Christmas Week!

This week was full of all the last of the celebrations and errands that needed to be done before the holidays. 

I was able to volunteer in Maddix’s class for his party. the kids asked me who I was, abs when I replied I was Maddix’s mom, they told me “more like his sister!” Needless to say, I had a wonderful time! Ha ha. 

We had friends over to build graham cracker houses and it took extra long because we tried making the frosting three different times and each time it wasn’t working… because we realized we were adding in flour instead of powdered sugar! 

The kids got to play with friends and run around in some decently good weather! 

We made Gingerbread men cookies for Santa, Elf donuts for the elves; we made grinch corn and watched the grinch; and we read The Night Before Christmas by the fire before putting our magical Christmas Eve pillow cases on our pillows and heading to bed. 

And the kids were so happy that our “service” manger was stacked full of straw (earned by random acts of kindness) and would be soft for Jesus’s arrival. 

Christmas morning was ROUGH! Between Travis and I feeling super sick and not having made it to bed until three is hours before the kids woke up, and the kids being grumpy… it started rough! But the day turned out FANTASTIC! What a wonderful Christmas ❤️ The kids played on the stair slide for so long. Maddix got to golf outside… until we realized Santa brought him left handed clubs; dang it!! And Addie took her nee bike out front and learned how to ride her new big girl bike in like 10 minutes! The rest of the time she rode circles while we ran/rode next to her and watched Aaron do tricks on his bike. The kids were super tired so we all took naps for a bit before dinner and a short movie. We then watched the church’s LightTheWorld video and called it a night. 

What a wonderful Christmas! 

And today… Travis and I ended up doing at-home COVID tests and thankfully they came back negative because we drove up to the cities to pick up my brother, Uncle Colton and we are SOoOo excited to have him here. 

Tornado Weather

Our illnesses continued in the form of stomach flu, colds, fevers, etc. 

I have so much to be grateful for that I can’t help but share. 

On Wednesday we had a storm warning for 80-100mph winds and potential tornado touchdowns. I am grateful that the towns here in the Midwest take these warnings seriously. Businesses closed early so no one would be on the roads, and semis were routed off the highway to wait it out at truck stops. 

First off, if anyone knows the weather here in Iowa, you know the winters are FRIGID cold, but Wednesday we reached a high around 70 degrees; all our snow melted right away. The older folks kept saying how it wasn’t natural weather. 😅

We had just sat down to dinner when the thunder just shook our house out of nowhere and the winds began to rip. Our lights started to flicker off and we quickly moved our dinner to the basement, grabbed our flashlights, and set up beds in the basement; Im so grateful I have a finished basement that offers a safe haven full of comforts. The house really started to take a beating, and we read that our airport (15miles away) had been hit with 100pmh winds. One of my children really began to lose it; they really don’t like tornados… however as quickly as it began to get intense… it was just gone. Done. We went out and saw other neighbors looking at the sky wondering the same thing, “where did the storm go??” What a blessing. As quick as it landed on us, it was gone; and it was supposed to last a few hours. 

We began texting our ward members who live out in all the very small surrounding towns to check in. One town lost their church house and the roof off their library due to a tornado that came through (20 mins south of us). Others had power lines downs, trees thrown around, but nothing like the tornado that went through another friends town. That one shredded the farm properties out there. Our friend’s farm being one of them. Their barn was completely blown apart and laying all on top of their vehicles, medal chard’s from the Neighbor’s shed had been lodged into the trees all over their property, and on and. YET… nothing touched their house; I am so grateful. 

66,000 Iowans lost power, but by noon the next day only an estimated 2,000 were without power due to hard working employees. As I’ve driving down several blocked off streets here, I can’t help but be grateful that’s all that it is… a minor inconvenience. 

We also had our YW Christmas party which turned out to be lots of fun. 

And then we had our friends girls over for a sleep over and Travis and the boys spent time out on their farm, trying to help get the aftermath all cleaned up. We did our snowman pancakes Sunday morning and I did all the girls’ hair matching for church; it was so much fun. Poor Travis woke up sick Sunday morning and didn’t wake up until 11:00. 

That night we had our nativity reading, via zoom with the Johnson side and then had a Christmas dinner with Susan and Glenn, Bro. Havner, and the missionaries; it was a really nice night. And we loved having Bro. Hav. Read our new Christmas story to the kids before calling it a night. 

And that was our week before Christmas!