Atherton Family Notes

Cece decided a couple of weeks ago that she wanted to be a “Barbie in a box” for Halloween.  Sandi wanted to keep Halloween on the cheap, and so this sounded like a good idea.  It turned out fantastic.  Sandi put together the box, and I cut out all of the decorations with our Cricut.

Sandi and the girls went to a trick-or-treat event at our local Marsh store, and Sandi said that Cece was the hit of the event.

For the scrapbook page, I decided to imagine what it would be like if you could really buy a “Celia” Barbie.

Be sure to click on the link and expand the picture to full size to be able to read all of the text!

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I’m sorry we haven’t been updating the site much recently.  We haven’t done very much that’s post worthy since Halloween.

It is the time of year where we start preparing for Christmas, though.  Since we started doing an annual video, preparation for Christmas starts around the first of October, when I drag out the music and start searching for the right song to accompany the video.  So far, I’ve found a few songs that might be OK, but nothing that has knocked my socks off yet.

Cece and I had a kirigami (cut paper patterns like snowflakes) fest over the weekend that worked out pretty well.  I bought a book from Barnes & Noble with some simple patterns to cut and since Cece and I were home all alone on Saturday afternoon, we decided to try it.

We made some interesting stuff.  Airplane snowflakes, Elephants, Celtic crosses and so forth.  Cece had a little trouble at first cutting the patterns, but once she got started (and I started drawing the patterns on the paper for her), it was hard to get her to stop.

(All of these were made by Cece except the blue cross and the red and white snowflake, which I made.)

The most interesting thing we made was a simple 3D snowflake made from 6 pieces of 6″x6″ origami paper.  The result was so impressive that Sadie and Carissa had to make their own on Sunday and Sandi wants to string some across the kitchen as a decoration this year.  I was going to post some pictures, but the girls took them to give to their teachers this morning.  I’ll put some up after we make the next batch.

By the way, I found this interesting site while researching kirigami on the web.

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(Hand turkeys provided by Carissa, Cece and Sadie.)

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Well, Thanksgiving is over, we survived Black Friday, the Christmas decorations are down from the attic and now the real fun begins!  Like many families, we’re likely to try to pack more activities into the next month than we have in the previous 11.  Oh, joy!

Let’s see, what have we got planned:

• Decorating the house
• Sandi’s gingerbread house
• Our annual gingerbread party for the girls
• A trip downtown to see several Christmas exhibits with Rob and Mary Ann when they come into town
• Possibly, another trip to Frankenmuth or some other place that has interesting Christmas celebrations
• Making 3D snowflakes
• Making Christmas t-shirts (going on right now, actually)
• Making paper Christmas trees
• Making half a dozen or more scrapbook pages
• Attending school Christmas performances (or performing in them, in the kid’s case)
• Christmas shopping
• Making our annual Christmas video out of scenes from all of the above
• Keeping our blog up-to-date
• Getting it all done by Christmas day

On the plus side, we did manage to get our Christmas cards finished before Thanksgiving, and Sandi even went to the post office the day before Thanksgiving to mail them.

It should be lots of fun, as usual.  I hope you have lots of fun things planned too!

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