January 2014 Fun!

A month in a post.....

HAPPY 2014!!

New Years Day found us at the Connemara Meadow Conservancy with our friends Bob and Penny Mione.  We enjoyed a picnic lunch, nice walk and Bob showed us his really cool sling shot, we found cool leaves, and enjoyed standing in 2 cities at once (Plano and Allen)

 JESUS WANTS ME FOR A SUNBEAM

And here are the cute kids on their first week at church of the year where I officially have no more kids in Nursery, Matthew is now a SUNBEAM!  Here he is in his special "What does the fox say" jacket.  It's actually a jacket that belonged to Stephen when he was young, Matthew loves it because he really loves that song "What does the Fox Say" and the brassy buttons have foxes on them!

SERVICE CAN BE FUN!

 I'm always looking for ways to get my kids to do service.  It is so easy for them to feel like the world revolves around them so to get them to think outside themselves and about others, it's a win win in my book.  So something that I've found that works GREAT is that each Friday, usually as Matthew and I are rounding the corner to our street after walking the kids, our garbage man is just finishing picking up our trash.  So Matthew and I have started rolling up our neighbor's trash cans.  He really likes it sometimes, and here is a time when the stocking cap he was wearing made his hair look funny! =)

PRESIDENTS DAY

I love an outing with my kids!  We also loved a beautiful day of from school for Presidents Day and went to the Perot Museum of Nature and Science. I love taking my kids places and doing fun things like this, most of the time they're well behaved and that makes us able to do lots of fun things like this....

HEARD MUSEUM

 Matthew is part of this preschool co-op.  This month we studied Dinosaurs and took the opportunity to see the Dinosaur exhibit at the Heard Museum, here is a shot of all the kids, it was quite the crew and a fun day!

Allen Eagles, Texas State Football Champions!

We went to support our local Allen Eagles and cheer them on to the State Football Championship!  Allen Eagles versus Pearland, and our Eagles won!  What was really fun was that it was held at AT&T Stadium where the Dallas Cowboys play.  Tickets to see the Cowboys are pretty extravagant and not what I'd choose to spend my money on, but $10 tickets to watch our Eagles play, then that becomes a family activity!

McKneely Christmas Fun 2014

The day after Christmas we went down to College Station to spend some time with our McKneely family....

Kaitlyn got her ears pierced!  It was her BIG Christmas present and she had quite the support group of Grandma, Aunt Laura, Aunt Sarah and cousin Shelly.  We also chose some really cute earrings for after they are done.  She was a little nervous but it didn't hurt at all and was over before she knew it!

Other McKneely family fun was this impromptu wrestling match--SO MUCH FUN!

Lewis Christmas Traditions

Each year we go to my parents house and decorate Gingerbread houses.  They had a special treat of waffles shaped like the state of Texas and all the sausage Sam could eat, he was thrilled!  This year we did it on December 23rd and took the time to open our Christmas presents too.  We had a great time!

They fill my home with music!

My older 2 children play the piano.  I LOVE that they do.  It's one of the "good mom" things I'm proud of.  I think that a person who can read music is calmer, smarter, and has a gift given to them that can be used to make the world a better place.

The piano comes naturally to Kaitlyn.  She plays well, has an ear for when things are not right, has far passed me in my abilities, and uses the piano as something to calm her when she's worked up.  She even plays prelude for Primary once a week so she's started adding church songs to her repertoire.  I think music will be a big part of her building her testimony of the Savior.

Sam, not so much, but he is determined and works hard and knows that it will be of benefit to him in the future to know how to play so he sticks with it.  I love this about his personality, he's so duty driven.  What a bright future he has.

They both played in their Christmas Recital and they did well.  Sam had decided to switch songs at the last minute but then froze and probably didn't do as well as he would have hoped, but experiences like this build character and I was proud of him for finishing and not giving up!

It was also a fun night because right after was the church Christmas party, and we had some of our neighbor friends stay and eat with us!  It's so fun when our neighbor circle and our church circle come together!

All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth....

This girl is amazing!  Stephen was pulled out of Sunday School at church to take her to the bathroom.  He waits in the hall and when she comes out she hands him one of her front teeth and the bloody tissue she used to pull it out while in the bathroom.

Then the next morning, she woke up and was bound and determined to get the other one out.  While she was supposed to be getting dressed, she was in the bathroom working on the other front tooth and wouldn't you know, by breakfast, she was toothless!

So she currently has 4 holes or windows in her smile, I think it's absolutely adorable.  She of course loves the attention, that she has a theme song this Christmas, and I love hearing her learn to talk all over again and she is learning how to EAT without many of her teeth!

Ice-mageddon...

Call it perfect timing, or the worst timing.

An ice storm shut down North Texas the first week of December.  It was the week of the Nativity exhibit and we'd been working ALL week to put the exhibit up.  The storm hit Thursday evening, and the exhibit was to open Friday morning.....

It was slated to be the BEST ever exhibit.  We'd added a bible exhibit (bibles through the centuries) that was worth MILLIONS of dollars, and had caught the interest of some local TV news stations (finally some news coverage of our event!) and we'd printed more invitations than ever and ran out!  It was devastating.

Preparations take months, set up began Monday, things were going so smoothly and we were praying, fasting, pleading that our event would go on.  But it was out of our control and the storm hit.  The storm was so severe they cancelled church, the exhibit stayed up, and we were permitted to open the following Tuesday and Wednesday.  We did our best to spread the word but our attendance wasn't what it would have been.  But I have to believe that there were people that came that wouldn't have come otherwise.

I also had a powerful realization.  There were times during the storm that we didn't think that the exhibit would even open, that we would have set it all up for nothing and would have to take it down.  The idea made me cry every time I thought of it.  But then I remembered an account of those that built the Salt Lake Temple.  Some of the jobs done were in areas that would never be seen by men, but still the craftsmen did their very very best work, because what they did wasn't done to be seen by men, but done as an offering to our Savior.  This was profound to me.  Why did we work so hard for the exhibit, but to give an offering to the Lord as a gift to thank him for his birth and life.  But I was grateful that we did open....

That was the awful part of the timing, but the nice about the timing was the way time stood still, we had a few days to spend as a family, take a much needed break (I'd been running pretty crazy with everything) and it was so nice to rest and reconnect.  We made it a point to go for a walk each day, here are some photos of those adventures....

Kaitlyn didn't notice dad telling her to wait and she slid in a laundry basket right into a pond and got a bit wet.  We're thankful for our Home Teacher who lived close by and let her throw her clothes into the dryer for a bit, and enjoy some yummy pumpkin chocolate chip cookies and milk.  Our next door neighbors lost a tree....

Dallas Millennial Choirs and Orchestra (DMCO)

THRILLING, A TOTAL HIGH!

Kaitlyn and I performed in our first concert with DMCO at the Meyerson Hall.  It was AMAZING! 

The music was challenging and it has been so wonderful to dust off my vocal pipes and sing music that really makes me work, it makes the concert all the more rewarding.

I've loved sharing this experience with Katilyn too.  I got emotional just seeing Kaitlyn and her Children's Chorus come rushing onto the stage at their during The Polar Express' "Spirit of the Season", and she sang with her WHOLE HEART!  She loved it and I loved watching her.

Matthew loved this too, he heard me practicing and developed his favorite song of my concert list, "Go Tell it on the Mountain" which had men parts (his), women's parts (mine) and children's parts (Kaitlyn's).  Poor guy fell asleep before he got to hear it performed.

Lindsey listened to the concert and heard that children as young as 4 were on the stage, oh boy!  She sharply turned to Stephen and said that she was going to do it next semester!  Too funny.

It was such a stressful day, in the midst of Nativity preparations, on the eve of an impending ice storm that would threaten the exhibit, and that day there was a resident of the City of Allen in need that our church stepped in to literally save at the last minute (elderly gentlemen on hospice living in a condemned house with no roof and an ice storm about to hit).

I think it was all too much and the whole next day I was just a wreck, I would cry when I would think about how beautiful the whole experience was, I'm so grateful for music and what it makes me feel.