Christmas!

 This year the entire Christmas Season has been CRAZY!!!! We have been so busy. In November we built a gingerbread house and donated it to the Gingerbread forest at the Grand America Hotel.  Wade and I volunteered and came up with the idea but we got a lot of help from everybody at the bakery to pull it off.  It turned out awesome!

It's based on the family windmill that is located in Durnam Germany. We used some old pictures and found some new pictures on the internet to help us get it right.  The windmill belonged to the Backers when they were the bakers for the royal family of Ostfriesland... I think that is how you spell it. The house is a house in the background of one of the pictures.  Though not necisarrily the house the Backers lived in or the bakery.

The windmill blades actually rotate and broke the most often. This is actually the second set of windmill blades that made it to the Grand America.  The first fell off and broke into a billion pieces.

Everything for that was visible on the house had to be edible.  The house and windmill were made from gingerbread the windows were from candy Santa, the Horse, the snowman and all of the other animals were made of Marzipan, the pond was candy as well. THe trees are made of Icing the path is little chocolate rocks the roof is cereal.  There are even kids in the house peeking out the door to see what Santa left in their shoes (In Germany they leave their shoes out on the porch for Santa to fill.  It's a family tradition in both of our families to get oranges in our socks or shoes so that is the gift we are using.  The horse is trying to steal the carrot from the snowman's nose. We had a lot of fun making this and even ended up winning the contest between the gingerbread houses (I didn't believe there was a contest even though Wade kept telling me there was.)

Other than that we have been working like crazy getting ready for Christmas both at home and at work.  We spent Christmas morning at my Dad's house.  This is my Nephew Tucker and Grandpa Schaugaard getting warm by the fire and waiting to get started.

Santa brought Tucker some chocolate Goldfish in his sock.  He was quite happy to be eating those.  He was funny because he couldn't let go of whatever he had opened last to open his next present so he kept doing it one handed. 

He had to get all the blocks out.

I made my brother Gary a new pillow case for his big pillow.  If you know Gary you know how important this is.  I made Tucker a minny version of both pillow and pillow case so they could be twins.  I think Gary was far more interested in both gifts than Tucker was.

We had a lot of fun for Christmas and saw lots of people.  But after the week of work we had we were so tired!  I took this of Button this is how I felt.

She had just finished shredding the magazine that she is laying on and just flopped down on top of it and took a nap.  Too much Christmas Fun for her.
And on Christmas I arrived at 35 Weeks pregnant.  This baby gets bigger every day.

We are getting so excited to have this little one get here! 

Hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and have a great New Year!!!