Keeping it Warm on the Feast of the Epiphany

Please excuse the snot-encrusted noses.

Greta's new favorite hangout--under the coffee table.

During the last snow

Sorry again for the line of pictures... silly Blogger.

This evening Anja stayed up late so we could have a big dinner together and open small gifts for Twelfth Night. Martin came home on his lunch break and fed Anja her lunch while I ran over to Von's to pick up some gifts. I was going to get Anja stickers--just stickers--but their blank books lured me in with their many cat-picture-cover options. And so I caved and got Anja a book with a pretty cat on the front and gave it to her as a Sticker Book. I felt a little foolish because I thought she would be too young to understand a sticker book, but she actually caught on right away and LOVED IT. Loved it so much, in fact, that she didn't take one bite of her dinner! She spent the entire dinner engrossed in her stickering. SO CUTE. Serves me right though, for opening presents before eating! Ha! Lesson learned. Oh well, it'll make a good breakfast for her.

It only occurred to me while I was waiting for the potatoes to finish boiling that I should've made the girls crowns for our festive dinner! So I zipped in and whipped one up for Anja as fast as I could (and with Martin's help) but even so, I was not fast enough and the venison that was on the stovetop turned out a little dry. Was it worth it?

For Greta we got a paperback copy of "Town Mouse, Country Mouse," a book we didn't yet have, but is a bookshelf neccessity.

And for Martino, the newest Bob Dylan album that was released some months ago, and these:

Made with love. They actually were really easy, except for the mistake of getting carried away on the thumbs and making them really, really long. They are lined with brown fleece which I scored for about a dollar (for a ton of it) at Jo-Ann's the other day in their remnants bin. (The remnants are already on sale, but everything was an additional 70% off! Yahoo!) I pulled some cute, yet manish buttons off of something else I had lying around and the loops that hold them back are little green yarn braids. I figure if I spend enough time on the details, the big mistakes will be more forgiveable.

Another craft I've been working on too much lately are these little creatures:Admittedly modeled after Santa's Gnomes these little woodland creatures are completely addicting. I can't stop making them. Luckily, Anja adores them and they get along very well with the friendly gnomes.

So this is how I've been spending my time while the girls just play in the front room, which is the warmest room in the house these days, until we get our woodstove up and running. Brrrrr.... anyway, I keep hearing that we're going to get a lot more snow tonight or tomorrow. Yay! Maybe Ivy Tech will have a snow day and Martin won't have to go to work! Well, we can hope anyway.