A moment of quiet!

Shhh! Do you hear that? The quiet voices of a movie playing for Shiro and the soft coos of my Shandie. It’s a very rare and quiet moment right now for me. My little girlies are with my mom house sitting for my brother and my big guys are all at a movie with Duane. The house is very quiet right now, the thinking kind of quiet. The kind where I can actually form some thoughts in my mind other than; “Quiet wrestling with your brother!”, “Call me when your done and need wiped”, “Finish your school!”, “Clean up those toys!”. 

Since I have the quiet moment I figured I would do a quick update on life in Neyville these days.  We officially have started Christmas break here. Shaylah still has school until the 24th and then she will be home for two weeks. ::HAPPY DANCE:: Shelbie is on break from her tutoring job but still works at the preschool. She will have a few days off so it will be a wonderful treat to have all my kiddos here together.

This holiday season started off different from our norm and I was concerned with how the holidays would be, but Thanksgiving ended up being so much fun. We had 40+ people crammed in our little house. At one point a little boy ended up inside playing with the kids that no one knew! Turns out he was visiting one of our neighbors! Hehe

Here is a quick picture recap of our holiday season so far!    My beautiful girls on Thanksgiving

We started off the Christmas season with our annual trip up the hill to the Sonora Lights Parade.

  Decorating the tree

Every year we buy a new book to add to our Christmas collection. This year we purchased “Unwrapping the Greatest Gift”. This book is wonderful! It is a beautiful way to count down Advent with your kids, and to be honest, us big people get just as much out of it!

In addition to the Sonora parade we also went to our local parade. (Can you have too many parades??)   The girls all went and saw the Nutcracker. This tradition is so much fun. I’m a sucker for tradition! This year my mom joined us. This picture is special to me as it has four generations in it. What a sweet blessing! This picture really has nothing to do with our holidays season but this little guy is just too cute! He has wanted a robe like daddy for a while and we happened to find one at the Goodwill store the other day. Best 3 bucks I’ve ever spent!

Christmas is just around the corner. We are almost done with shopping and trying our best to focus on the reason for the season. Our family talked about how we could make this year different from the normal rush and we came up with a new Neyville tradition. We will not be doing any gift exchanging on Christmas. We are going to spend the day focusing on family and our Lord’s birthday. It’s His day anyway, right? We are all so excited about this. We still wanted to buy gifts for each other so we are making New Year’s Day our new gift exchange. It will be “Happy New Years gifts”! Jesus IS the reason for the season and we are trying hard to make that our focus!