Merry Christmas from the Harper's!

Our annual Christmas Eve Family Home Evening was complete this year with everyone home. Six of the eight grandchildren acted out the Christmas Story as part of our evening.




Merry Christmas to all of you!

Christmas in Nauvoo Ward Christmas party

Here's a video of the preparation pictures of our ward Christmas Party last week. Somehow we got busy and didn't get crowds this time! I'll post some short videos tomorrow!

No sugar apple pie

Over Thanksgiving, Pat made a wonderful French Apple Pie. I had to admit, I
had some of it even though I try not to eat sugar. But, I thought to myself,
I can make a sugar free version . . . and here it is! My crust is made with
almond flour, Splenda and butter. I sliced my apples and put some cinnamon
and sugar with them and then the top was made with some nuts, butter and
vanilla whey powder. It tasted wonderful!!!!

Roses in December

I went outside to pick some lettuce and looked over at our rose hedge which mostly looks like dead sticks but saw this. . . Roses blooming in December. There was not just one, but several on this plant. Wasn't there a movie by that name?

Flip HD pocket video

With all of the family coming home this year for Christmas, I wanted to be able to record a lot of the memories since we never know when we'll all be together again. I gave this little HD video recorder to Kevin and Bonnie last year for Christmas and thought it would be wonderful to have one to keep handy when I'm playing with the children and all of the family are here over the holidays.


Here's my first try with Michael! I'm going to try it out tomorrow at our ward Christmas party!

Apple trees

One thing I need to do is get better with handling our orchard. We have several dwarf trees that we've gotten a little bit off fruit but we plan on expanding our fruit production.

So, we ordered four more apples trees, standard size! We have two Gala and two Anne. These apples are very sweet. We will have to probably wait a couple of years to see the fruits of our labors.

In other pictures you may have seen all of the 5 gallon buckets by the trees. We have attached a drain spout on the bottom and put them in the soil so we can water where the roots are.

In other news, we have some lines of water, electricity and natural gas going down to the greenhouse. I'm relieved that we didn't have to break down any of our concrete on our little driveway area that goes to the back of the house.

We are getting a lot of wonderful lettuce of various varieties right now. I hope the colder nights won't be too hard on it! We'll cover it up if we need to as our cold doesn't normally last right now.

Michael is so great to do so much work around the home. I'm so blessed to have a sweetie who has so many talents on building and fixing things. If he doesn't know how to do it, he works to learn it!