, a flashlight, tools for the guys, etc) My mom gave me a Wii for christmas!!!! I was so overwhelmed with joy that I cried!!! And of course kelli was there with natalies new camera to document the event!!(I don't have those pics though-sorry) It is such a great gift! I haven't stopped playing it! After we all opened gifts it was time to go home and get ready for Santa to come to our house! (not that my kids needed anything now)

This is the Christmas Tree after Santa came to visit!

The kids were so excited about Christmas that they woke up at 7:30 (even though they didn't get to sleep until midnight the night before!) The first thing that they did was went through their stockings! Gage was so excited over the new toothbrush in his stocking that he tried to use it before we took it out of the package!

Gage and MyKelle had a great Christmas from Santa and mom and dad. They got new bedspreads and sheets for their new bed! Gage got a cool tool bench with tools that make real tool sounds!

MyKelle also got a leap frog tag system which is way cool and highly recommened for all kids preschool age!

After our Christmas we headed up to Grandma and Grandpa Williams' to do Christmas with them! The kids all got dart guns and had fun shooting at each other!

We had such a great Christmas! Thanks to everyone for making it so special!

Here comes Santa Claus. . .

This year we have had a few visits from santa already. MyKelle is so cute! She only wants santa to bring her one thing, "a barbie doll, Jasmine". I asked her one night what else she wanted Santa to bring her and she said "Nothing else mom, I have everything else. Let Santa take my other toys to other kids that don't have toys!" What a sweet little girl!

Everytime Gage sees santa he gets all excited but doesn't like to sit on santa's lap until after MyKelle. He always asks santa for a truck. Whenever you ask Gage what santa says he says, " Oh oh oh!" It is just about the cutest thing ever!

This last Saturday we had our big "Nordfors" family christmas party! There is so many of us now, that we had to have our party at a church house this year.

We did lots of stuff at this party. We ate our famous scones and ham for breakfast. Then we tied some quilts that we are going to donate to primary childrens hospital in Charlie Coopers name!

Above is a picture of my mom and jessica tieing a quilt.

Then we had all the kids act out the christmas story! It was quite entertaining this year. However my kids were the only one's that refused to be in the play, so I didn't get any pictures of the wonderful nativity. But incase you didn't know when my family acts out the christmas story there were unicorns, lions, turtles, and santa claus that went to see Jesus born!

I also got to hold Charlie for a little bit! He is so sweet and I was getting some pretty good smiles from him! Thanks Angel for letting me hold your little boy.

After the nativity, we heard that Santa was on his way.
This is all the kids patiently waiting for Santa!

Look at gage, he is so cute!

When Santa showed up he made us all sing Jingle bells and dressed my cousin steven up to look like rudolph. I just love Santa! He always knows how to make me laugh!

I did get some footage of Santa and everyone singing the end of jingle bells. However I was holding my camera the wrong way, so if you want to watch the video you have to turn your head! Enjoy!

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!

Christmas a little early

We got a few of our Christmas gifts a little early this year! Our dishwasher broke back in October, and we have been doing all of our dishes by hand!!! It's amazing how I take that dishwasher for granted!! Well for christmas Darin's parents helped us buy a new dishwasher that I insisted we install early! I just love this new dishwasher. It holds so many more dishes then our last one, and it is so quiet!

The kids also got their christmas gift from darin's parents early! They bought them bunk beds!! (Buying beds is something that they like to do for all of their grandkids. They never got MyKelle a bed, so they got us bunk beds!!) We were so excited about the bunk beds, we put them together the minute we had them delivered. The kids just loved the beds-until it was time to go to sleep! We started putting the kids to bed that night at 7:30, and they didn't fall asleep until almost 11:00! This was the first experience that Gage has had with a bed, so he wanted his crib back and just threw the biggest fit. Once I got him calmed down MyKelle decided that she was too high, and wanted her old bed back. They both ended up crying themselves to sleep! It took about a week to get them used to the new beds, but now they love them!
The day after Thanksgiving we got out all of our christmas decorations and our christmas tree and we decorated our house. Well i didn't put very many christmas ornaments on the tree this year thinking that it would be less tempting to the kids to play with the ornaments. Well the other day I caught MyKelle singing to herself and playing around the tree. I went in the living room and asked MyKelle what she was doing. She told me the tree needed more ornaments, and she was decorating it.
Below are her decorations to the tree.

She went and grabbed all of her bracelets and necklaces and hung them on the tree.

What a sweet little girl! Merry early Christmas!

Candy Making

Every year since I can remember me and my huge extended family get together and make chocolates. I love this tradition! I also love to brag to everyone about how good our candy is! Since my gammy died we have still tried to carry on her tradition of candy making! This year however, no one wanted to make candy. So I called my mom and begged her to make candy with me this year. After much begging she caved in. We invited my sisters, kelli and natalie and jessica to come help us. (We missed you jessica!!)

The first time we got together was the saturday after Thanksgiving. We made a whole lot of fondant that we are using as fudge!! We made really yummy fudge! (sorry no pictures of this get together! I forgot my camera) We made mint, vanilla cashew, and orange cream!(which was orange with vanilla on top!)

The second time we got together it was just me and my mom. We made nut rolls! I have never made these before so it was really fun to learn!!

This is me stirring the carmel to go on the vanilla fondant!

This is me putting nuts on the carmel to make one complete nutroll! Yummy!!!

This is a bunch of the nutrolls!

This was a very tasty treat! We took the leftover fondant and the leftover carmel and put them in a container together and then ate it all up! It was Soooooo good! I'm wondering why we ruin that by putting nuts on it!!!

The third time we all got together, we dipped the chocolates! I have only done this once before (last year) and I only did like 10 chocolates last year. So I was so excited when no one else wanted to dip this year, and I got to do it all my self!!!

This is me "bottoming" the chocolates

Just another picture of me!

This is me dipping!!! The first few looked really funny! but I think they looked edible by the end of the night!

More dipping!

Below are the finished products that I dipped!!

Thank you to my mom and my sisters for helping me make chocolates and fudge this year!! I had a lot of fun!

Santa Claus is coming to town

(Don't let your kids read this blog!!! I don't know why they would be reading my blog anyway!)

Below are pictures of last year.

For the last couple of years my dad has played Santa Claus!! He has been Santa at christmas ward parties, family parties, and Walgreens!!! That's right Walgreens!!! And he's doing it again this year! This saturday (December 13th) from 1:00 - 3:00 my dad will be at the Clinton Walgreens playing Santa. Every year Walgreens has a Santa come and the kids get their picture taken with him and they get a FREE 4 x 6 picture! I think that this is a lot of fun, and my dad really enjoys it! So bring your kids to the clinton walgreens on saturday to have their picture taken with Santa for FREE!!! I love that my dad does this! Thanks dad! Love ya!

Little MyKelle

This past week I have been struggling a bit with staying happy and cheerful. I know everyone has these days, but today was a little different. Today we were driving home from my mom's house. It was late at night and I was hopping that my kids would fall asleep before we got home. Well MyKelle refused to sleep and she was tired and very winey!! All of the sudden MyKelle says, "mommy you made me cry!" Feeling very frustrated with her (because i didn't do anything to hurt her feelings) I asked MyKelle, "Why are you crying MyKelle?" " Because you are being very sweet!!" was her reply. I was so touched by what she said that i started crying!!! How did she know what I needed to hear? I guess the lord does know and understand us!!