Pre Christmas fun, Hams, Banquet, Smoking, Santa x2, Last Minute

I am pretty far behind so I will have to make it up in two different posts.  Here's the first post of the week leading up to Christmas...

Noah keeps hopping out of bed to get lubs at night, but then he wakes up at the crack of dawn to be up for the day.  Ugh!!  He keeps moving throughout the day so when he actually sits still for five minutes he is out like a light.  What a crazy kid!!  I wasn't home so Aaron texted me this picture to make me jealous that he was getting Noah lubs:

Sarah had a dance performance that parents couldn't go to last week.  However, one of the nice moms that were helping out backstage sent this picture of Sarah and her friend waiting for their turn to dance.  It was fun to see even if I couldn't be there!

Sarah's elementary class earned a fort party by having consistent great behavior.  The teacher sent some pictures of the different forts they made in class.  Sarah was hamming it up for the camera, too--crazy kid!

A bunch of ladies got together and had a 'Favorite Things' party.  It's where you bring one of you favorite treats to share in addition to a $15 gift that is something that is your favorite, too.  I ended up bringing some chocolate Christmas Cadbury Eggs for my treat and a super soft plush blanket with some white chocolate hot chocolate for my gift.  It was supposed to be wrapped, but I didn't end up wrapping mine--whoops!  Then everyone got a chance to pick a present and whoever brought the present got to stand up and say why it was one of their favorite things and then pick another present--if that makes sense.  It was a fun a night.  I ended up with a Swig mug and a Swig gift certificate.  Wahoo!

Things have been a bit rough with Matthew lately.  Puberty with crazy teenage emotional rollercoasters with added autism makes for some rough times.  We have been trying to weather the storm and most of the time we do okay, but there are few days where things are pretty crazy.  Take for instance two Sundays ago.  Aaron had taken Josh and Daniel early to church so they could help prepare the sacrament.  I was going to come a bit later with Sarah, Noah and Matthew since we weren't quite ready yet.  This got Matthew quite upset.  When Matthew gets upset it's not pretty.  He HATES not being to church at least 15 minutes early.  He got pretty wound up and I refused to take him until he calmed down which made him even more upset.  It was a bad cycle.  He roughed me up a bit so by the time he calmed down enough for us to leave for church we were 10 minutes late.  We walked in while they were singing the opening song.  It was then Matthew started crying because he was still pretty upset.  He started crying pretty hard so I had to take him out to the foyer for him to calm down a bit.  We went back in right before they started the sacrament, but he started crying pretty hard and couldn't pull himself together.  It was then I finally had to take him back home because he was so emotional.   Ugh!!  In the different autism groups I follow and am part of everyone says the teenage years are the most difficult.  I would have to say I really agree with them.  Hopefully his emotions will calm down soon because they are pretty crazy right now.  Raising a kid with autism especially during the teenage years is definitely not for the feint of heart that's for sure!!

In other happenings Noah is always up for a good selfie--haha!

Josh's Cross Country finished out the season with a end of season banquet.  Josh told us parents weren't really invited so Aaron and I didn't go.  However, when he got home after the dinner he said he missed having us there because everyone else had their parents there.  DOH!!  Oh well you live and learn I guess.  At least we will know that we can go when it comes around next year.  At the banquet Josh got awarded the most outstanding Freshman of the team.  Wahoo!  He even got a commemorative plaque to show for it.

He's so funny because he came home and put it right where anyone who comes over can see it.  He is pretty proud of the plaque.

Aaron has still been trying out new things with his smoker.  He tried out making some jerky.  It was pretty good.  You use Dr. Pepper, soy sauce and jalapeños in the recipe.  When I heard what was in the recipe I didn't expect it to taste very well, but I was pleasantly surprised.  Here's what it ended up looking like:

Aaron was going to make Christmas Eve dinner for all my family so he needed a trial smoke run for a ham before the big day.  He was talking with the butcher at the grocery store and the butcher talked him in to trying an uncured, uncooked ham.  99% of spiral cut hams from the store are precooked so this would truly be an experiment.  Aaron was unsure about if he wanted to try such a thing so to help make up his mind the butcher gave him a huge uncooked ham for half price.  Aaron seasoned it with some rub, smoked it and took it to work for his work party.  It turned out pretty good.  Here's what it looked like on the smoker (the wires are temperature probes to make sure it was the right temperature):

Speaking of hams...Noah's a ham if you haven't guessed:

Josh is continuing with his running.  They have an indoor track team for the beginning of the year, but they won't let Josh participate since he is a freshman and Jr. High gets out 30 minutes after the high school so they don't want to wait for him before they start practice.  Kind of a bummer, but he gets them to text him the daily workout so he can run on his own.  They other day he had to do an eight mile run.  He ended up running down to G&G T's house where Daniel and his cousin Miles were having a sleepover that night/day.  They didn't mind him crashing the party because he was only there long enough to get some refreshment, take a picture and then leave to come running back home.  What a crazy kid.

We hadn't had a chance to see Santa this year so we were excited to find out that our local grocery store was going to have Santa and Mrs. Clause come for a visit.  Matthew was so excited to see them when we walked in.  He was having a hard time containing his excitement.  This is the best picture I could get without his arms flapping so fast they were blurry.  He gave them quite the list of wants, too.  The funny thing is they were mostly for Sophie.  That boy loves that dog so much!

Noah:

Sarah:

Daniel:

Josh thought he was too old to sit on Santa's lap, but he did allow us to take his picture along with the other kids as a group:

Ugh kids can be so frustrating at times.  When Josh went to California for Cross Country he ended up missing a day of school.  That day he missed he had a huge Science project that was due, but he didn't tell us about it.  It wasn't until I checked his grades a week later and saw he had a 'C' in science that I had panic attack.  That's when Josh told me about the project and how it was my fault because I hadn't bought him the supplies to make it with--WAIT....WHAT?!  Had I known about the project beforehand I would have gotten all the stuff he needed, but he failed to mention it to me, but yet, it was still my fault...Anyway, I found this out as we were walking out the door to go 'Swimming with Santa' with the entire family.  It is a fun get together put on by a respite company twice a year.  They rent out the Bountiful Aquatics center after hours for 1 hour and 45 minutes for families with kids who have autism.  My kids LOVE going to this twice a year.  Anyway, he chose that inopportune time to let me know how I had failed him.  Ugh!!  Anyway, we went swimming that Saturday night and had a lot of fun. We got home about 9:30 pm so that's when Josh got started on his project.  He had to make a car out of household objects that will move by the wind of a blowing fan, but he couldn't use a pre-made car kit or Lego wheels or anything else to make it a bunch easier.  Anyway, it took him about an hour and a half to put something together with Aaron's help.  Here's what his household object car looked like that ended up using old checkbook boxes as a base and a sail, cut up votive candles as wheels (that they 'borrowed' without asking from my living room decoration which I am not happy about), a cut up metal hanger for the wheel axles all hot glued together:

When they were finished with it, Josh then told us that it his project was so late that the next step in the science project was due, too.  The next step was improving on your design and fixing the car to make it go faster.  It was just a bit frustrating to say the least!!  Anyway, I helped Josh with the next step the following afternoon because we had hit our limit of school projects that night...Gotta love last minutes surprises that were somehow my fault?!  Anyway, I am just glad it got done and that Josh is still alive--haha!

Last Monday night we went and walked around the Lights at Layton City.  We usually drive through the display, but I wanted to try walking through it on the walking path this year instead.  I am glad we did because you see a lot more when you walk through it.

When we got home we had to have hot chocolate:

Again here's Noah passed out.  That rough schedule of late nights of getting lubs and waking up at 6 am really takes a toll on Noah (and myself--haha!):

The other day after school a few of the cross country team were going to do a fun 8 mile run out at Antelope Island.  When I had to pick up Josh afterward, it was snowing.  I brought Sophie along because she really loves car rides.  Well she really loves car rides until you have to use the windshield wipers.  Once I turned those on she totally coward into Josh's lap.  They must have been the scariest things she has ever seen or heard--poor thing.  She was just shaking, too.  What a weird dog!

Last Wednesday the young men and women rode Frontrunner down to Temple Square to see the lights for their weekly activity.  I got this text from a leader a few hours after they had left.  I am sure Matthew begged her to take his picture and send it to his mom since he loves having people do that for him.  I do get pictures of Matthew from random numbers quite often which makes me just shake my head, but also makes me glad people are so nice to do that for him.  I am glad she did take and text the picture to me because it made me smile.  I was glad Matthew was having a good time and got to see a Union Pacific train, too.

Here's the whole group that went:

Here's Daniel with a few of the Deacons:

Here's Josh with his group:

The next day the kids wanted to take a selfie.  The funny thing about this selfie is that Noah was sucking on a candy cane that promptly got stuck in Sarah's hair.  She didn't figure that part out until after the picture was taken, though.  I thought it was pretty funny, but Sarah wasn't too happy about it neither was Noah since he lost his yummy candy cane.  Let me just say it was stuck in her hair pretty good, too.

The kids' last day of school was Wednesday which meant we got a few days to play.  Aaron still had to work which was a bit of a bummer.  Anyway, Thursday we didn't do too much, but Friday we drove down to Sandy.  At the South Towne Mall they had a cool Christmas in the Wizarding World of Harry Potter set up.  I wanted to get there when it opened since I know it has been pretty busy.  I didn't realize that the Harry Potter display opened an hour after the mall did.  We got there right when the mall opened before I found that out--DOH!!  We took a few pictures outside the set up and then wandered around the mall for an hour waiting for it to open.  Here we are outside the entrance:

Here we are standing on the outside of Honeydukes Sweet Shop:

We wandered by the fountain where I happened to have a few pennies I let the kids throw in to make wishes:

When we got back to the entrance after wandering around for an hour the place was BUSY with a huge line.  We waited our turn in line and luckily, the line moved pretty quickly.  To keep us busy in line they had a mirrored ceiling where the kids passed the time by pulling silly faces at themselves.  I can't complain because it kept them from fighting with each other while we were line.

We finally made it inside.  We looked around and got to play some Quidditch, too.  We weren't very good, though:

We then got in line for Ollivander's wand shop.  Noah was not happy about it as you can see:

Finally it was our turn to go inside. It was hard to get Matthew to stop talking to the lady long enough to get inside the wand shop--haha!

I thought they were going to do a wand choosing ceremony, but I was wrong.  They only had wands set up you could look at and that was it.  It was a bit of a let down.  The kids still had fun looking at the different wands, though.

After we saw all we wanted to we wandered around the mall some more.  That's when the kids found these swivel chairs they had fun playing on.  Matthew and I didn't enjoy them very much, but the other kids seemed to.

That evening after we got home and Aaron got home from work we decided to head down to Temple Square to see the lights.  Daniel had previously found out about the charity vending machines they had at Temple Square for Light the World movement so he dug out a few bucks from his piggy bank to donate.  We were shocked when we got down there that there was at least a 45 minute wait for the charity vending machines.  Since Daniel had his heart set on donating his money we waited in line for our turn.  The line passed by the beautiful Christmas tree in the Joseph Smith Memorial building so we took a family picture by it as we waited in line:

Finally it was our turn.  Daniel decided he wanted to donate clean water to people in Africa.

He tried putting the money in, but the cash thing was broken and wouldn't accept cash.  It was a bit frustrating, but we ended up sliding our credit card and had Daniel give us the cash instead.  Here's Daniel trying to put the cash inside the broken machine:

In return for the donation he got a bottle of water with Light the World saying on it.  It was pretty cool:

We then went up to the 10th floor of the Joseph Smith Memorial Building where you can see all of Temple Square and the pretty lights:

Then we headed over to the candy window display at Macy's.  They used to do these elaborate scenes made all from candy back when it was ZCMI.  When it changed to Macy's they stopped doing the Candy Windows, but started back up a few years ago.  They are pretty cool to see.  The whole scene it made entirely from candy:

After seeing the candy windows we headed over to see the lights on Temple Square.  It was really pretty just like it is every year:

We even stopped by to warm up inside the old Tabernacle, too:

It even started snowing while we were walking around which was pretty cool.

It was a fun night.

On a side note we had a pretty sweet gas fill up the other night.  Our grocery store had a sale where you got 4x the fuel reward points for any gift card purchase.  Since we bought a lot of our Christmas stuff from Amazon we would buy Amazon gift cards from the grocery store and redeem the 4x fuel reward points in the process.  We accrued so many points that we got to fill up both cars for $1.39 a gallon.  Wahoo!  It was so awesome we had to take a picture of it because we are nerdy like that--haha!

Reaction, Bandaid Face, The Waves, Creche Festival, Christmas Party, Life and First Class Award

Well it appears Daniel may need to go back to remedial OIT school.  He supposedly graduated from Oral Immunotherapy for cashew and pistachios last Thursday, however, he was munching down on some pistachios Friday afternoon and had a severe reaction.  He was covered head to toe in hives, wheezing, sneezing, coughing, hoarse voice, snotty mess, the whole 9 yards.  Luckily, we were able to stop it with our emergency meds at home (Prednisone, Ranitidine, Allegra, and his rescue inhaler) before we had to use the Epi pen.  Daniel is terrified of the Epi pen so I was glad we didn't end up needing to use it, but it was close.  The emergency medication kicked in pretty quickly so the worst of it was over after about 30 minutes.  It only took a few hours for all the hives to disappear completely, however, the spots where he'd scratched his skin raw stayed around for a few days.  Here's what his whole body looked like (all that red is one ginormous group of hives):

 I called the on call number for the allergist which got me to the nurse and they said to stop the pistachios, but continue on his maintenance dose of cashews.  Unfortunately, it happened Friday afternoon after the office was closed so I wasn't able to call the next day to get the full instructions.  However, as fate would have it, we ran into his allergist at the grocery store Saturday morning and talked to him about it.  He knew all about Daniel's reaction from the on call nurse I had talked to the previous day which was impressive.  He said that he wanted to wait for Daniel's body to get fully used to the cashews for a few months before we reintroduce the pistachios and if we need to do a mini OIT for pistachios we could.  DOH!  I thought we were done with OIT, but not quite yet.  Hopefully with time the maintenance dose of cashew will finally cancel out the pistachio allergy, but for now he will just avoid pistachios.  We see the allergist again in a month for a follow up so we will know more then.  In the meantime we had to deal with Daniel's 'roid rage (steroids make him extremely moody) the whole weekend, but I think it's finally out of his system.  Phew!  It was a rough few days there, though.

My cute Sarahbug had a scratch on her nose that she won't leave alone.  She will absentmindedly pick at it so to try and stop that we put a bandaid on her nose.  We had her take it off if we were going anywhere, though.  She insisted that we take a picture of it so here she is in her bandaid nose glory:

 Noah is a pretty laid back kid unless it has something to do with his hair.  That kid spends more time combing his hair than his three brothers combined.  He can only comb his hair in my bathroom, too--the light must be better in there I guess.  Who knows?!  Anyway, he has to do the 'waves' and get them just right in the front of his hair.  It is comical to watch him because he really does spend a long time combing it.  Now if you look closer you can see that his shirt is on backwards and what you can't see are that his socks are mismatched.  He doesn't care about that, he only really cares about getting the 'waves' just right in his hair.  Another funny thing is he will spend that long combing his hair, but then he will put his hood on when he goes outside which messes it all up.  **Sigh** What a crazy kid!

 Last week basketball started up for Daniel.  The city 'voluntold' Aaron that he would help coach Daniel's basketball team as well.  Luckily, he is team coaching with another dad which he feels more comfortable with since basketball isn't his forte.  The first few weeks are practices then the games will begin.  After basketball practice Saturday we took the family over to the Creche Festival.  The Creche Festival asks families in the area to donate their nativities for people to come look at for two days.  It is for everyone not just LDS people which is pretty cool.  It is so interesting because their are nativities from all around the world that are displayed.  They have all kinds of nativities from Playskool sets on up to super fancy ones.   They are pretty neat to go and see all of them.  The whole church gym is filled up with a lot of nativities.

 This is the 3rd year that I have been able to display mine.  My nativities aren't fancy, but more sentimental.

 Saturday evening was our wards Christmas party.  We had dinner then they had a nativity play.  Daniel had the only speaking part of the whole thing.  He was a Roman soldier:

 It is the same costume he used for the Wax Museum a few weeks ago (minus the sugar skull gummy worm Medusa head) when he was Perseus so it was great we were able to use it again.  Here's his speaking part:

They had the primary kids come up and sing a few songs to go along with the nativity.  Here's Sarah and Noah singing with the group:

Here's the nativity scene on the stage (Daniel is the one on the far left with the sword):

 Daniel was so serious and wouldn't smile for any of the pictures--crazy kid:

It was an entertaining evening.

This past weekend we made some homemade egg nog.  Yummm!  The kids thought it left the funniest creamy mustaches behind:

 I had my last two work shifts this week for the semester.  Wahoo!  Unfortunately they were swing shifts which meant I missed a few things.  Tuesday night Josh had a band concert that I wasn't able to go to.  Luckily, Aaron and the kids as well as G&G T were able to go.  Here's a picture of Josh that Aaron took.  He is the 4th one over from the left side:

 As luck would have it, though, the band, orchestra and choir did an assembly the next day that I was able to go to.  Here's everyone as they were getting ready to start the assembly:

 The band was the very last ones to play.  I was sweating  bullets because I HAD to leave by 1:15pm to get to work on time.  The band started playing the first of their three songs at 1:10pm.  DOH!!  Needless to say I was a few minutes late to work because I wanted to hear all three songs the band played.  Oh well it all worked out.  I was just glad I was able to hear Josh play.  Here's the band:

 Here's Josh who is the 2nd trumpet in on the left side:

 Last night while I was at work they had a Court of Honor.  Daniel was able to receive his First Class award:

 Josh received his Life Scout award:

 Wahoo!  The boys are really coming along with scouting.  Now on to figuring out what to do for Josh's Eagle project...