Last Day O' Break Fun

I loved Christmas break. I really cherished every moment of having my girl Gracie home with us. We slept in. We ate breakfast at 9 o'clock. We did crafts. We watched movies. It was unscheduled bliss. It was so hard to see it end. On both of us. But I wasn't letting her know how hard it was for me. So her last morning of break I let her make a list of fun things to do that day. We read books, watched movies, and made a special snack. We had been wanting to try out making our own homemade pretzel bites and decided this was the perfect day. We used a recipe found here.

First of all let me say that there is nothing hard about this recipe. But it does have a lot of steps and is a bit labor intensive. We had done homemade pretzels before, but had never done the step where you boil them in the baking soda water. While a lot more work they tasted a whole lot better. Just like the mall pretzels.
We made regular bites to go with homemade cheese sauce and cinnamon and sugar bites to go with cream cheese frosting dip. VERY YUMMY! This ended up being our dinner for the night. We couldn't stop eating them.

Sorry there are no pics of our finished product. I guess we were too busy stuffing our faces. I know we will be making these again.

Breaking up is hard to do.....so you might as well make a party out of it, right?

A Trip to Nana's 4 Christmas

This year we went to Nana's house to have Christmas with her. We started our weekend by meeting her and the Rothzen's for dinner at a Mexican restaurant. It was a bit crazy (spilled tea, dropped ring pops, double ordering, the usual) with 5 kids, but it was still good to have a quick visit.

That night the kids got another wear out of their matching Christmas pjs and watched a Christmas movie. After they were in bed the adults opened our gifts. Charlene surprised me with a Kindle (wow!). The next morning the kids enjoyed opening all their gifts.



The girls loved playing with Nana's collection of misfit toys.

Thanks Nana you always spoil us!

She's in love.

Grace loves dogs. I mean she really loves them. She loves to play with her stuffed dogs, virtual dogs, my brother's dogs. She is a dog person. So one of her favorite parts of Christmas break was dogsitting for our friends the Haye family while they traveled for the holidays. Grace loved every minute that we had with Libby. At night when we were all sitting around watching tv and the kids were playing she would want Libby to sit with her so badly. So we would tell her to sit very still and put a blanket on her lap. Libby finally snuggled in with her. Grace kept giving us the thumbs up sign. I think we were all a bit sad to give her back. Now the question is how long we can stay a dog sitting family before we commit to one on a more full time basis. We shall see.

The Humistone Family Christmas

While we are blessed to be near our families we still miss having "in town" family. The Whetstone family has become our Hannibal family. Paul will jokingly call us the Humistone's a combination of our last names. We are so thankful for this precious family and the blessing they are to our lives. In December we had a two part "family" Christmas. For part one they invited us over for a fancy dinner. It was delicious! Then they surprised us with gifts and took a family photo for us in our fancy duds. It was a great night.

I love their huge real tree.
For part 2 of our family Christmas we watched the boys while Paul and Karen went out on a date night for Mr. Paul's birthday. When they got home we got to share the birthday dessert complete with candles.


After dessert we surprised their family with our gifts for them. We love doing this crazy young children season side by side with the Whetstones and their boys.