Randomness

Ok, I have a bunch of pictures to share and none of them have to do with Christmas. Well, they kind of do. 

Chase came into show me this great sticker he got as he was helping Andre with the new fire extinguisher. I about died laughing right there. No one else saw what I did. They just saw the gigantic sticker. 

I thought it was appropriate placement.

 I just wanted you all to see what I see as I am washing dishes.

This is the view out my window during the winter. I love it. 

I have wanted to get a picture of this for years. BUT- it is very hard to get. These awesome shadows only last about 1/2 hour and the angle of the sun is only this way for a few weeks. You need to have the blue sky, the white clean snow on the ground and you have to catch it about 3:30.

I cheated on that last picture because I went outside and took a picture without the deck showing. This is really what I see: 

 I like it even more now that our deck is white. 

But the really awesome view is blocked now by our trampoline. 

I had to tromp through the snow to show you this...

This is one of the good things about living on a golf course.

In other news. 

Our children got "toys" for Christmas that they have not put down since 7:30 on Christmas morning.  We are letting them have their fun because it is Christmas vacation. However. It will soon be time to cut back. It is going to be hard. For all of us. 

So... Today we talked about time management with nuts and rice. I am sure most of you had this demonstration in primary or young mens/young womens before. But just in case you didn't...

The Jar = our time

Rice =video games, TV, and other time wasting things. 

medium nuts= fun things that are also good for you (playing outside, playing soccer...)

Walnuts= stuff you have to do (go to school, take a shower, read your scriptures...)

If you put the rice in first, you will not find room for the things you NEED to do. 

 

But if you put the walnuts in first, then the smaller nuts and then the rice... everything fits!

So... we begin trying to teach the kids to do the important things first and then they can do the little time waster things that they like so much. 

 In other news:

Remember how the world did not end the other day? Well we had a party to celebrate that fact. 

But our kind of party was not the typical kind of party. 

We celebrated all the ways that our world could have ended.

We had an earth...

 and it was bombarded with asteroids.

We had Zombies hidden in our basement and we had to find them all.  We avoided the zombie apocolypse.

We built a village with our blocks and stuff ...

 and the destroyed it with arrows, nerf guns, and giant bouncy balls.

 It was fun.

We talked a lot about this. We did not want to scare the children again like when we let our 9 year old watch Arachniphobia (he didn't sleep for weeks afterwards). We talked about how the world does not end because a calender stops, you just get another calender. We talked about what the real end of the earth really means and what has to happen first (second coming, millienium, satan finally stopped, earth becoming celestial,  etc...) and how we do not need to be afraid of this stuff.

The best part of the party was that we had pizza for dinner. The kids helped me make it. The pizza crust was the earth. it was covered in "lava". Then part was covered in "asteroids" (sausage), and part was covered in attacking "UFO's" (peperoni). Then the whole thing was covered up in a snow storm and frozen. Then the whole earth was heated up in global warming then eaten by monsters.