January catch-up

For me, it seems that blogging and timeliness just don't go together. So, here's another large, photo-heavy attempt to catch up on items I want to share!

Each Christmas, the 4 & 5 year-old class at church presents a living Nativity. The twins are in this class this year and both chose to be wise men. They did very well!

Church members come into the common room after service where the kids are posed up on a platform. The church members then sing through a bunch of carols. Thankfully, both boys kept themselves busy with their 'gifts' - though admitted later to being incredibly bored. Boring for the kids, too fun for the adults!

Since we're far from our families, most Christmas gift exchanges happen through the mail. When I opened the box from my parents, I was happy to find a tablerunner that immediately began gracing our table.

Mom also sent me the pattern, saying how fun and quick it was to make - two of my favorite crafting words! I have a stash of various holiday fabrics that would be perfect for this pattern.

Here are the SSCS gifts I made for my swap partner, Joy from JoyPatch. I spent a lot of time digging through her blog, looking for gift ideas. I had been wanting to try my hand at wool pincushions, so decided to design a pincushion using her favorite quote and her pets. My first several designs included flowers and dragonflies, but when I actually put it together, anything beyond the quote and the animal faces looked tacky and overcrowded.

Had my pattern shown the same thing, I would have made the pincushion pink rather than saving the pink for the flowers that weren't to be. I added in some pink pins and some vintage buttons to round out the gift. I finished sewing with a couple days to spare, so put together a quick gift bag. It was another fun exchange year!

While I was home over the holiday break, we filled up a lot of our time building train tracks. We've outgrown our train table and have a lot of fun making the tracks wind through the furniture. Here's a sample of our work.

We also had to make another round of recycle monsters. The boys attend a local weekly tennis program for kids, where they each get a little bottle of water. Those bottles provided our inspiration for this round of monsters. Here's Doodle #1's monster:

(yes, we did stamping earlier in the day and he decided to use his face...)
and Doodle #2's monster:

He had also saved some shoe forms that he found during our last shoe-shopping trip. He's a real trash-collector who has plans for everything he picks up. Hopefully he continues to do so well actually using the items!

Right after the holidays, we found an oragami book at the library and tried our hands at making several items from it. Our favorite thus far is a boat that actually floats. I didn't get a good picture of the boats, but did catch the boys in action.

They played with the boats until they turned into paper mush. (The boats - not the boys, though they were pretty damp and mushy too!). We have a couple more folds to try, but we're waiting for the weekend when my brain's a bit clearer!

One of the main reasons we've been busy lately is that our holiday season leads quickly into our birthday season. My partner's birthday comes a couple days after Christmas, followed by the twins on Jan 11. Then it's Doodle #3's turn in mid-February and mine in early March. Then we're done with birthdays until after the next Christmas. It makes for quite a whirlwind! This year the boys wanted to have a play-date with all their friends at once. We negotiated for a while and finally settled on renting the gym and having 8 of their friends join us for an afternoon of fun. The party was a hit! (I can't believe they're already 5!... that was fast!)

We did have one crisis only a couple minutes after entering the gym. Doodle #3 was attacking a ball much larger than him when his chin met the gym floor. He sat still long enough for me to put a bandaid on it before heading back out to play. We took him to the doctor after the party and were happy to find that his cut didn't require stitches - only some glue.

The unseasonably warm weather we experienced over the holidays lasted until yesterday, so we spent quite a bit of time hiking and exploring.

Pretty odd to be out wandering in light jackets in January! Snow and cold finally came back yesterday, though, so we're hoping for some sledding time soon! Our sleds have been lonely too much this winter!

*Whew* that's it for my catch-up. We're in the midst of my sewing season, so I'll actually have some quilting so share again soon. Thanks for following along!