A December to Remember?

Maybe every December is to remember so this one was no different.  It had its ups, but it also had its downs.  We finished up our communication unit at the beginning of the month.  We also had a Christmas Parade for the Cubscouts where we used our truck and trailer for the float and it was so fun.  The float was How the Grinch Stole Christmas themed and the kids enjoyed decorating it.  Home schooling worked to our advantage because they decorated the float during a school day so our kids were the only kids who got to help and they enjoyed being part of it.

The we took a trip further South in Texas to visit relatives.  We had a nice time there and did some work on our flatbed trailer and enjoyed seeing family.  We also got to attend our oldest niece's graduation from college and we are so proud of her!  Congratulations Bethany!

The last day we were there though, a few of us had a bit of a sore throat.  We got home and things went down hill fast.  I scheduled doctor's appointments for all three kids and it turns out two of the three tested positive for the flu and the third wasn't far behind.  Poor Daddy was sick with it too.  They all four got Tamiflu and although they were as sick as dogs for about a week they got better much faster with the Tamiflu and the doctor said that the fact that we had all had flu shots in the fall, helped them not get it as bad as they could have.  Somehow I escaped getting it knock on wood!

After they were all finally feeling better we were getting close to Christmas and I didn't want to start a whole new unit just to have to stop in the middle so we continued on with our math lessons, grammar lessons, spelling lessons and we decided to do Christmas activities as well.  We went on an amazing field trip to a church in Lubbock with just our family.  They had hundreds and hundreds of Nativity scenes set up from all over the world.  They had a scavenger hunt sheet that the kids did to find certain ones with certain features and it was so fun and so amazing to see all of them.  I took a ton of pictures and obviously can't share all of them but I will pick a few of our favorites.  My favorite is the one with the three cute little shepherds.......

We also made ornaments.  We made some that we printed off and colored and then laminated of the religious symbols of Christmas and then we found these cool peppermint ones with a recipe to make them on Pinterest and we tried them and they were so fun!  We had to get a new tree this year and it is beautiful and we had a great time decorating it with ornaments both new and old.

We finished out the year with the older two and I playing Horse-opoly until Midnight on New Year's Eve and having a great time.  We also finished out the year with our pipes freezing which led us into an eventful start to 2015.