The Holidays Begin!

We are in full holiday mode here at the Wilkes house! The house is decorated and most of the presents are bought and we had a week of fun holiday activities.

For Young Women's this week we put together a 12 days of Christmas for one of the inactive girls in our class. Thursday and Friday was my Creative Memories holiday Open House. I turned the house into a Creative Memories store. Jim was out of town for two days and came home to find his office taken over by my Open House. We had snow warnings all week and had a few flakes on Saturday morning but it was all very disappointing. Supposedly a big wind storm was on it's way too but so far all we have had is ALOT of rain and I mean ALOT!!

The girls both had several babysitting jobs this weekend so were kept busy. Saturday was a crazy day! As soon as my Open House was over Friday afternoon we put everything away and I started cooking. I hosted my annual First Line Creative Memories brunch Saturday morning - with raspberry cream cheese coffee cake, cinnamon coffee cake, a chili egg dish, spiced bacon and baked grapefruit! (I'll post recipes on my other blog later this week - www.yourhomebasedmom.com) It was a fun morning with my team. As soon as they left we cleaned off the table and reset it for my Beach Babe Holiday tea that afternoon. I started cooking again - tomato and basil soup, tomato tarlets, ham and cheese palmiers, banana bars, and pecan tassies and more. Let me tell you that was a lot of cooking! We enjoyed a nice tea and book exchange and had fun catching up with each other - we have known each other for 18 years so have a lot of history together. Jim was my expert dishwasher and there were a lot of dishes to wash.

Tessa had a mega dance rehearsal on Saturday - she was there from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. and was a tired little girl when she got home. Jim, Cali, Jameson (cali's friend) and I went to the BYU/Univeristy of Portland Basketball game Saturday after all the parties. 90 percent of the fans at the game were cheering for BYU. It was fun even though it wasn't much of a game - BYU won easily.

On Friday our garage door decided it was tired of going up and down and decided to stay in the down position - with the car inside! Jim called the garage door repair people and they said they could fix it but not until next Tuesday - 5 days later. Well - we still had two other cars so we were o.k. but then Saturday during my tea party Jim was backing his car out of the driveway and didn't see my friend's car parked to the side, he turned out of the driveway a little too soon and hooked his bumper on her wheel well and proceeded to rip his entire front bumper off his car - so two cars down!! The tow truck will come tomorrow to haul his car to the body shop. So 3 drivers - 1 car, should be interesting......

Today after church we went to an Advent service at one of the large Episcopal churches in town. I think it was the first time the girls had been to any other type of church service. They have a wonderful choir and the acoustics in their church are incredible. I only recognized three of the carols they sang and the girls weren't sure about all the standing and sitting through the service. We went with our home teacher Gary Nees who had told us about it. We really enjoyed it, even though 4 1/2 hours of church in one day was a lot!

Happy December everyone!