1. What is your holiday wish for your family?

To have a day filled with time together without any medical emergencies.

2. What is your Christmas morning tradition?

We all get up together--which usually means kids wake mom up, mom makes coffee, dad gets up :) Then we open all sit in the living room and open stockings and then we open gifts one-by-one. We all then have breakfast together in our pjs.

3. If you could ask Santa for one, completely decadent wish for yourself, what would it be?

A vacation somehwere interesting for our family with the necessary support for our daughter so that everyone can have fun. A gift just for me would be camera with lenses (or new lenses for my camera) or maybe a wii fit.

4. How do you make the holidays special without spending any money?

Making ornaments out of things we already have such as recycling containers/cardboard or using found objects in different ways

Reading a different holiday book each night

Lighting a candle at dinner each night and discussing what we are each thankful for.

Making Christmas cookies and delivering to school teachers/bus drivers/office staff

Taking the time to make handmade gifts for each other

Taking a drive at night and looking at Christmas lights

Making holiday cards/addressing holiday cards to friends/family

Simple holiday crafts utilizing supplies we already have

Adding in new traditions (celebrating either St. Nicholas day or the Solstice this year)

Putting ornaments on the tree and discussing their meaning (all my children have been getting ornaments since they were born and I have mine from growing up as well)

Going to a Christmas Tree Lighting Ceremony

Going through our stuff and making piles to donate

5. What games did you play with your family growing up?

Mousetrap, Life, Monopoly, Hearts, Spades, Cribbage

6. What holiday tradition have you carried on from your own childhood?

Giving an ornament a year to my own children, watching a Christmas movie on Black Friday, reading a Christmas book each night, Having a Christmas Cookie making party

7. Where would you go for a Christmas-away-from-home trip?

Disney World as we have never been and think it would be magical at Christmas

8. Check out GameStop (link to: http://bit.ly/gamestop10) and tell us, what are the three top items on your GameStop Wish List this year?

DSi XLs for all three children

Black Ops game for the PS3 with the Prestige bundle

wii fit

A New Blog

So, a new blog :) I have been away from blogging for awhile and--lets be honest--the old blog had all of three entries. I would like to think/believe/wish that I will use this new blog more frequently.

I have pretty much stopped scrapbooking (burnout) for a year now and have realized that although I like looking back at the scrapbooks and enjoy the memories and there was even a bit of art therapy in there, I am a different person now. I stay up late to do work or sew or spend some time reading while I used to stay up late to scrapbook. I also realized that I scrapbooked bits and pieces of the little ones' lives but very little of my life or my husband's life.

Hopefully this will be a change. A place to collect bits of this and pieces of that. A place for favorite photographs. A place to write the daily stories. Hopefully a place that I won't look at as a chore and just one more thing to do; I am hoping that this will be a part of my daily ritual that I enjoy.

I look forward to sharing our family life, posting recipes, sharing books read, posting pictures of crafts, and discussing our favorite hikes.