Cyber Sanchez Christmas Card Extravaganza!

 

 Hello friends and family! We are ditching the traditional Christmas card this year in favor of a straight-to-your-screen, don’t-have-to-walk-to-the-mailbox cyberspace version. I’m hoping to get back to the traditional paper letters in the next year or two, but for now I’d love to bring everyone up to speed on life in the Sanchez household this way. In the interests of ‘keeping it real,’ I may overshare. My apologies. : )

Judah Bear will turn three in March and is such a fun little man! He is still kind of small for his age but I am convinced this kid is made of solid cement. He is so strong and so tough and his love for his sisters is beyond adorable. Judah is also a total cheeseball! He has this great big smile (just like Adaleine!) that he flashes to just about anyone he sees. He started swim lessons a couple of months ago and told his teacher in his very first class that he wanted to do it all by himself. I have no idea where he gets this stubbornness ; ) 

*Reality Check* This freaking kid will not sleep in his own bed through the night. I will accept a good portion of the blame because when he was a baby it was so much easier just to let him in bed with me than trying to calm and quiet him. But seriously, dude. Sleep in your own bed!

Adaleine Grace just turned five in November and requested we celebrate with a Fancy Nancy birthday party. She is in her second year of preschool and loves getting to go to school three days a week. She is mommy’s little helper at home; she loves folding laundry and helping with lunch. She also loves riding her bike and playing outside with her brother and sister. Ada started Awana (kid’s church group) this year and is getting lots of patches to put on her vest for memorizing Bible verses. Adaleine and Eden both started swim lessons in March of this year and are both doing swimmingly! I’m sorry. I had to.

*Reality Check* I would argue that Sissy is one of the sweetest little kids that has ever walked the earth. She is beautiful and a true blessing. I have two small suggestions to this little ray of sunshine: L-I-S-T-E-N to what I am saying to you or I’m going to lose my ever-loving mind, and please for the love of all that is good in this world try to put your shoes on the right feet!

Miss Eden turned six in June and is in first grade (gulp!). We had a rough patch last year when she didn’t like school for a bit, but once she got the hang of reading all of that disappeared. She is now one of the top readers in her grade and even enjoys math! (She must not be my daughter.) Eden loves learning new things and is really interested in animals right now. This is her first year of Awana too and she is having so much fun with the games and memorization, along with making new friends in her group. She lost her first loose tooth and is turning into a young lady before our very eyes. 

*Reality Check* At the ripe age of 6 1/2, Miss Eden truly has the whole shoes-on-the-right-feet thing down pat. Here’s my big struggle with Eden: breakfast. The kid doesn’t like cereal. Doesn’t like cereal bars. Doesn’t like anything that’s fast or that she could make herself. And she’s a morning person. She is so not my daughter. 

 

As for me (Brittany), I am still keeping busy as a stay-at-home momma. Between running around for the kiddos, packing school lunches, and helping with our Mom’s Small Group at church I’m pretty spent! We also moved yet again this year when our landlords decided to list the house we were renting for sale. This was our third or fourth big move in just over two years—depending on how you count them—and to say it was a hard move for me is a gross understatement. But God continues to provide and we are in a really great house in a nice neighborhood that is so close to the girls’ school. We have been very blessed!

*Reality Check* There are days when I feel like I’ve got this whole ‘mom-ing’ thing totally down, but for the most part it’s mostly me spending my days navigating laundry, feeding the kids again and wondering how all the fruit snacks wind up in the sofa cushions. Confession: I hate putting away laundry. With a passion. Consequently, there are currently three baskets of folded laundry in my bedroom waiting to be put away. Sigh.

 

Landon continues on as a locomotive engineer for BNSF Railroad. His job takes him away from home a lot and his schedule is wildly unpredictable, but that just makes the times that we’re all home together even more special. He participated in the Spartan Run in October with a close friend and really enjoyed it. The kids and I all had fun watching him climb across monkey bars, crawl under barbed wire through mud pits, and throw a javelin. 

*Reality Check* Landon broke one of my brooms to make his practice javelin, which I’m totally over. Whatever. Also, he is now the reluctant proud owner of a ‘honey do’ list, which I’m confident will be nothing but helpful in our ongoing quest for world domination organization and peace throughout our home.

Thanks for sticking with me through our family report! We hope you are all having a safe and happy Christmas season and pray for a blessed new year!

With love,

Landon, Brittany, Eden, Adaleine & Judah

Party On! Adaleine's Fancy Nancy Birthday Party

Hello Dahlings! Just popping in to say bonjour and share with you all the particulars of Miss Adaleine’s Grand Birthday Soiree that we hosted last weekend! I think everyone had a mahvelous time!

I was so excited about these invitations. I purchased them for just $10 from the Etsy shop PixelParade (here's the link to these invites if you want it) and just used a little glue to attach some sparkly cardstock to the back. I got the sparkle cardstock when it was on sale at Hobby Lobby, but if you don't want to spend the extra bucks these invites would still look super cute without it.

And here is a picture of our birthday girl! (Sorry about the weird lighting. This house has wonky lighting all over the place. Sigh) I somehow missed this step last year, so I made sure to capture her pretty smile this year. Since it was a Fancy Nancy party, Sissy chose her fanciest dress, put a pink shirt underneath, and added some fun leggings to complete the ensemble. You can see one of the signs I made for the party on the door behind her. This one says, "Bonjour! Welcome to my soiree!"

Here is our food table before I got the pink punch out. I had so much fun with this and I think it turned out looking pretty fancy : ) I used doilies under everything so that upped the fancy factor, too. My cake-making sister moved away for a year (curse you, Minnesota!), so I went with cupcakes for Sweet Adaleine's party. Since my dear sister was unable to make cake for this party, she made a million tissue paper flowers instead! And I have to say, they really made the party. : ) If you want to see some of the cakes Tiffany has made for our other parties, click here, here, and here.

Side note about the cupcake stand: my husband rocks. He cut plywood pieces for me before going to work one night so I could set up this cupcake stand. I then covered the boards with some of the disposable table runner left over from Eden's butterfly party and used upside-down drinking glasses as supports. I got the idea from this brilliant lady here.

I added pink and purple food coloring to white cake mixes to color the cakes and just went with simple white frosting. Sprinkles and pom picks from Target {clearance!} made them fancy. I wish I had taken the time to make pretty wraps for all the cupcakes like this, but that would have just been too much for me this time.

I dipped a package of marshmallows in almond bark and then covered them in rainbow sprinkles that I already had. Bonus points for not dishing out more dough! (I'm so cheap it's scary)

I bet you were wondering where the pretzels were, huh? I simply cannot have a party without pretzels, so I went with the old 'dip them in almond bark' standby and called it good. I may have eaten a couple hundred while I was dipping them. Those things are so good!

For our games, we played 'Accessorize Fancy Ada,' which was a big hit. I had a Fancy Nancy coloring page (found here) printed as a 24x36" engineering print at Staples for less than $4! Then I bought a new box of colored pencils and turned on a movie. I colored her hair a little darker than the actual book character's so she looked more like the birthday girl. The bows are not in this picture, but I just used white return address labels and printed pink, orange, and purple bows onto them. 

I didn't think this one through since it was a preschool-age party and THEY CAN'T READ, but next we 'played' (being very kind with that word usage) 'Fancy Talk' where the kids match up fancy words and plain words. Oh well, I had fun making it. : )

Right behind this little stud muffin here you can see the table we had set up for the kids to kill a little time while they waited for everyone to arrive. The sign said 'Adorn Yourselves' and I got little plastic top hats for the boys and tiaras for the girls, along with mustaches and bracelets. I may be biased, but I think this kid really rocks the socks off that 'stache.

 I kept favors simple (and cheap!) by just doing little baggies of chocolate chip cookies tied up with ribbon and a card that said, "Thanks for being fancy with me! Merci!" 

And last but not least I had to share this picture. See sweet Adaleine with her little bouquet of flowers in this picture? See the little boy in the background? He brought her those all tied up with a ribbon. Cutest.thing.ever. I might be planning their wedding in my head already. Justkiddingnotreally.

I didn't get a picture for some reason, but I also hung up a buttload of streamers (reminds me of Wreck It Ralph every time I hear that phrase) all around the rooms so it just felt like a great big fancy party. Adaleine asked if we could keep them up forever. I said one week. It has now been eight days and I'm too tired to take them down. Hey, if we leave them up another couple weeks I can call them Christmas decorations!

Have a very fancy day! : )

A 'Despicable' Halloween

Okay, so I failed miserably with my resolution to blog every day for 30 days. I’m bummed but trying not to be too hard on myself (which is what I would normally do) and just admit that maybe this wasn’t the year for it. I might try again next year, who knows? There are still a couple of posts I’ve got tossing around in my head that go along with my Moving Right Along theme, but I’ll get to them later on. : )

I just wanted to post today and share with you a couple pictures of the munsters from Halloween. I shared last year about their Toy Story themed costumes and how I made them, but this year we went for simple and easy. 

We stuck with keeping all kids in a common theme (which I will do for as long as they’ll let me) and chose another kids movie. Despicable Me! This is hands-down my favorite animated movie right now.

Eden dressed up as Margo, Adaleine was Agnes, and Judah rounded out the trio as Gru. It was really simple and very little effort was required on my part, which I loved. 

 

 

 The only minorly crafty things I had to do were add darts to the jacket I found for Miss Eden to wear and to draw stripes onto Sissy's shirt with a marker! My sister crocheted the scarf for Judah, so black shirt and pants completed his outfit with zero effort from me. If only every year could be this easy! Hope you had a happy Halloween and ate all the Milky Ways you could hold. Diet starts tomorrow ; )