The first of December

One of our Relief Society activities was a service auction.  I bought a place for Jessie in a play from a lady in our ward who directs community plays.  Jessie choose to be in “The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.”  And she loved it.  She got to be in the angel choir and run across the stage with one of the main characters on her back, screaming “Get her off of me!”  Jessie is so good at memorizing that she had just about the entire play memorized and quoted different pieces to us during dinner.  David and Lisa went to see her on Thursday evening and really enjoyed it.  And Grandma and Rachel went with us to see it on Saturday.  Neil LOVED it and knew that each time the lights dimed that was his cue to clap.  It was so stinkin’ cute. Rachel brought Jessie three pomegranates (instead of flowers) to celebrate, and Jessie was in heaven.We also got to go to Jessie’s first band concert.  Unfortunately we couldn’t exactly hear the flutes individually, but we still knew they were adding to the concert.  Spencer was so excited to hear the band play “The Hanukkah Song,”  his favorite of the songs Jessie had been practicing.  But when they started playing he was really confused, “This doesn’t sound like what Jessie plays!”Neil and I did a little Christmas shopping and he conveniently fell asleep – so nice.  I just tucked his and my coat under his head and I had remembered to bring his blanket and binkie to facilitate that little maneuver.  YEAH ME!The first Saturday of December was a full lunar eclipse.  And Mark and Ken were not going to miss it.  At first they were thinking of getting up at 4:00 am, but it was later revised to 6:00, much more reasonable.It was NOT warm that morning, but it was worth the watch to see the shadow of the earth going over the moon with your own eyes!!  SO COOL!  I opted to watch from inside and then we made some homemade hot chocolate to warm them back up.

This is a little on the dark chocolate side for those of you who are more milk chocolate people, but I’m sure you could add some more sugar if you like.

Italian Hot Chocolate

3 Tbsp. cocoa powder

1/4 cup sugar

2 cups milk

1 Tbsp. cornstarch

1/2 cup milk

1/2 tsp. vanilla

Whisk together cocoa powder and sugar in a small saucepan.  Add 2 cups milk and whisk together over medium heat (the recipe says low heat, but that takes SO long!  So just keep the milk moving and turn the heat up some).  It will take until it is almost almost simmering to get the cocoa powder mixed in.  Turn off heat.  Dissolve the cornstarch into the 1/2 cup milk and stir into the milk on the stove.  Turn the heat back on and whisk until it starts to thicken.  Turn off heat and add the vanilla.

Here is cute Neil’s smile.Mark put together this map at school and was quite proud of his work and how well all the pieces fit together.We enjoyed Mark’s Christmas concert choir at the Elementary School.  He got to be in a special song about how the snowman melted.  All the boys got different parts like monks, Mexican guys in sombreros, Batman, Michael Jackson, jazz, etc.  He was a rapper and a dog.  The rapper line was: yo, in the sun he melted, melted, melted, in the sun he melted small, small, small, word.”  And the dog line was: “who let the sun out, who, who, who?”

It was hard to get a picture of him from the back but, he’s the one it the sunglasses and backward hat right in the middle.

Mom and Heather and two of her kids made it out a week or so before David’s wedding and I’m ashamed to say that I didn’t take very many pictures at all, but we had a lot of fun!  We did make several batches of crescent rolls and mom worked on the center pieces for the luncheon (which turned out awesome):the boys played together:and waved goodbye to the kids in the morning when they left for school:and here’s a cute picture of Alexander that someone took with my camera: