Jack Jingle Felf the Elf

This past month we have had this little guy 'hangin' around our home.  He has brought a lot of joy and excitement to 4 little munchkins.

He is not more than 10 inches tall and weighs less than a pound, but he sure does pull a lot of weight around our house.

It all happened in the middle of December of last year when we heard a knock on the door early one morning and the kids ran to get it when on the doorstep this little guy was sitting there with a note.

Santa's Little Elf

Dear Ryan, Sarah, Bella, and Ali

Hi, hi, hi, I am Santa's Elf!  I am so excited to be here!  Yip, Yip Yippee!  I have been waiting a long time to get to your house!  Santa sent me to your doorstep, to live with you for a while.  You see, Santa needs helpers to watch over all the little boys and girls, and make sure they are making the right choices and being really good!  So here's the plan...

Please put me somewhere safe.  I will be watching you to make sure you are making good choices.  You can whisper in my ear about the nice things you have done during the day.  But, please do not touch me or else I will lose my magic elf power.  Too much loud screaming makes my ears hurt, so please talk quietly (my ears are so big, I can hear everything triple).  I will be watching you very, very carefully during every minute of the day.

Remember only the nice kids get the gifts on Christmas morning!  So every night before you go to bed, whisper to me all the nice things you have done during the day.  If you have done something naughty, I want to hear you say sorry to the person you hurt.  Every night after you go to bed I will use my magic elf power to zoom back to the North Pole, and will report to Santa on how you are doing.  Then I will zoom back really fast before you wake up.  But don't wake up to early, because if I am not back before you are awake, I can't come in.  When you wake up in the morning you can come find me in my NEW hiding spot.  It's really fun to look for me, because I am kind of sneaky!  When you find me, please do not touch me, I like to stay in the same sneaky spot all day long.

I am really happy to live with your family!  Remember Ryan, Sarah, Bella, and Ali to be really good for your Mom and Dad.  You will get bonus points for saying "Please", "Thank You" and "I Love You".  Also, if I see you cleaning, making your bed, brushing your teeth, eating healthy foods, picking up your toys, or helping your family, you will get bonus points.  I can see through walls, so even if I am in the kitchen, I can still see you in your bedroom.  On Christmas Eve, I will fly back to the North Pole and will return on December 1st of the next year.  So, don't worry I will be back next Christmas!  Yip, Yip, Yippee!  I can't wait to be your special little family elf!  Have fun and remember to be good!  One more thing...... please choose a name for me, I don't have one yet.

Love, Your Little Elf

Needless to say, our kids have been over-excited about our little friend.  We couldn't decide on just one name, everyone wanted something different so Jeff decided to combine all the names in to one.  Sarah wanted Jack, Bella wanted Jingly, Ryan chose Felf, so the final name came to be Jack Jingle Felf the Elf.  He even has his own song about his name also.  We go around the house singing "his" song which is the tune of John Jacob Jinglehiemer Schmidt.  

I think one of his hardest parts is finding a new and different hiding spot every morning.  He has also delivered a few Christmas Lists to Santa.  We don't even have to mail them anymore.    We had a friend over the other day and was looking at our Elf and told her Mom that their Elf looks just like ours.  I told her that they might be brothers, I don't know, do Elves have families like that?  Then, the other day, our neighbor was over here and she wrote a letter to Santa asking him to send her an Elf for their family.  She left her note here so Jack Jingle Felf could personally deliver her note.  It must have worked because a couple days later, they had an Elf show up on their doorstep.  

As the Christmas season is quickly coming to an end, I am really going to miss Jack Jingle Felf the Elf.  He makes me happy just knowing I have a friend who is really tight with Santa Clause.  I have not missed my chance to whisper in his ear and tell him some of the good things that I have been up to also.  I do hope he sent a good word for me to Santa.  My list is really not that long, but there are some specific things that I would really LOVE!!!

With that said, I would like to take this moment to wish all of you a very Merry Christmas and the most Joyous New Year!!!  And watch out, maybe next year you just might have an Elf show up on your doorstep that can share some of the Christmas Magic that brings so much excitement.

MERRY CHRISTMAS TO ALL...... AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT!!!!!!

Family Nativity

Word of Caution: This is an amateur production!!!

So, every year, the Kendall's get together for a family night a few days before Christmas to put on our own Family Nativity.  When I first joined the family it was the adults doing this since there were only 3 kids at that point.  Not too many years later, the kids started to outnumber the adults and I don't think any of us felt too bad when our acting was set on the shelf and we are allowing the youngsters to cultivate their talents.  Jeff is usually called back because none of the rest of us want to play the piano.

Jace has such a great deep voice to be the Narrator, so that has been his part in the play for a couple years now.

Sarah got the chance to play Mary this year and Joseph was played by Darren.  He was such a great Joseph except for the few times he chose to hurry off and leave his wife to fend for herself.

There's our cute Joseph, Mary, and Baby Jesus - who at this point in the production was played by Austin.

I really don't think Sarah minded her part, she got to hold all of these cute little babies!!!

What would our story be without 2 adorable angels, Abby and Ali, who are actually angels in every sense of the word.  How can you deny that fact?

Tyler and Bella were the perfect choice for being Shepherds, however, one does not looked too thrilled.

Now this is the only picture I have of our 2nd cute little Baby Jesus, Nathan.  He too did a fantastic job!!!  I think his brother really loves him as well.

I just had to put this one in because it was too cute of both of these cousins, Ryan and Jordan.

But this is the real crew who were made up of "4 Wisemen" (Ryan, Lauren, Jordan, and Sydney) but a couple of them chose to name themselves "Wisewomen" which was very fitting.

And in the end, we had our 3rd and final Baby Jesus, Gavin, who seemed to be more interested in grabbing Sarah's clothing and hair and eating whatever he could.

He was also a little wiggly, but he still did a very fine job.

I don't know guys, do you think we should take this show on the road???  If nothing else, our kids sure do look forward to this FHE every year and we hear about who's going to be who for months leading up to it.  What fun memories and traditions we have.

Christmas Dance Program

Bella and Ali have been taking dance since September at Marlene's Dance Studio.  They LOVE going to dance every Tuesday and have such a great time.  They got to perform on stage a couple days ago and they were both so excited for the program.  Bella wanted to invite everyone she knows to come and watch her.  I limited it to her personally inviting only her grandparents.  Both my parents and Jeff's parents were able to come.  On our way there, I was hoping we would make it, because traffic was terrible.  We did get there only a couple minutes late, but I guess everyone was running late as well.

Ali  and Bella in the car on the way there

Both of them performed 2 dances each.  On the 1st one of Ali's, I think she got a little case of stage fright.  She went out on stage and stood there the whole entire dance.  There are only 4 girls in her class, so the 3 others were dancing and trying to coax her to join in, but our sweet Ali does not do something she doesn't want to do.

There she is during "Ellie the Elf" standing and pretty much didn't move until they made her walk off the stage. There were several chuckles in the audience.  When I got her from the stage, I asked her why she didn't dance and she responded, "Because I didn't want to."  I told her she needed to dance on her last one and she said, "OK I will."  That's all it took, she did a great job on her last one, "Lasso Cowgirl."

Now Bella, on the other hand, did such a good job on both dances.  She just love doing this so much.  I had my doubts after what happened in "Enchanted" last spring, but she proved me wrong.  She got up and did everything she was supposed to and looked so cute up there.

This is the first dance she performed, "All I Want for Christmas."  This was the Ballet dance.

And the next one was "Peppermint Candy Canes" with tap shoes.  I was so proud of both of them.  Their personalities sure do come out at times like this.  Of course I think they are the cutest girls up on the stage, but they really were!!!  But I don't think there is much bias going on here :-)

I sure do love my girls!!!

Vista Elementary Christmas Program

The annual Christmas program was a little different this year than in the past.  They used to have grade by grade come up and sing.  They each would sing about 2 to 3 songs and then they were finished.  This year they did them separately breaking he grades up into 4 groups and different time.  I really liked it a lot better.  The school was not as crowded and we could see our kids easier.  Kindergarten sang for almost a half hour straight.  They probably sang 6-7 songs and I was really impressed by how many of the kids actually knew the words to the songs.  Bella was no exception.  She sang along so good with every song, and she even had time to pull a few faces at me as well.

Here she is singing "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer"

Sarah wasn't really looking, but she was very interested in just about everything else.  Their class sang 2 songs in Spanish.  They did such a great job.  I am so impressed with the language ability of these young kids.

Ryan did a great job!!!  Especially on "Twelve days of Christmas" where Grandpa Kendall helped him remember 5 Golden Rings part every time he got to that part.  It sure did bring a big smile to his face.

I am so proud of all of my kids.  They are such good students and they really love school so far.  I love going to programs like this to see them perform.  This is one of the pay offs being a mom.  I love my kids so much!!!

Pre-School Christmas Party

Ali's little Pre-School class had a fun little Christmas Party last week.  What a cute little group of kids.  They played some fun games like: Musical Chairs, Cake Walk, Red Reindeer Red Reindeer send (?) right over, and of course the presents exchange then decorating cookies.

True to form, we had to do a lot of coaxing to get Ali to participate, but once she started, I think she had a lot of fun.

Leaves, Leaves Everywhere

These are just a couple fun pictures of the thousands of leaves we had to clean up this fall.  We had Kennedi come over and play with Sarah, and they had so much fun jumping on the tramp with all the leaves.  Ali joined them for a bit, but she got tired of it quickly.

Funny story about these leaves.  Sarah came up to us one Saturday morning and asked if she could take all our leaves over to the Pitts yard to jump in them.  We told her she needed to ask Sam or Jason (not one of the kids) if it was alright.  She called up and asked for Natalie, before Natalie got on the phone I told her she could not ask her, she had to talk to one of the parents.  So, reluctantly she asked for Sam.  When Sam got on the phone, Sarah asked her if she could take all of our leaves over into their yard to jump in them.  Jeff and I were cracking up.  Surprisingly, Sam said yes, anytime you would like to do that you can.  So, the kids got to work, getting our wheelbarrow and moving the leaves from one yard to the other.  Then they had a grand ole' time jumping in them in the Pitts yard.  Later I felt kind of bad (but not bad enough) when I saw Jason out there bagging up "our" leaves.  What great neighbors we have.  Thanks guys for being very good sports and helping us out with our kids so much.  I'm serious when I say we love you and are so grateful for your love towards us.  Friends are the best thing in the world and to have great friends across the street make it even better.

Neighborhood Vandalism

I just had to post the pictures of the "Vandalism" that occurred while we were gone for Thanksgiving.

I'm sorry to say -- I think the jokes on you!!!!  Compliments of the Pitts :-)

All I can say is:

GO BYU!!!!

The sad thing is -- we still have the window paint saying Utah is #1, and Go Utes.  We really need to get that graffiti off of our home.

Summary

I guess I really took a long hiatus from the blogging world for a while.  That's what happens when you get busy doing things that you really should be doing.  Let's summarize this past month real quick:

• Cleaned up leaves
• Trimmed trees and bushes
• Prepared the yard for a long winter
• Picked up more leaves
• Distributed leaves between different neighbors so we didn't have to bag them all up
• Offered lots and lots of prayers that our roof doesn't leak this winter
• Shuffled kids around to various activities ie: scouts, dance, piano lessons, basketball practice, achievement days, song practice, friends houses, birthday parties, cousins sleepovers
• Thanksgiving in Delta
• Cleaning up my parents basement
• Watched lots of football
• Our home got vandalized
• Ward parties
• Visiting Teaching
• Church callings
• And the worst of all -- Sicknesses

I am very happy to be to this point and I think everyone is healthy and I hope the worst is behind us.  I feel like Christmas is coming and I am not ready.  I guess I better not spend my time blogging about it and just do what I need to be doing.  With that said, I better sign off and hope to blog a little more in the coming weeks about some of the fun things we are doing.