Ryan & Erinn's Family: December

On December 2, Elise and Evan participated in the MTAC Keyboard Theme festival. Evan won second place in his category, and Elise Honorable Mention in hers. She has a joke lately that she's the queen of fourth place. She's won it something like five times now, and had mixed emotions to have added to her collection!

Evan has a compulsive eye-blink when he's stressed.

Evan finished up his last month of doing school at home with Mom. We had a great autumn together, and I really enjoyed the one-on-one time with him.

Working on his Book of Mormon Goal

As our remodel continued, the drywall went up in the toy room and bathroom, and they installed the tub. In the meantime, I started giving Celeste baths in a plastic box in my shower, since she had outgrown the kitchen sink!

CVLA had their Christmas Cantata! The kids did a great job, although Celeste was super wiggly the whole time.

Kindergarten Class (Corinne)

First Form Latin (Elise)

Henle Latin (Connor)

CVLA Choir (Connor and Elise)

Ryan stepped up and became the Hot Cocoa Distributor

We found a gopher snake in our front yard. I love gopher snakes. They're so much more pleasant than their rattlesnake competitors. It's too bad they're always getting run over by cars.

Ryan and I turned 40! Wow! We celebrated by decorating the Christmas tree, eating cake, and (later) going to see Hamilton at the Pantages Theater. We knew it fairly well from the CDs, but adding the theatrical/visual aspect made it 10x more amazing! I had a bit of an anxiety attack while we were there for some reason, but I got over that by the second act, and ended up having a great night.

We participated in two great church activities in December. For the ward Christmas party, Evan and Celeste got to be in the program as a wise man and a gift. Evan had to say a memorized part while corralling a crazy baby onstage (we gave her a lollypop to make her stand still), and he did a wonderful job!

The second activity was the Primary Temple Lights activity. It was nice not to be in charge of it this year, but I felt weird and out of place. I spent a lot of time just watching the kids play in the dark on the temple lawn and looking at the temple. I felt a strong impression while I was standing there that the distance I'd been feeling from Heavenly Father lately was due to my failure to approach Him. I realized that I needed to find time somehow for daily spiritual practices again, such as scriptures and prayer. I went home feeling a lot better.

Connor and Elise were promoted to Blue Stripe! I'm so proud of their progress.

More remodeling... The cabinets went into the bathroom and toy room, and I got to pick out carpet, marble and quartz. (I was pretty lucky to find stone I liked in the remnants pile.)

Celeste started to develop her passion for scribbling! She would sit for long stretches of time - at the table, on the floor, on the couch, on the wall (oops), and make beautiful art.

On the advice of a friend, I started listening to a podcast called Bold New Mom (now called Better than Happy,) and realized that it was a pretty great substitute for therapy. Jody Moore is a life coach who works with LDS moms, and helps them to manage their thoughts and balance their emotions. I ended up joining her more in-depth program after a few weeks. It's hard to explain, but it has been the source of most of my recent progress with my anxiety issues.

Since it's better late than never, Corinne had her birthday party at The Little Gym, and invited all her favorite friends. She had a ton of fun, soaked up the attention, and got lots of great gifts!

On Christmas Eve, we went on our soon-to-be-traditional hike (this year it was Cherry Canyon). The kids opened the gifts they received from their cousins, and Ryan and I stayed up late wrapping gifts, as usual!

Merry Christmas, 2017!!!

The older kids all got Kindles this year.

Kelli made this adorable cross-stitch portrait of our family!

He insisted that he wanted a REAL motorcycle helmet.

We were visited by the Christmas Walking Stick! I'd never seen one before.

A few days after Christmas, our friends the Palmers came to visit us. Their crazy boys decided to go swimming in our icy cold pool, and were in there a lot longer than I expected. We hung out, ate food, and went to the Santa Monica pier, where we saw sea lions!

On one of the days the Palmers were here, Ryan took Evan and Corinne to "Take your Kids to Work Day." They packed books and toys (including Corinne's new Sago Mini playset), and had lots of fun helping Dad.

I took this picture so we wouldn't forget any of the pieces.

Although the walls weren't painted yet, we bought a loft bed and let Connor start sleeping in the toy room. Having the extra space has been so helpful!

I forget which one we picked. One was for the bathroom, the other for the toy room.

Our piano teacher has a New Year's Eve party every year. In addition to food, music, and games, it always includes homemade costumes. Connor and Evan went as a cop and robber, Elise as a dogcatcher (with a dog in a net), and Corinne as an angel. I was already hesitant to go, since I much prefer to spend holidays alone with family, but I actually came down with a bad cold the day before. The baby wouldn't have done well (she was also sick), so I sent my husband and kids to the party and stayed home to watch Netflix and blow my nose.