A cup of Christmas Tea

Tonight I attended the 2nd Annual Christmas Tea at St. John's Lutheran (my home church). Our table consisted of Mom, Aunt Elinor, Oma Kathe and two other ladies from the church. Here's the table that my mom hosted.

All of the snowmen in the center are hand carved by Aunt Elinor. It was the best table there! 

Here's another view of the table.

There were several beverage choices: egg nog, spiked egg nog, many different teas and coffee. I tried Candy Cane Lane Tea. It was delicious! While the "elves" were passing out bevs, we played a fun ice breaker game. We each had to hold a piece of paper to our foreheads so we could not see what was written. On it was a name of a Christmas character either fictional or real. I was the Grinch and Aunt Elinor was Angel Gabriel. It was quite fun.

Then we had desserts. And boy were there desserts! I just tried 3! There even was lefsa.

After we were done nibbling on desserts, we played a Christmas hymn and song game. The host played a part of a song or a part of a Christmas movie and stop; we then had to write down the next line. We did not win, but we came in 3rd (out of 6).

It was a fun night, and it was great to be back at St. Johns for the evening! Now I'm in the Christmas spirit. I'm snuggling with Luna and watching Miracle on 34th Street!

Harvey's request!

There has been a request for "more Luna" on our blog! Well Harvey, I have some more Luna for you today!

First I'll start off with Zoo Dazzle. Last night, Laur, Jill, Cher, Mindy, Natalie, Harvey, Jon, Tony and I ate supper at the Bear's Den in Byron. We ran into a few of my co-workers who were "bird watching" there. After supper the ladies and Harvey headed over to Oxbow Park for Zoo Dazzle. They had lights up all around the zoo. It was so fun and SO cold. I wasn't properly dress unfortunately. The kids made ornaments, ate cookies, made little mice for candy canes and got tattoos. Quite a fun evening! Here are some shots from my camera.

Grandma Cher and Harvey waiting for tattoos. 

Mindy and Natalie making mice.

 I made a stop at Target on my way home and bought Luna an early Christmas present. Here she is loving it.

I invited Connor and Megan over this morning for a play date. We had all kinds of fun!

Megan and I made chocolate chip cookies. She's letting me know that we have all the ingredients and are ready to get started! (Note her haircut! Isn't it adorable? Now we're twins! I'll post pictures with my new haircut sometime soon...)

We used the Kitchen Aid mixer for the first time. It works great! Megan wore my apron that Tony made for me. She looked like such a cute little baker.

We had a living room picnic lunch while watching Tangled together. The kids were amazed that I let them eat in the living room.

Connor spent most of the day playing with Luna. Now she's all tired out.

Megan and I made some Christmas magnets for their fridge at home. Here she is coloring one of them.

This is what they look like. 

Here's a shot of Connor and Luna. He put a golf ball in the laundry basket, and she went nuts over it! 

Tonight I'm going to the Christmas Tea at St. Johns Lutheran with my mom and Aunt Elinor. My mom sponsored a table. Last year her table had a nutcracker theme, and this year it is snowmen. Hopefully I can get a picture of it to post on here!

Where's the kitchen table?

I just hit the print button for the twentieth time tonight.

After 2 months of writing lesson plan after lesson plan, having my professor rip them apart, re-writing lesson plan after lesson plan, I have hit the print button for the last time.

Tomorrow morning, my professor is coming to observe me teach a literacy lesson. At that point, I will be handing in my re-done lesson plans and will say goodbye to writing lesson plans for at least a month when the new trimester begins!

I have one more class session on the 12th, but then I'm done for good for the trimester!

It will be nice to have a kitchen table without textbooks, lesson plans, notes and various binders and papers spread out all over it.

I survived my first trimester at Augsburg!

The things I learned in school today

1. Wear cheap clothing: you never know when you'll "run into" a cabinet and rip it...

2. "Don't swear, because God doesn't like it, and you want God to like you because hell is SCARY!"~student

3. Don't bring apples with my lunch because my student will play Annoying Orange with it and yell "Apple...what??...knife" and slice right through it and then proceed to eat it.

4. No matter how hard we all try throughout the day to keep the room clean, it will still be destroyed come 3pm.

5. www.buildyourwildself.com is the best website for kids to play on! You can even set it as your desktop and learn some cool things about the animal parts you picked. (It kept our kids engaged for 45 minutes!) Way to go Ms. Jess with that idea!

Today was such a Monday. We were all tired and still full from Thanksgiving......

Thank goodness I have such a loving husband...he's meeting me in Rochester with a nice, not ripped shirt to wear to class!

Happy Monday!

Christmas is coming, ready or not!

Today I finished putting up my nutcrackers in our upstairs sitting room. I know I'll be fussing with them until they look just right, but here they are as of now.

Here's one wall of the fireplace.

Here's the other

 Some more...

and the window watchers.

Here is my smallest and my biggest nutcracker. The small guy is on the big guy's head.

Tonight we went out to my in-laws and chopped down our Christmas tree. I decided that I had been gone from Luna too much over break, so she came along with us! Here she is meeting her brother Sprout.



Then Cher came out to help us find the perfect tree. She ended up helping way more than I did. I couldn't find my 2nd mitten in my car....

Alan and Cher are going to bring it down to our house sometime this week, then we can get going on the decorating!

They are here!

Well folks, over the last 4 weeks I have been patiently (some may say I was not so patient) waiting for our "professional" wedding pictures. This morning our photographer came to Bethel and dropped them off for me during church. I couldn't wait to get home to look at them, so before I left the church parking lot I had my laptop out and I was looking! They turned out nicely! Here are a few of my favorites:

My beautiful necklace by Lynn from Oak Hill Designs! LOVE IT!

Our first time seeing each other.

Formal

Smidt Family

My bodyguards

The photographer wanted to try something new

Our nephew

Father daughter dance

Megster

Not quite sure why we're making those faces

The back of Megster

Fun at Soldier's Field

I love this man! :)

Hokey Pokey

Natalie and I dancing up a storm

Thanksgiving on the Rez

We have now returned. Laura and I are catching up on our emails and facebooks that we missed over the Thanksgiving week. We were unable to use the internet for gmail and Facebook...It was actually kind of nice! Here's the short version of our trip:

We arrived in Vermillion, SD around 4:30 on Tuesday evening. I took Laura on a tour of the town until Uncle Dave and Aunt Diane got home from work. It hasn't changed too much since I was there last May. Dave and Diane took us out for supper to The Pub, where Jacque used to work. Then we had some nice conversation until bedtime.

We woke up and hit the road around 9am Wednesday morning. Jacque told us to give her a call when we reached Winner, SD. When I did, she said "Look around you. This is your last look at civilization for a while." It was true. As we left Winner, the houses came few and far inbetween. The landscape began to change from flat prairies to beautiful rolling hills however. We arrived at Jacque and Whoopie's a little before 3. Our first night was spent conversing, taking a trip to Springcreek (where the South Dakota Smidt's had lived for many years), eating, and drinking!

Thanksgiving day was so nice and relaxing for us. Jacque did a wonderful job cooking (and cleaning up the entire meal...) She's a wonderful hostess. Her friend Brooke also joined us for the meal! Delicous! Laura and I spent the morning before we ate on the computer. Jacque introduced us to pinterest.com, and we're both addicted!! So much fun....Then we went out onto BIA 5 and had saw some beautiful scenery. That evening we went to bed in preparation for our early departure on Friday.

Friday morning, we were on the road by 4:45 am CST. We went to see the sun rise over the Badlands. Just a little sidenote: It is incredibly creepy to be driving through Badlands National Park when it is pitch black out, but once the sun started to rise, it was a breathtaking site. We then went along to Wall Drug. After looking around there, and seeing my childhood hero Annie Oakley, we made our way through the Black Hills to Mount Rushmore and Crazy Horse. We ended our day with a stop in Rapid City for supper/lunch at the Firehouse Brewery and a shopping trip at Target. We were back to the Rez by 8:00pm CST. We switched timezones to Mountain Time for a good part of the day. It was strange to wake up in one timezone, travel to another, and come back to the original timezone. Maybe it's because Minnesota isn't close to another timezone, but it just felt strange!

On the way back from the Rez, Laura and I calculated how many hours we had been in the car. Overall, it was at least 29 hours! Yikes! It was so worth it though.

Tony and I stopped by and had a Thanksgiving after dinner drink with my parents last night, and tonight we're having dinner with Tony's parents. Thanksgiving family time continues!