Simon uses his own hand for reference before drawing a circle with five lines. hehe! He's so damn adorable! He does a pretty decent job writing his name too.

Xander draws some sweet zombies calling out for "brains!"

Isaac and I are reading two of the Little House books. Yay! He's starting Farmer Boy and I'm starting Little House in the Big Woods. We'll swap books if he ends up liking it.

Xander is braving his first chapter book. At least, I think it's his first. He reads picture books, comics, online, etc very well but has been intimidated by the chapter book. I hope "Stink" helps him over the hump.

I finally snapped a pic of our "couch." I wish we had another room for bigger families.

Lotus is having fun playing with her cousin, Icen, today. She's seven weeks older and a full head taller...he's a cute little peanut, isn't he? Jason is "reading" to them. Way to put the smallest amount of energy possible into it, Babe! hahaha!

He's older and a little crotchety at times but he's still our little buddy. Jason and I chose him together before we married and he's been by our side ever since.

It cracks me up remembering how we used to "share custody." Jason and I didn't live together (and lived about a 2.5 hour drive apart) until we married, several months later, so we would take week long turns with our baby. I'm pretty sure speaker-phone-babytalk was involved;)

He's not sure about the new sweater...or me asking him to sit for a picture. "Sit? what does that mean?"

Also, our two week spending freeze is over and it was TOUGH! We did end up grocery shopping a little after the first week (which was really two weeks post-grocery shopping). Who knew I could really use up all the we-don't-have-any-food food. I whittled down to just the dry goods and continued to cook. I used all the flour, all the rice, all the oats, all the pasta, all the split peas and nearly all the beans.

We did good though and continue to make progress toward our 2012 goals. Yea!

Look at everyone bundled up...

Isaac seems to appreciate the "gaming mitts" I knit them all for Christmas the most. He wears them every day!

In keeping with our 2012 financial goals, we have a TWO WEEK no spending challenge going on, starting today. It's going to be tough! Some might think two weeks is nothing but this is without any preparation. I'm forcing myself to work with the "we-don't-have-any-food" food.

We are kicking it off with a full tank of gas, 1.5 gallons of milk, leftover homemade pizza and a hearty amount of peasoup prepping in the crockpot. I have several bags of beans, a big container of rice, oats, lentils, masa harina, etc. We should do fine theoretically.

I'll need to get past the lazy, Jason will need to get past the soda addiction and the kids will need to get past the picky eating. SCARY!

With our attempts to limit the number of gifts the past few years, it still seems like they get a lot of plastic that gets assembled and set aside. This plastic is what they asked for, of course, but even they agree it is a short lived "high" and maybe they didn't need this or that.

My friend Valerie mentioned a tradition of limiting kids to four gifts:

Something they want, something they need,
something to wear and something to read.

I love it! I did a web search and this practice comes up a lot. How did I miss this until now? What I like about it is the single "want" gift. It will make them think and be more selective in choosing. It will certainly help organize the shopping process.

If you think this seems Scrooge-like, trust me, the kids are not for want;) Christmas is for fun and the element of surprise.

The boy is EIGHT years old!

Are you with me?

Jason and I were motivated by the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover book just after we married and eliminated all non-mortgage debt. We downsized to one car and have been living well on these principals ever since.

However, we did get off track from our long term goal of eliminating mortgage debt and that is what the 2012 focus will be. The smaller mortgage is my first goal and I've already thrown my first "extra to principal" at it. Woot!

It's going to be tough this time because we have four kids sharing our love for weekend trips, movies and dining out. I'm just going to have to be creative with saving money and still keeping the fun.

First year with Lotus,
new niece and nephew,
lots of hikes and weekend tent and cabin trips,
Couchsurfing guests,
Sewing and (LOTS of) knitting,

and best of all, our EPIC cross-country road trip.

It was a fantastic year, spent savoring the moments with our kids. Life is good!

This is auto mode with no flash. I noticed all of the pics I snapped here overexposed the right side of Xander's face. Ideally, I'd want to be able to leave the flash off most of the time and not worry about manual settings when using a point and shoot, but I'm sure after a little reading and learning the camera settings better this issue wouldn't be an issue.

It would be nice to have a light-weight camera like this and not worry about the lens changes of my heavy SLR or the grainy crap our regular point and shoot puts out. This might be a 2012 purchase!

Same camera...Jason and Xander wind the yarn for a surprise project for a certain friend of mine. A certain friend who has shared so much of her wonderful pottery with us. I hope she likes blue!

Yay! We might as well open them now right?

We bought a giant roll of two-sided wrapping paper from Costco in 2006 and have been almost exclusively using it since. After wrapping ALL of this year's gifts we finally finished the roll. That is SEVEN Christmases on the same roll of paper. I confirmed this by looking back at Christmas tree photos on my blog back that far....yep, the same paper every year. Ha!

I hope Costco hasn't gone cheapo with their wrapping paper because we'll buy another for sure.

Ah, the flurry of gift time...

They each got "gaming (texting/podster/fingerless) mitts" hand-knit by mom.

The loot, minus the sibling gifts that were under the downstairs tree waiting to be opened next.

Jason got a fancy gaming keyboard. My gift wasn't finished in time for Christmas but I'm super excited to get it when it is. It's a custom, hand-made knitting needle organizer and matching knitting bag. It's going to be gorgeous!

It never seems like we get them that much stuff but then I see it all on the table like this. Crikey!

Simon is our kid most effected (right now) by commercials. He had to have these Socker Boppers. I love how he really tried to lay into Jason. He's still our little guy:)

What a great Christmas! Now we can enjoy our night, sleep well, relax tomorrow while they play with their toys. I can leisurely make cookies for our dinner with friends. Change is good!

...and now first birthday activities are completed. Ha! Hey, she's only one and *every* day is awesome in her mind.

Pretty paper!

Yay! The packaged contained chocolates, a book, lip balm, two(TWO!) skeins of awesome yarn, two ornaments and the sweetest knit monster friend.

So sweet the boys wanted dibs...

...but it belongs to Lotus.

Saying hello...

Taste test meets approval...

Off to set it on the couch...