Our December this year was busy as usual but a different than our usual December. Starting with our Christmas decorations. I come from a family where several of the women love to get their Christmas trees out and set up early. My Grandma June has been known to leave her tree up year round more often then not. Sometimes she changes the decorations for each holiday, sometimes she just leaves it Christmas all year. When we were younger my mom didn’t put our tree up as early but now she usually has a small one if not the full tree up by October at the latest. My sister Sherri usually has hers up by September. I have my tree up by the Friday after Thanksgiving at the latest. Usually a week or two into November I get the itch and put it up. This year, since we didn’t know for sure when we were moving we decided to not get any decorations out in out rental and just wait until we were in our new house. When we missed the November 1st move in dead line by the time Thanksgiving was approaching I pestered our builders pretty hard for a move in date. They finally said their goal was to be “done” with the house by Thanksgiving and then have a few weeks to go through and catch anything they needed to fix or change and the week of December 18th would be a good move in week. Thanksgiving came and went and the house was close but not quite what I would call “done”. The builders hadn’t said anything about moving the date up or back so I decided to tell them that I had scheduled movers for Dec 20th. They never really agreed but they said ok. We packed up the rental and got things ready to go with no Christmas decorations…it was a little bit gloomy I must admit. Decorations really add to the festivities and atmosphere. There were still Christmas parties and church school activities to help it feel like Christmas though!
Emilee’s class took a field trip to downtown to see some of the choirs singing at Union Station. She asked her dad if he would be a chaperon on her field trip and was pretty excited when he said he would love too! They watched the choirs and then broke into small groups and got to do a little Christmas shopping and eat lunch. Emilee had a great time and loved that her dad was there.
Allison has been doing some babysitting lately and finds it to be quite lucrative. She is incredible at it too. I was a boring babysitter, I didn’t really love doing it and I preferred the kids to entertain themselves while I supervised. Allison has awesome activities and games planned and makes a fun evening of it for the kids. She makes scavenger hunts, seems to have an endless supply of balloons, and gives them lots of attention. She watches a friend of ours son named Ethan with Emilee a lot and every time we come home they have new fun ideas that Allison has come up to do with them. This picture is one of the crafts she did with them sometime in December. These were little pictures them made. There was also giant almost life size gingerbread cookies hanging on the wall that they had made of themselves.
Emilee sang her very last time in Sacrament as a primary kid. She will be in Young Women’s after the New Year. I will have no more kids in primary!! That is so crazy! Allison snuck a picture of her singing for me. Her and Reese are inseparable.
Allison started her gymnastic season in December. She has decided that she wants to focus on weightlifting and wrestling so she is going to finish this Meet season for gymnastics then take a break. She has done a great job in gymnastics and always works hard at keeping her flexibility and learning her routines. We like watching her perform her events. Here are a few links to some of her best ones so far, in my opinion. Also some pictures from different meets she has done so far this season.
https://youtu.be/MB0es-oSbDQ (Allison Bar Routine)
https://youtu.be/kedxhCSiRQA (Allison Floor Routine)
As the day to move into our house arrived we weren’t sure it was going to happen until the actual day we moved. You never know with builders. In my limited experience they will never say when they will be done. They have to have a hard deadline and they will push it up to the second of that deadline. This time they made the dead line though! I told them we were moving in on December 20th but I actually didn’t schedule the movers until the 23rd. From the 20th-23rd we brought as much of our stuff over as we could that we didn’t want to box up. Lots of car loads. We got a lot of stuff taken over. There was pretty much just furniture for the movers when they came on the 23rd. The kids helped a lot and Matthew even recruited a few friends to help him load his car and take over a few loads. The first thing I took over was the Christmas tree and I set it up right away with a few decorations. I wasn’t going to have our first Christmas in our house with no decorations. It immediately felt like Christmas. That and the Christmas music made it a great time for moving.
Just to keep things extra exciting and as busy as possible on the 22nd of December Matthew had to have another procedure done on his arm to help get more of his mobility back. They had to put him to sleep but they were able to do what they needed without cutting him open again so he was able to recover a lot quicker then his initial surgery. We were worried he would have a pretty crappy Christmas break but other than a day or two afterwards he felt pretty good and was able to do the things he normally would have.
We used the same movers that moved us into the rental to move us out. They showed up at 9am Saturday and were supposed to be done around 1-2pm but for some reason they decided to bring a smaller truck this time then they did the first time…so when the truck they brought was about half full they realized it was not going to fit everything and they were going to have to do two trips. That made an already long day a little longer but they finished about 6pm and we had all of our stuff in our new home!! We got beds set up for everyone and spent the first night in our new house on December 23,2023. A week shy of two years from the day we bought the land and decided to build.
The next morning we all woke up refreshed and ready for Christmas Eve. We were actually pretty tired from working nonstop for three days to get everything done but we were very happy to be in our home. It was Sunday so we went to church and enjoyed the sacrament program. The Christmas program is one of my favorite weeks at church. There was beautiful music and great talks and thoughts shared. We came home and spend the rest of the day settling into our house, playing games and making Christmas treats. It was a Jones year for Christmas but my family usually doesn’t travel at Christmas because we are all spread out and no one wants to deal with the weather. Grandma and Grandpa Terry came over and joined us for a Christmas Eve dinner of pizza, salad, sparkling grape juice with Christmas Crunch and rolo pretzels for dessert. We same some Christmas songs, read the Christmas story from Luke in the Bible and watched a Christmas movie together. I usually like to have 95% of my shopping done by December 1st and then have it wrapped early in December but that didn’t happen this year because we didn’t have a lot of places to put things and I didn’t want things to get lost so for the first time in my life I had nothing wrapped on Christmas Eve. Ryan and I did it when everyone went to bed. It was fine we got it all done and weren’t up as late as I expected but I prefer my usual method. It is a lot more relaxing. I was pretty stressed that I would fall asleep and forget to do it before Christmas Day.
Christmas Day was a great day. The kids were debating on what time we should all get up. Some of them argued that we should sleep in but in the end the usual wake up time of 6:30 decided on. We opened gifts from Santa and each other and family and then the last gift I opened was the start of a scavenger hunt for the kids for some family gifts from Ryan and I. We were excited with how excited they got about the scavenger hunt. Even Matthew was into it. They figured the clues out pretty quickly and found a family game, a punching bag, and a ping pong table. After the scavenger hunt it was time for breakfast and then relaxing and spending the day assembling gifts and hanging out. Later in the day we went over to Grandma and Grandpa’s to see how their Christmas morning went. Yeah, it was a great day. I love Christmas and I love that we just get to relax and hang out together and not have to do work and other things.
https://youtube.com/shorts/0Ww2OcD-PJc (Christmas morning 2023)
Ryan worked a little bit through the next week until New Year’s but the kids and I were out of school and work. It was great to get to catch up on things I had gotten behind on and get settled into the house and not have all the normal stuff to do as well. We got a little dusting of snow a few of the days.