It's a Holly Jolly California Christmas

As I mentioned in my last post, we spent the Christmas holiday in California with my family. We had a lot of fun...

On Christmas Eve we did the traditional lighting of the German Christmas candle pyramid while we sang, read stories, and read Luke chapter 2.

We also dressed in costumes for the nativity program. As you can see, my mom was the 'star' of the show...

My brothers Evan and Reed.

The day after Christmas we went to my sister Adrienne's house for the Criddle Olympic games. Above is our traditional Lindberg family spoon on the nose contest. My mom won using a baby spoon, and above is her victory dance.

Another Criddle Olympics event was the elf racing as seen below.

Later in our trip we visited the Lawrence Hall of Science. Here are some pictures taken outside the museum...


For Family Home Evening my dad told a story about one of our ancestors and we made sailor hats out of newspaper.

We also spent time just hanging out. Eli enjoyed being swung around in a bean bag chair by his dad.

It couldn't be a party until Reed played 80's music on the piano and the grandchildren danced their little rock star hearts out.

Below is the family photo we took.

Eli's 1st Birthday

As a few people have pointed out to me, it has been a LONG time since I've posted anything. We were gone to California, Utah, and Idaho for 3+ weeks for the holidays, and now I've procrastinated blogging. So, here is the first catching up post.

Yes, Eli turned the big ONE on Dec 23rd. We were in California visiting my family when we celebrated his birthday. Here are a few gems for your viewing enjoyment...

The pre-cake birthday boy with his excited mama. Thank you Dollar Tree for providing the embarrassing birthday headband/crown that will now be a tradition.

Instead of a cake we made bug cupcakes. They turned out really cute.

Ah, there is order in the universe. My child is indeed a chocolate lover.

And then there were the presents.

It's hard to contain the excitement. Jake gets a kick out of this picture.

Fav pics from this week

Stick Out Your Tongue!

Walking

Playing with Links

Grooving to the Music

Tis the Season

The Christmas season is just around the corner, and that means sugar, family, and cold weather. After a hot Texas summer I'm looking forward to bundling up in a blanket with hot chocolate on a cold night.

We have a Relief Society meeting and service project coming up at the beginning of December, and below are some pretzel snowmen that we will be making at the activity. They were fun and pretty easy. I think they turned out well. I think this would be a fun family tradition to start.

And here are some other pictures taken today...

I walk into the room to find this...

...Jake's ears were cold.

An Early Halloween

Our ward had an early Trunk-or-Treat tonight. Eli went dressed as a lion. I wanted to take pictures of some our friends and their kids that were there, but Jake was helping the priests with their haunted house and I totally forgot about our camera in my purse. So here are a few pictures of just us from tonight...

Believe it or not, the picture below is of a happy, laughing boy.

ROAR!Time to go home!

Bobbing For Apples

Recently Eli experienced his first whole apple. It was de-e-e-elicious!

The Ants Come Marching Two By Two

This video pretty much sums up what we have been experiencing in our apartment over the last few weeks. Ants! Ants in the carpet, ants in our pants. It has been raining off and on here, and the ants will come in under one of the windowsills next to our fireplace after the flood water rises. Stinkin' ants.

One night they were so bad that we started vacuuming them up. As we were on our fourth or fifth vacuuming of the night, the vacuum stopped working! I plugged the vacuum into another outlet to see if by chance it was just the outlet that went dead on us, but it didn't work there either. The ants spent the next 24 hours taking over our living room. They were on top of the carpet, under the carpet, and I even found one dead ant on the inside of Eli's diaper plastered to his leg. When looking inside the vacuum (we have a bagless vacuum) you could see the ants burrowing tunnels and making themselves at home. I thought I was going to freak out.

Later that afternoon I took a shower and went to blow dry my hair using one of the same outlets only to discover that both outlets we had tried using previously were on the same circuit and were out. I reset the circuit and had an ant extermination spree. Take that for stealing my living space small creatures of nastiness!

Reading

Standing Up

Toy Joy

Ah, the thrill of a new toy.

Picture Update

Eli has less of a double chin in real life than he does in the picture above.

Book Suggestions?

I'm hosting our book club in November, and I am in need of a book club book suggestion. I had some good book ideas, but for some reason they don't have copies of the books in the Denton or UNT libraries. HELP ME! I know there are several of you who are avid book readers. What are your favorite books?

To give you an idea of what we have read recently in the book club, here are some books that have been on our reading list:

• The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collings
• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
• The Life of Pi by Yan Martel
• Key Lime Pie Murder by Joanne Fluke
• The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom

Here are the books I was thinking about picking, but they don't have them in the library:

• Kitchen Table Wisdom by Rachel Remen
• My Grandfather's Blessings by Rachel Remen (I have a copy of this and there is a copy in the Denton library, so this is a possibility.)
• The Peacegiver: How Christ Offers to Heal Hearts and Homes by James L. Ferrell
• This Is My Words by Nancy Turner (I haven't read this and there is one copy at the Denton library, so this is a possibility.)
• The Tao of Pooh by Hoff (I've read this, but I don't know if everyone would like it.)
• The Secret Life of Bees (I've read this and it is a possibility.)

Choosing a book for book club is harder than I thought because I want everyone to enjoy the book, and everyone has such different tastes in books. And this is a lot of pressure because this is my first book choice for the club, so I don't want to be known as the one who picked "that" book (said in a negative voice).

Suggestions please!