december

Our December was full of holiday activities.  We started the month with our church putting on "The Nativity: A Christmas Celebration."  Allen was a wise man in a short program and Carter and Jared were wise men in the live nativity they had outside the church.  The whole gym was transformed into a display of nativities from around the world.

Claire had a piano recital.  She is in the middle of her second year of taking lessons and still loves it.

We picked out our tree and decorated it.  It was our biggest one so far, about 10+ feet tall.  I loved looking at it everyday.

I want to take the time to write down our family Christmas traditions as they are now, so years from now I can look back and remember.  They have changed through the years, but for the past few years this is what we do in the month of December:

-The kids favorite tradition is doing the 12 days of Christmas for a family.  We pick a family with at least some young kids that we think would enjoy getting little surprises every night, but won't  try and catch us.  Also, the location has to work well; no cul-de-sacs, etc.  The kids love to help decide what to give and love to be the ones to run to the doorstep and run away.  When we started this only Allen or I could do the dropping off.  I like it much more now that even Claire can take part in it.

-We have a advent calendar with candy, but the count down that we really enjoy is one we started several years ago.  We make a chain to count down to Christmas and on each link we write something we love about each member of our family.  Each day we open the link and read it together, then put it on the wall so we can see it all month.  Seeing what each kid puts about everyone is always fun.  This year Carter and Jared put the same thing for me:  "She always makes sure we do fun things as a family and she drives me to all my activities." I found that very interesting.

-For the past several years we have gone over to a friend's house who host a Christmas sing along.  Several families sing Christmas carols, visit, and eat yummy food.

-We pick out and decorate our Christmas tree as a family.  We play Christmas music as we decorate.  I do the lights and ribbon and any added greenery first, because I like it done a certain way.  We love to look at all our vacation ornaments and remember great times together.  I love to see the ornaments with the kids pictures from when they were younger.

-We make a white chocolate chex mix to give to our friends.  We make my grandma's fudge and make and decorate sugar cookies just for us and family that comes over during the holidays.  This year Carter made white chocolate peppermint bark for himself because he usually doesn't like most the goodies our friends give us.

-Claire didn't want to go sit on Santa's lap this year, so I guess that tradition is gone.  She said the letter she typed in computer class to Santa would be enough.

-Christmas Eve:  Usually Grammy and Grandpa come over and give their gifts to the kids.  They also open one gift from under the tree.  A few times we have gone ice skating with the cousins, but not this year.  We go to Grammy's for pizza and the cousins act out the nativity as Grammy reads the story of Christ's  birth.  She has costumes for all the parts.  This is a tradition that I did as a kid so I love to see my children do it too.  Then we are off to Mimi and Grand dad's church for their candlelight Christmas Eve service.  This is what Allen did every year growing up and I love continuing it with our family.  After the service we head to a restaurant to eat appetizers and desserts. As we head home we drop off our last day of the 12 days.  We also drop off a "Christmas jar" along with the book, Christmas Jar, to a family we feel may need it.  Once home we lay stockings on the couch so Santa knows where to put the gifts and we put letters to Santa in the stockings.  The kids sleep in the same room (at least start out and end that way).  After they are to bed, Allen and I open our gifts to each other.  I love this tradition.  I love having this alone time with Allen, reminiscing about the day, talking about the exciting day to come.

-Christmas Day:  The kids line up on the stairs and wait for us to get our cameras ready and say they can come down to see what Santa brought them.  Then we eat our traditional William Sonoma croissants (plain, chocolate filled, and ham and cheese-yum!).  Next we dig into our presents from and to each other.  Sometime that morning Mimi and Grand dad come by to see what the kids got.  We usually head over to my parent's house around lunch time and visit and exchange gifts.  The cousins love showing each other what Santa brought them.  We head home for dinner, which the last few years we started a new tradition of having Allen grill some filet mignons to perfection and have baked potatoes and some green with them.  We usually get back together with the Sextons that night to play whatever new board game we got.

-The day after Christmas:  Allen's sister, Kelly, and her family come in town and we get to have another Christmas!  Marianne always makes a wonderful traditional Christmas dinner, then we open gifts which usually includes many surprises and games from Larry.

Writing all this down makes me sad it is over for this year.  I can't wait until next year!

puppy love

I admit it.  I love my dogs.  I now have 5 kids.  I wanted to share a few photos of them.  Believe me, I am holding back on the amount, there are so many more I would love to show and talk about, but I know no one cares but me.  I just wanted to document how good they are together.  They have been together about 11 months now and are great buddies.  

When they first got together Neo was the one who wanted to play and would bother Max all day about it.  Now, Max likes it just as much and initiates it just as much.  Max still likes to have our attention, especially when Neo is getting it, but now he just comes up and paws at us, instead of pushing Neo away.  He is still the alpha male and they seem good about this relationship.  They still prefer me over anyone else, but they show love to all of us.  

Max is still shy to people he doesn't know, but getting better as long as you are not an teenage or adult male.  He loves Claire's friends and the girl or smaller boy cousins.  Thanks to Mom going on walks with me and the dogs they love her; Max will go up and shyly greet her.  He also greets his groomer and day camp worker with shy kisses.  They continue to make us all happy.  They put me in a good mood.  And my favorite past time is talking for them.  I'm really good at it, just ask my family, they love when I do it.  They never make fun of me or ask me to stop.

Neo and Max

 Neo is especially  good to Max, letting Max use him as a foot rest and head rest.

 they love to cuddle with us and each other

And they continue to lay synchronized because they know I like it.

lucky number 13

There is something magical about turning 13 for Langford boys.  Not only do they start to really notice girls, but the girls start noticing them.....in droves.  This happened to Carter two years ago, when in the month of December, according to one of his friends, he broke a school record by having 12 girls liking him at the same time.  That Christmas he got 3 Christmas presents from girls.

We seem to be repeating history with Jared.  Every day it seems that some new girl is texting him and asking who he likes, either for a friend or herself.  The other day I picked him up from school and he was already on his phone, when I questioned why, he said he just got a text from a friend that heard that two girls that liked Jared were talking about him and when one found out that he didn't like her the same way she liked him, she began to cry.  He is such a heart breaker.  Then last night I was at the mall food court with him and a friend and two cute girls came up to them and started talking to Jared.  When he came over to the table I asked who they were, he said he had no idea.  They just came up and said, "Hey Langford" and started talking to them.  Jared's soccer hoodie had his name on it.

Thankfully things calmed down with Carter in the 8th grade, so we assume we only have half a year left of it with Jared.

mikestrong

We have found that a lot of Carter's friends match up with our family.  He has about 10 friends that have either a brother that is Jared's age (and they are friends) or Claire's age (friends also) and one matches up exactly.  The Wengers.  By coincidence, Allen and I graduated high school with the mom of this family.  The Dad's job is to manage a large sports ministry at their church and we have played endless seasons of soccer and basketball through this league.  And because of the friendships, our kids are always on the Wengers team and Mike, the dad, is always the coach.  A few months ago Mike was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia and immediately went to Vanderbilt to start aggressive chemo treatment. We have been saddened and humbled  to have a friend, coach and mentor go through something so awful.  It really hit home to see a family just like ours having to go through this.  I keep thinking, it could just have easily been us. We have been blessed to have had several opportunities to serve this family in need.  

One small thing Carter did...notice Carter's hair in the first picture.  Those who know Carter know that he likes his hair.  He has "good" hair.  But when he heard that several men and boys were going to shave their heads the day before Mike was to find out if the first round of chemo worked; he was in.  There were about 30 people that ended up shaving their heads, in that their were about 10-15 teenage boys who wanted to show love for their coach and friend.  The next day at high school they all wore their MIKESTRONG shirts.  And it worked, Mike's first round worked.  And so has his second.  He is about to start this third to get ready for a stem cell transplant.  He is not out of the woods, and we continue to pray for him and his family.  This experience of knowing them and serving  them  as a family has been a good thing for us.  A common bond we have.

double digits

 Claire turned 10!!!  She kept saying, "double digits!"  She chose to have a girl cousin sleep-over for her party.  She wanted to play bingo with fun prizes.  I enjoyed picking out things I thought these girls would like.  Her big gift was a new bike with gears, so she can keep up with us on the hills.  She also got her ears pierced and loved all the earrings she received as gifts.  In some ways she seems older but then she comes downstairs in a princess outfit and I'm glad she is not growing up too fast.

she requested a pink cake

nervous 

but no tears

Carter left this sweet note on Claire's door for her to see when she woke up.  Priceless.

byu grad

some of my books I am getting rid of

I am done.  I did it.  A few weeks ago I finished my last class at BYU.  I am a college graduate.  I have a bachelor's degree in Psychology.  Well, my official graduation date is December 20th, but I am claiming it now.  I could write a paper about all my thoughts and feelings about going back to school, accomplishing this goal of mine, etc.  Actually, I did, for part of my last class I wrote an eight page paper on my experience.  But for this blog I will just say what I said at the end of my paper: the biggest thing I take away from this is that I can do hard things.  I wasn't always sure of that.  Several times Allen had to remind me that I could.  I'm glad I learned that lesson.

long summer re-cap

I've slacked in my blogging.  Lori is partly to blame.  She introduced me to instagram.  I have had fun posting random pictures there and playing with the color settings.  You may have noticed some tweaking with photos in my posts.  They are ones I played with on instagram.  So here is my re-cap of small happenings from the summer, and most pictures will be from instagram.  In no particular order:

Carter went to his first EFY (Especially for Youth: church retreat for 14-18 year olds) in Kentucky and had his first COW (crush of the week).

Carter borrowed a friend's slack line for a week ( all summer) and we enjoyed playing on it.

 We all had our eyes check, most for the first time.  Jared, Claire and I all came home with glasses to be worn when reading- trouble focusing=headaches for us (Jared and I) or reading the board at school (Claire).  Carter has better than perfect vision-didn't know that was possible.

 While on our annual end of summer rafting trip with friends, we stopped at the Cumberland plateau and enjoyed the scenery and the boys climbing a rock wall.

we helped with a service project "green bean drop"

Did another round of "Chopped" and let Claire cook this time.  It may have been a bit early for her. 

This is the winner-Jared's creation

 Carter got his learner's permit!!!  He is driving and doing great! Just a few grey hairs.

Jared found a new love-smashing things with an axe.  This is just one of the things he has gotten his hands on.

The kids, thanks to Mimi and Grand dad, got to ride in a Zorb!