Happy New Year with Kinder!

I'm still catching up on sharing some of the things we did in December!  The girls found some special KINDER® products under the tree Christmas morning, but we decided to save these big items for New Years since there were plenty of treats to be eaten around Christmas!

They were pretty excited to unwrap that huge egg on New Years Day!  When they saw the chocolate egg inside, Katrina could hardly restrain herself ;)

It was fun to get a bigger toy to play with and pretty exciting just to see the oversized egg! (We had to pack a lot of the chocolate away for later though! ;)

News from Kinder:

Watch for new toys in 2015- there are 50 new toys in classic KINDER® SURPRISE eggs and 50 more in the Pink ones! Talia had a look at a few of them and is hoping to see a cute hair clip or a parachuter in one of her future eggs! ;)

Games & Puzzle Week

January 26th-30th is Games & Puzzle week and the KINDER®  Canada Facebook page is celebrating with daily prizing, so don't miss it!

How did you celebrate the New Year with your kids?

We went over to Ken's brother's house on New Year's Eve and partied with cousins and grandparents. The kids had an early countdown and went to bed while the adults played games and snacked some more. In the end we were home in our own beds by the time the "real" countdown hit, too! :)

Disclosure: I’m a #KinderMom who is part of the KINDER® Canada influencer team; as part of my affiliation with KINDER® Canada, I am provided with special perks and products. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

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DIY Tic-Tac-Toe Game

Here's how we made these cute DIY Tic-Tac-Toe Games!

This was a great little sewing project for my girls to be involved in, leading up to Christmas. They made gifts for their pen pals and some of their long-distance cousins. I originally found this Tic Tac Toe craft idea among other sewing projects for kids on parents.com. It would be a great gift any time of the year and is a good easy sewing project for kids.  

Ballerina

In December, Katrina had her ballet recital. She has been taking ballet classes at a local community centre every week during the Fall and for their last class they invited parents and grandparents to come and watch them do their warm up and a couple of dances they had learned. I absolutely LOVED it! :) Katrina has always loved dancing and was so happy to be able to be in a ballet class. She loves to dance around freely at home and always adds graceful little flourishes. I think it's adorable and I'm sure I was beaming for the whole class. ;)

These two photos in front of the Christmas tree were taken right before we left our house that day. Not sure why we didn't think to have her put her ballet slippers on for the photo, but I love how serious she is about what she's doing! :)

These photos are from the recital.  I love the joy on her face in the photo of her stretching.  At the end of the recital, the teachers called each girl up individually to receive some flowers.  Katrina skipped away so happily after receiving hers that she whipped her flowers around and a stem snapped.  Ken's mom took the photo of me showing her that she could still hold them like a bouquet and they would look nice.  Turns out that wasn't the best solution though, because Poppy (what the grandkids call Ken's Dad) offered to take her over and ask for a new flower.  The photo on the side is of her, happy with her unbroken new flowers :)

I sure love being the mother to these little girls! :)

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January 2015 Sharing Time - Week 2

Welcome to January's Sharing Time Linky!

Before we get to the party, here's a quick recap of the week:

I shared my Top 14 Posts that went up in 2014:

... and some Photos from our Christmas Morning.


I shared our struggle with mitten loss and a Smart Mitts Giveaway (which you can still enter!)

Lastly yesterday, I told you about my new calling at church!


Now, on to the link party- I can't wait to see what you share! :)

Please join the Raising Memories Sharing Time & add a link to your latest and greatest blog posts
about activities to do with your children or fun projects that you have done!

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If you're participating, please share the button on your blog & "hop over" to at least one other blog post that's been linked up- let's support each other!

<a href="http://http://www.RaisingMemories.com/" target="_blank"&_blank"><img src="http://oi43.tinypic.com/10gbrwy.jpg"/></a>

An InLinkz Link-up

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New Primary Calling

I have a bunch of things I want to share on the blog. Pictures of activities and recipes and crafts that we've done and stories of experiences from 2014, but I just felt like I needed to take today for a quick catch-up post, and to say that I've been busy!  But great things are coming :)

One big thing that happened in December was that I received a new calling at church. If you're a member of my church or if you're familiar with it, you'll know exactly what that means, but I'll try to explain this in a way that will make sense even if you're not familiar with our church.

What's a Calling?

We don't have a paid clergy. We all have different callings (or jobs) that we serve in at different times. We attend church for 3 hours on Sundays. During the first hour, we sit together in families. During the 2nd hour, we split up into different age groups for Sunday School classes. During the 3rd, the men meet together and the women meet together.

What's Primary?

The children and teenagers also have meetings with their own age groups during the 2nd and 3rd hours. The children's organization is called Primary. I had been serving as a Primary teacher (Ken & I were teaching the 5 & 6 year olds) on Sundays.

Perfect Love by Del Parson

The whole primary meets together for one of the hours and teachers teach individual age-group classes for the other.  My new calling is to be the Primary President, so I will be in charge of our local Primary.

This is a big time commitment and I have been rather busy in the past several weeks! I think things will settle down a little as I get used to it and as we get things organized.  Somehow, even though I've been spending hours on this, there just seems to be enough time for it.

Our Primary theme for 2015 is I Know My Saviour Lives.  I am excited to turn my focus to helping the children in our ward (congregation) to know that.  I know I will learn a lot through this experience and I think it's going to be pretty awesome. :)

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Finally Snow, "The Mitt Problem" & a Smart Mitts Giveaway!

I would be happy to have snow for somewhere between 2 weeks and 1 month of the winter and above zero temperatures for the rest of it.  Canada is not on the same page as me.  This year however, our girls' Winter Break from school was not very wintry!  We didn't even have a white Christmas.

Finally on the last Saturday before school started, we got snow!  The girls went out in the morning to build snowmen and it's a good thing they did because that afternoon it rained and the rain froze over the snow.. and that was the end of snowman-weather!  I told them not to worry because it's not unlikely that they'll have snow during "Spring" Break in March! ;)

Along with photos of the girls building snowmen, I wanted to share some photos of Talia's new Smart Mitts.  This has been a rough year for Talia with mittens.  I have lost count of how many pairs have been lost!  We went out and bought her a nice pair of mittens (good ones) and a set of mitten clips to help her to keep track of them (that worked for us last year and is still working for Katrina), but she lost one mitten & one mitten clip within a couple of days!