McCall with the Keeps

 In December we spent a weekend in McCall with Shawn, Debbie, and Mitch Keep.  It was timed perfectly.  The roads were clear to drive up and then we got snow.  Besides movies, games, swimming, and lots of good food we had a really fun snow afternoon.  The pictures show the progression of some snow to a giant snowman to a snow cave and eventually snuggling into bed with a story from Auntie Debbie.

Ridge's Christmas List

This thing kept Ridge busy for HOURS!  This wasn't the final list.  I taped several more pieces of paper on to the end.  He was pretty proud of it, even after I read the Berenstain Bear Christmas book.  The one where Sister Bear realizes that it might be selfish of her to ask for too many things.  The great part about being close to Christmas, though, is that every time anyone asks for anything in the store I can just say, "put it on your Christmas list."  That usually does the trick.

Decoration For Christmas

With a warm fire and Christmas music in the background....

Larsen Family Reunion

In the middle of Thanksgiving, visiting, tons of food and parties, and Katelyn's baptism we also had a Larsen family reunion.  My cousin Michael hosted it at his house.  Here is a pic of my Aunt Karla, Aunt Toni, Uncle Kent, Mom, Aunt Jan, and Aunt Mardyne (from left).

Katelyn's Baptism Day

 Katelyn was so excited to be baptized and have all of the family here to support her.  Both sets of grandparents, the Tarry's, Rissie and kids, Darci and Dan and family, and of course Mike and Holly and girls.  We were sad that she would miss out on the leis from a Hawaii baptism so we enlisted the family to help and she got a heap of leis to add to the excitement.  Soon after the leis were around her neck she also had a following of kids.  Part of GG's talk included a warm snuggly blanket and part of Nama's talk included a cute baptism bear.  More than any of those gifts though was the actual baptism.  Congratulations Katelyn.

Baptism Pics

 We took Katelyn out on one of the last nice days of fall 2014 for some pictures in her baptism dress.  Apparently we weren't the only people taking advantage of the nice weather.  Everywhere we went there were hoards of photographers doing senior pictures and wedding pictures.  We had a hard time finding a place to take pictures, but they turned out cute.  These were some of my favorites.

Festival of Trees Wreaths

I helped both of the girls' classes create wreaths this year.  Kyleigh's class had a "mining in Idaho" theme and Katelyn's class did a Renaissance theme.  I had the kids in Kyleigh's class paint pick and ax sets that I had cut out of wood with silver paint.  I also had them cut small foam blocks into gem like shapes (gems are all shapes so they could pretty much do whatever they wanted).  Then we used hot glue to put colored rock salt on the foam gems.  I made a sign for the middle of the wreath that said, "Idaho gems by Idaho's gems."  We got an honorable mention at the festival of trees for that wreath.  With Katelyn's class I cut rectangles out of leather and burned the edges of the leather so it would look aged.  We cut out small pieces of paper and put holes through the paper and leather.  The kids bound the paper and leather together to make tiny little books.  Their teacher had them write stories in their tiny little Renaissance books for the wreath.  I also cut out swords from wood and had each of the kids spray paint a sword.  Their teacher also printed out whole page shrinky dinks and had the kids color them.  She then shrunk them down to ornament size for the wreath and added a bunch of other little things.  Both of the wreaths turned out so well and were purchased by the parents of class members, which is really cool.