Wishing You A Merry Christmas!

We are ready for a fantastic holiday at the Jesienouski house and we hope you are too! This year has flown by and we almost can't believe it is Christmas again! This year has been filled with fun adventures, most of which we've already blogged about, so I won't recap now. LOL We are excited for the upcoming New Year.... 2010 is going to be a great one, I'm sure. We'll keep you posted as usual!

Merry Christmas! We wish you and yours the very best as you celebrate with family and friends! May the Lord bless and keep you as we celebrate His birth! Love to all!

New Modules for T-Trak

Well, I have finally gotten back to work on modules for the T-Trak Modular Layout. These two modules allow us to change directions on the layout so now we can do things with the layout instead of just making an oval. The first one is a mountain with tunnels. The mountain lifts off to deal with possible derailments.  I made the trees a new way this time, I used Caspia for the trees, with green foam glued on.  I believe it looks really good and it wasn't that hard to make a whole bunch of trees, and it was quite cheap, made over a hundred trees for $17.00.  Lots cheaper than the normal trees I buy and a lot more realistic looking.

The next module is my lake module.  I like the sea serpent on my old layout so much that I had Tonya make me a new for the T-Trak layout.  Tonya made it so that it was looking back, so I put a little girl standing on the shoreline and it looks like the dragon is looking at her.  I have named the Dragon Susan after the character in Monsters vs. Aliens.   Again I used the new trees and used a quite a bit of Woodland Scenics Realistic Water in the lake.  Tonya painted the base of the lake to have a shoreline and look like it gets really deep.

Here is a closeup of the little girl and the serpent. You can't see it in the picture, but I have three adults running away from where the girl is standing. Also, I put some dead trees around the lake to show that when there are not kids to eat, Susan goes around and eats the leaves off of trees. Also to the side you can see part of the dam. On the other side, it has two culverts where water is coming out, looks pretty neat, but the picture of it was blurry, so you will have to trust me.
Lastly, here is a picture of them together. With these two modules and their sister modules that James is building, we can have four trains running on their own tracks and the layout is shaped like a +. It was very popular at the last show we were at, and it is still very easy to move the layout and setup. Can't wait to put the big layout together again! Hopefully in January! BTW, if you didn't notice, you can click on the pictures to see a bigger version.

Handel's Messiah

Last night for our 25 days of Christmas we went to Handel's Messiah performed by the Southwest Symphony. It was really good and we knew a couple people that were performing. I loved the trumpets, the lead trumpet player was great! It was really nice to go and hopefully they will do a Halloween concert like they had this year, they played great music and I wish we would have gone.

Reindeer yard decorations

This morning, for some unknown reason I turned left going off my street (normally go right). As I turned to get out of our neighborhood, I saw a house that had 10 reindeer in their front yard. I thought that was a very nice decoration and wondered where they stored such big decorations throughout the year. As I got closer, however, I found out they were not a decoration, there were 10 deer in the people's front yard! 2 of them had antlers! I went to grab my cell phone to take a picture, but I guess stopping a car really fast in front of them spooked them and they ran off. I love where we live!

25 Days of Family Fun for Christmas-Days 1-6

Scott and I wanted to make this year a special one for our family and we have made it a point to have a fun family activity for each night of December as a kind of countdown to Christmas. The only requirement is that it has to cost little to no money (but we may splurge on a couple things) and it has to be something we do together.

On the first night, we attended a special program that celebrated the things Taylor has been working on this year in her Young Womens group. We listened to some great spiritual motivational speakers, and had a chocolate fountain, which Shaylie loved.

Day two: we visited an amazing train layout built by a friend of Scott's. It is a huge room full of Christmas villages, ice skaters, sledders, trams, and much more. It really was a treat. I also got to see Shaylie's choir perform this day, though unfortunately the others had to work/school.

Day three: We went to Taylor's winter band concert as a family and enjoyed their talents. Taylor really is a great flutist. They were very enjoyable.

Day Four: Again, a musical outing--don't you just love music at Christmastime--Taylor's piano recital. She played O Holy Night and did very well. Shaylie's choir performed again at school and this time her dad and I and Grandma Dawn all got to go enjoy it.

Day five: We spent the day at the annual Dicken's Christmas Festival. Always a ton of fun! We got to see Shaylee Sabaitis dance and another of her friends in a short production of Oliver! My mom, Anissa and Anje joined us as well.

Tonight, day six: We watched the LDS Christmas Devotional and baked sugar cookies. Yum!

I will post another update after the next few activities. I am really enjoying the time we are spending as a family. It gets harder and harder to remember the real reason for the season and I hope this will bring us closer together as a family.