What I Wore: First Sunday of Advent

Sorry, folks, my maternity wardrobe at nearly 38 weeks is not deep enough to include much purple to coordinate nicely with the season of hope and joyful expectation that is upon us.  So I'm wearing browns and white.  Not the most festive, but neutral and nice.

I really wanted to wear my brown sandals, but they could not be found anywhere this morning.  I'm going to blame my two year old....

What I wore: 

White maternity tank: Ross

Brown skirt: I have no idea where I got this.  I have had it for-ev-ah!

Brown belt: Ross

White sandals: Ross

Soleil necklace (doubled up): Premier Designs Check out my friend, Jacie's Cyber Monday Flash Sale for some great deals on lovely Premier Design jewelry if you are on Facebook!

Thanksgiving earrings: made by my Aunt Cindy

    

I am just about 38 weeks, people, so in less than 4 weeks, we meet our newest little family member.  If I am lucky, it will be two weeks or less... 

I must say that I am really loving all the unknowns at this point though because it really helped me this morning to understand the season of Advent a bit more and that idea of joyful expectation.  What with preparing our hearts for Jesus at Christmas and preparing for our newest bundle of joy, there is a whole lot of waiting, joyful expectation, and preparing our hearts going on around here.   

We finally got around to adding some more to our family guesses, so I edited this post from last week  with our guesses of birth time and weight and some name ideas from the girls.  Don't forget to check out the post and join the fun by making some guesses of your own.  

Happy New Year in the Church and have a blessed Advent!

7 Quicktakes Saturday to end November

Yep, November has been a tough month to keep up.  7 Quicktakes is a Friday thing started by some blogger somewhere...but I just can't seem to get it done on Friday this month.   And I don't have high hopes for quicktakes in December either.  Those might end up being posted on Mondays...  :)

1. Let's start back with Chris' birthday.  He doesn't like a big deal to be made, and he definitely got a pretty low key birthday.  On the actual day, he had appetizers and a couple beers with a few work co-workers after work.  We met him at BJ's and headed to Disneyland.  The only "birthday-like" thing we did was that Kayla made sure he went and got his special birthday pin.  The next day we celebrated more with a special breakfast, dinner, and later a chocolate caramel tart.  Unfortunately I planned poorly so the tart was not finished until after the girls' bedtime so we sang Happy Birthday with a candle stuck in a bowl of ice cream so they could participate in some aspect of cake/ice cream/singing.  And I got a total of one picture from our two days celebrating.  Here is Chris blowing out the candle on his birthday ice cream.

2. Thanksgiving.  It was also pretty low-key.  Because I was just under the 3 weeks till due date mark, we didn't feel comfortable traveling anywhere, so we did a small, tight-knit Thanksgiving here with just us.  We didn't go overboard with sides, though we did buy a 20 lb. turkey so we'd be sure to be able to stock out freezer with tons of turkey to use in December when baby comes! Chris was in charge of the bird.  He likes to brine it (makes them SO juicy and moist) and this one did not disappoint.  I wished we had invited someone just so I could brag about Chris and his amazingness.  I made a mashed potato recipe that Chris' mom gave me early on in our marriage.  They have cream cheese and some other stuff and are Chris' favorite version of mashed potatoes.  I had stuffed the bird, so we had stuffing and then I made some easy crockpot cranberry sauce and we had store bought rolls.   My grandma gave me a bag of precious tart cherries from Uncle Jeff, and I made the cherry pie that we all love so much.  It will never be Grandma's cherry pie unless it's made by her, but it was as close as we were going to get and we were very pleased with my efforts.  I just don't think it would have felt like Thanksgiving without a cherry pie.  

3. As soon as Thanksgiving ended, Christmas began.  We aren't usually quite so gung-ho about  decorating SO quickly after Thanksgiving, but I think this year with all the unknowns surrounding the baby's arrival, we are just excited to make sure the girls get to do the various Christmas activities that they would normally do.  We can't fit a tree anywhere in this itty bitty space, but the girls helped Chris put up Christmas lights on the back patio and around a few windows on the front side of our condo.  And they love them.  So far they have only been lit for ONE evening and it was enough to make them all dance around the room with joyful grins and squeals.  

Today we put up a wreath and the Christmas stockings (more delighted squeals and smiles)

4. After the excitement of putting up a few Christmas decorations and pulling out some of the Christmas pictures books and CDs, we decided to check out one of those over-the-top Christmas light displays nearby.  Each year we find a neighborhood or house that does a grand Christmas light display timed to music, but this one truly beats all.  Besides the outside of their house being decorated with lights and a large number of coordinated songs whilest said lights danced and changed, these people invite you into their home as well to view an amazing assortment of Christmas decorations and large displays of Christmas villages.  They had a few lovely nativity sets, several huge village displays, smaller Mickey and Snoopy village displays, and that was only the beginning really.  WOW! 

 

5. Chris also found a Santa hat amongst our Christmas things, which Kayla has been pretty much wearing non-stop since yesterday.  She even wore it to and from ballet class today.  

     


6. We have visited a great many parks in our area, but we found a new one the other day.  It's a site where bones of giant sloths, bison, and sabre tooth cats have been found apparently.  The girls took a ride on the statue of the giant sloth.  The playground area was a huge hit too because it had several spinning apparatuses which the girls found to be pretty darn awesome.

 


7.  I am about 37 1/2 weeks.  So far I feel like there are days where I could deliver at any second because baby headbutts me repeatedly in the pelvic region and I have been experiencing a pretty good number of Braxton Hicks contractions, but at my appointment earlier in the week, I had no progression whatsoever.  If you know anything about babies, you will know that progression or none really doesn't mean much anyway, but there's something about being told that you are a cm or two dilated that makes you feel as though you won't be pregnant forever.  Currently I feel a little like I'm going to be pregnant forever.

  

Ava likes pictures.  Most of the time she just likes to photo bomb them, but as you will notice from a few of the ones above, she does get in some of them and ham it up and give a big cheesy grin too.  And she's darn good at it.  

God's Word-filled Wednesday: Psalm 30:12

Happy Thanksgiving!  

I thought this verse was a lovely one to reflect on as we thank the Lord for all the many blessings in our lives!

Psalm 30:12

God is so good! 

Here are a few fun and easy ideas to make your Thanksgiving even more wonderful and fun for the kiddos!

Check out this link for some fun free Thanksgiving printables!

Check out this link for some free printable Thanksgiving placemats!

Lots of kiddos at your celebration (or even just a few)??  Make a fall colored hand print wreath to hang up for Thanksgiving decoration.  We did this last year and gave it to Grandma at the end of the day to keep and decorate her house.  You could also make the hand prints in red and green and give Grandma a Christmas-y wreath to begin celebrating Christmas which fast approaches after the Thanksgiving festivities end.  

Prayer Journaling for Kids

I mentioned in a previous post about how I enjoy prayer journaling. My daughter recently finding my journal and adding her own bit, gave me an idea that perhaps she would like to begin a prayer journal as well.

So here I am to share about our ideas for starting a prayer journal for young children.  My daughter is 5, so though she is just starting to read and write, she is limited in the number of words she knows off the top of her head.  Currently, her prayer journal is mostly pictures that she draws, but we have found ways to add other elements that she can use more and more as she grows and becomes more familiar with language.  And she loves it.

To start off, I grabbed a cheap spiral notebook for her to use.  She decorated the front with stickers and her name.

Yes, all we have in the way of stickers at the moment is Minnie, Hello Kitty, and Doc McStuffins...

I finally found a use for the holy cards, bookmarks, etc that come in the mail from all the lovely Catholic organizations asking for money.  I save them for Kayla to put in her prayer journal now.  

She loves the pictures that remind her of holy saints and Jesus, and sometimes she uses them to look at and draw her own version.  Some of them have little prayers on them as well, which she glues in and she'll bring me the journal at various points in the day to pray some of them.  

The next tool I made to aid her in prayer journaling is a Word Book. 

Ta-da!

Inside I have a section for each letter of the alphabet and I wrote a bunch of sight words as well as the names of some of her favorite saints and words that often relate to prayer and the Bible (i.e. grace, pray, sing, love, light etc...)

She is pretty good at being able to sound out a lot of words, but obviously the Word Book still requires some assistance from me at this point.  If she wants to write "Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord..." she can pretty much always find the right letter for each word, but sometimes needs some assistance finding the word under that letter category.   Eventually this book will give her the ability to prayer journal pretty much entirely on her own and add new words as she grows and learns more and more.  And of course, her sisters can use it as well when the time comes.  

And just for fun, here are some examples of a few pages from her prayer journal.  I love that she loves praying decades of the rosary with us as a family, saying prayers at bedtime together, learning our new family consecration, singing her own little songs to Jesus, and memorizing scriptures, but I am thrilled to see how prayer journaling has given her a whole new way to pray and relate to Jesus on a more personal, individual level that is unique to her.  

 

On the left is a picture she drew of Jesus and the right is part of a scripture verse that she memorized and loves.

And this one is Mary

I love this page where she wrote a bunch of prayers to some of our favorite saints asking them to pray for our family.  

Little hearts are so beautiful and pure.  I hope and pray that she always stays this close to Jesus. 

God's Word-filled Wednesday: Nehemiah 8:10

Short and sweet today.  

Be joyful! God is with you. 

He's got this. 

Fall in Southern California

Contrary to popular belief, we do have a brief period of leaves changing and lovely "fall-colored" (or at least partially fall-colored) landscapes here in Southern California as well.  The length of the our "leaves changing and falling-period-of-fall" is usually not long because we don't get immense amounts of rain here, and you will see palm trees scattered amidst the various other deciduous trees whose leaves change color and drop, which makes it seem a bit less like the fall scenes you see in other parts of the country, but I appreciate that we get to have this aspect of fall even if it is brief and on a much smaller scale than other parts of the country and world.

It's likely that nothing will ever compare to the glorious fall scenes I experienced in Gaming, Austria (the semester Chris and I studied abroad and met and started dating).  Part of that is probably because those beautiful fall colors scattered across the nearby mountains and hills  surrounding the little town we lived in are interlaced with my memories of that semester and of meeting the man of my dreams.

And currently, every fall is filled with color and excitement for us because we have these three beauties in our life that fill it with life and vitality.  Aren't they lovely with the fall leaves they collected when we visited a nearby park last week?

 

 

Family Trip to Disneyland-Part Four

After the parade, we hopped back over to California adventure and Elise and Ava promptly fell asleep as soon as we started moving in that direction.

So I got a nice little afternoon walk  in the quiet area back by the Redwood Challenge Trail and Grizzly River Run while Kayla and Chris went on Great Grizzly together.  While I walked laps, I also picked up fast passes for Soarin' Over California to use for later.  Meanwhile, Chris and Kayla headed to use our fast passes from earlier on Radiator Springs Racers, and I took a nice stroll over there to watch them and my little nappers woke up, ready for more fun.

Next stop was to catch a bit of the Pixar Parade (the girls could watch this all day long, plus they had a special feature for Christmas at the beginning) and get Chris and Kayla on a ride on Soarin'.  Then we switched and I got to ride with Kayla.  We love that ride.  Ahhhh, California.  

Hopped back over to Disneyland for a quick dinner and then Chris and Kayla rode Pirates of the Caribbean while I took the other two for a fun show in the Tiki Room.  Chris and Kayla jumped on one of their favorites- Big Thunder Mountain- and we got spots for the Christmas fireworks show.  

You have to be there to experience a Disneyland fireworks show (they are awesome), but our favorite part was the end where they blew snow out.  You can kinda see it in the picture below...a little.  Christmas starts way early in Disneyland, but I don't even care.  I was loving it all.  

The only thing I loved better was all the wonderful time spent making wonderful memories with my amazing family.  We had a blast.  

SUNday at the beach

We hadn't been to the beach for awhile, so we planned a beach morning after Mass.  It was 75 degrees and sunny, but we opted to just explore the rocks to look for crabs and build sand castles instead of swimming today.  The girls had a blast and the beach was practically deserted compared to the larger summer crowds, so it was just a really, nice, relaxing family fun day in the mild, sunny weather.

 

      

        

And then we walked up a hill overlooking the ocean where there is a lovely park and let the kiddos play on the playground and have a little picnic in the grass before heading home for naps.