Christmas Eve with the Mosers

Christmas Eve is spent with my mom's side of the family. We always have a lot of traditions to go through. We first have dinner. This year we had clam chowder, chocolate chili and tomato soup with yummy bread. We then go and watch a video about the service project we did that year. Our grandpa gives us our Christmas money and tells us to do something good with it. This year we all did different things such as buying essentials and dropping them off at the Road Home, handing it out to a random barista, and putting money in the Salvation Army buckets. We usually make a funny video to depict all this, but ran out of time this year. So this year we watched all our previous years videos that still make us laugh.


When we get done with the videos we move on to the bells. We play Christmas hymns until our ears can't take no more.
Some of us are good at it, some of us...not so good.




We then play the candy bar game. This one we have played for years. We know each others favorites and some have learned how to work around this (ahem, corey).
Theres a huge pile of candy in the center and on your turn you roll the dice. If you get any form of six, you get to pick a candy bar out of the pile; or if you remember what candy bar someone has in their bag, you tell them what you want and they have to give you it. It gets pretty heated.





The doorbell then rings and at the door is santa's bag full of pajamas for each one of us and a clever poem that gets funnier each year.



Then it's time for the favorites gift exchange game. We all have to bring our favorite thing and it has to be good. $20 good. There's a lot of stealing in this game. This year I went through an XBOX live pass, movie passes, an amazon gift card and finally ended up with new pillowcases and a few essential oils to add to my collection! Kevin ended up stealing a box full of beef jerky. He loves beef jerky.



My dad is always holding that baby!







And then we call it a night. Bring on Christmas Day.

How To: make your own kombucha

My mother gave me a SCOBY for Christmas! What is a SCOBY you ask? It's an acronym for Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. It is the living mushroom that is formed from living kombucha cultures during the fermentation process.

Kevin believes that this drink can heal anything. He is a real Hippie you see. No I kid, he just believes it can ward off a cold. Any time he has felt something come on, he drinks a bottle of this and it goes away. And I believe him. And me, I just like the taste of it. But since it is around $4.00 a bottle, we buy it sparingly. But look no further Malorie! Your mother has made it possible for you to make your OWN kombucha!! It is quite crazy. I tasted some of the liquid swimming around the 'Mother' aka SCOBY and it tasted exactly like the bottled kombucha. Awesome.

So if anyone wants a 'baby' from my next batch I am selling them for $1000, no $10,000! Kidding. For family its free. For all you random's its $5. This is hard work people!



This is what I got for Christmas. "Mother...what...is this?.."




The 'MOTHER!'




So if you want to learn how to make your own:

Here's a recipe.

Heres a video to watch that helped me a ton. I maybe watched it 3 times.



I just made my first batch. Now I have to wait between 5-30 days for the final product. I will let you know how it goes!

Christmas with the Browers

My MIL is awesome and decided to have Christmas a day early so me and my SIL could enjoy Christmas time with our families. We are completely spoiled being able to have two Christmas's.

Christmas morning while we were waiting for Ellie to be woken up, Kevin goes "Where's the fat one?" It took me a moment to figure out who he was talking about, but not Alta. She kept calling Ellie "The Fat One" the rest of the morning. Not good.

I got Kevin two big packs of Reeses Tree's for Christmas and had Ellie help him open it. She was sooo excited when she saw what they were. When we later took her for a little morning stroll, she was not too happy about going back inside. When I kiddingly told her she could have a "Reeses Tree" if we went inside, she let out a yell of excitement and started for the door. I could not believe she had understood "Reeses Tree." Maybe she really is "The Fat One".

Kevin got me an amazing pair of road biking shoes for Christmas. They are the best looking shoes I have ever laid eyes on. He did amazingly well. I don't even remember seeing them at Canyon Bicycles when we had gone there to peruse. Now to just find me a road bike to go with them... Does anyone have a Cannondale SuperSix, 56, Shimano 105 components bike for around lets say $500? You could really help me out here.



Alta loving her "Cutting Projects"


All the boys got "Technology Shirts". They all had to try them on and see who looked the best in them.



Benny got a new do' for Christmas. He's looking extra puppyish these days.


Ellie enjoying her "Reeses Tree"


The Babies enjoying there new baby sized table.



Goooooodmorning me!


Who even drew this and took this picture? I think we have an artist in the family!

fun at The Grand America Hotel

We had a fun night with my family the monday before Christmas in the downtown. We started off with going to dinner at Italian Village and getting some pizza benders. It was Kevin's first time so we had to take action shots of his first bite.







Tyler managed to get a great shot of the both of us...



We then went to see a little Christmas light show in Murray which disappointed. Not worth the wait in line. But we did get to eat gummies while we waited and take cheek-to-cheek pictures.




Then it was off to the The Grand America. We love that place. That is where we had our wedding luncheon before we got hitched. Then we were lucky enough to spend our first night there. Such a beautiful hotel.

For Christmas this year they had a little fun family activity. They had cute decorated windows with clues you had to find in them. They gave you a card at the beginning with the clues on them, then you walked throughout the hotel to the 18 different windows. The incentive to finish was a sugar cookie at the end. We were all so excited for that sugar cookie. We received our sticker of achievement and took it to the bakery, where they preceded to shut the door on us and tell us that they had just ran out. My uncle Corey just about kicked that door open to show them they better bake him a cookie or they would have him to deal with. But then we decided to let our anger out on Tyler by putting our leftover stickers on him without him knowing. Boy was he mad.












We might have spent a little too much time in the cute toy shop at Grand America. That may have had something to do with us loosing out on the cookies. They had the cutest monster section with these animated frames with monsters in them. I felt like I was in the movie Monsters Inc. The toys were so good that I had to drag Kevin out of there.











They also had a huge gingerbread house on display which meant fun fun fun for Hadley. Right when we walked up to it, Hadley continued to crawl under the barriers with the intention of walking right on into it. Kevin was quick to grab her which was lucky since the peppermint stairs didn't look too sturdy. We weren't sure if the glass was candy as well so we dared Tyler to lick it. And he did. And it was candy! It was a true gingerbread house!