Christmas 2007

The Trents are back online from our holiday break! We hope you all had a wonderful Christmas spent with family and friends. We had a wonderful holiday, and we are still stuffed full from all of those Christmas goodies! On Christmas Eve, Nan, Bernie, Aunt Rhonda, Uncle Tony, and cousins Sarah, Jack, and Emily came out to our house for a Christmas Eve dinner.
Here we are waiting for everyone to arrive.

Once everyone had arrived, the festivities began. Punch was served, snacks were snacked on, and everyone just had a great time!
On the menu: Oysters Rockefeller, Aunt's lasagna, salad, and rolls. You have not lived until you have tried Oysters Rockefeller. I myself am not a big fan of oysters cooked by themselves, but I could eat my weight in these (as a matter of fact, I think I did!). Here, the tin foil cups are ready to be filled with oysters, a horseradish/spinach mixture, topped with breadcrumbs, cheese, and bacon. Nan is the best Rockefeller maker! I'm trying to learn the recipe so I can pass it on like she has to us!

While dinner was cooking, Emily enjoyed the little snowy village.


Ever since we had purchased our spinning tree, we have begun a new Christmas tradition with the kids. Before our Christmas Eve get-together, Mom buys little toys and candy and fills a little bag for each kid with their names on them. She hides them in the tree, and when they come over, they each take turns finding their gift bag. In this picture, Mom is playing "one potato, two potato, three potato, four..." with Sarah, Jack, Emily, and Eric to see who gets to find theirs first. They couldn't wait for after dinner to find their bags, so the grown ups gave them the "Ok". :)



Trays and trays of oysters kept coming one after another! I ate 12 oysters! Can you believe it? Once you start, there's NO stopping!

After dinner, there was a flurry of presents being opened! Amidst all of the excitement, Bud-lo found a spot to rest right in the middle of the action. We had a wonderful time!

On Christmas Day, we woke up at 6am to open presents. I was going to take pictures, but it was too early! We had our traditional breakfast casserole, cinnamon rolls, and orange juice for breakfast.

Later that afternoon, we headed on over to Granny and Papa's house for Christmas dinner. I forgot my camera! The smells of roast and hash brown casserole welcomed us when we got there, and I was put in charge of making sauteed broccoli and rolls. After we had all stuffed ourselves full once more, we exchanged gifts. Afterward, Granny had us all play the Christmas gift exchange game with gag gifts that she had bought! I was stuck with a rooster alarm clock that crows rather loudly! Eric won huge dog slippers where you stick your foot through the dog's mouth, Philip won a singing squirrel, Mom was stuck with blinking reindeer antlers and fake teeth :), and Dad won a shirt with a funny saying on it. It was very interesting!

All in all we had a fabulous Christmas! I can't believe it has already passed and tomorrow begins the New Year! Are y'all staying up? I didn't make it last year but I am going to try harder! Tonight we are having snacks and are going to play some board games while we wait for the ball to drop. Have a great night everyone, and we'll see you next year! :) ~Alli

How To Become Wise

I found this video made by Jack McDonnell. He did an excellent job explaining what the Bible says about fools and how to become wise. I think you'll enjoy it!

We have all had the experience of being fools, however, Romans 3:23-24 says..."For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God; being justified freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus." Through accepting what Christ did for us on the cross, we can be free to walk wisely before God.

Blessings to you and your family this Christmas. ~The Trent's

A Year-End Recap

I came across this fun meme over at Dappled Things! What you do is you post the first line from the first post of each month for the year 2007 to see what all you've been up to this past year! Since we didn't have our blog in January or February of this year, we will just start with March. :) Here we go...

March: Welcome to our blog!

April: Character is formed under a great variety of influences.

May: Well it's not winter, but we thought we would give this new recipe a try. :)

June: I took this quiz and found out that I am Elinor Dashwood of Sense & Sensibility!

July: One of the joys of having a garden is being able to enjoy it.

August: Last month, Meredith and I were asked by the ladies in our church to be in charge of planning and catering a baby shower for the lovely Mrs. Prueitt!

September: A trip to the farm in pictures...

October: Our bags are packed! Today, Mom and I are leaving for our weekend getaway to Tennessee!

November: Well Kim over at Life in a Shoe is having ANOTHER Vision Forum Giveaway!

December: It has been twenty-two days already, and they are still growing!

Wow! This has been quite an interesting year for the Trent family. :) If anyone else would like to do the end-year recap, consider yourself tagged! Please leave a link under this post because I'd like to read it if you do. :) Have a wonderful weekend everyone! ~Alli

Philly Cheesy Pizza Dip

Last night, we tried out "Philly Cheesy Pizza Dip" for our Friday family fun night. It was an immediate hit with our family! Doesn't it remind you of Christmas with the red and green? Mom found this recipe in the new issue of Food and Family by Kraft. That is a great magazine by the way, and the subscription is free! Inside are some delicious and cheap recipes like this one!

Philly Cheesy Pizza Dip

1 pkg. cream cheese, softened
1/2 C pizza sauce
1/2 C shredded mozzarella cheese
2 Tbs each chopped red and green peppers
1 tsp Italian seasoning

Spread cream cheese onto bottom of 9 inch pie plate. Cover with pizza sauce; top with remaining ingredients. Microwave on high for 2 minutes (we baked ours in the oven at 400 until hot and bubbly) until heated through. Serve with Ritz crackers.

Makes 2 cups

~Alli

And the Winner Is...

Drumroll please......

Dad did the honors

Morgan Denise!!!!!

Congratulations Morgan, you have won! Please e-mail me at matrent@tds.net with your name and address, and your "Chickadees and Holly" print will be on its way! We are so excited to be able to share Dad's print with you! We all hope you will enjoy it. :)

Thank you to everyone who commented! It was so encouraging to our family to see so many of you participating. I hope you had as much fun as we did! Congratulations again to Morgan!

Speaking of giveaways, there is another one being given by my friend Meredith over at her blog, Striving to Serve at Home! If you like delicious goodies, head on over to her blog and enter this contest before this Sunday night at 9pm!

~Alli

OUR 100TH POST GIVEAWAY!!!!

Alright everyone! It's time for a giveaway! This giveaway is celebrating our 100th post, well actually this is the 102nd post! Anyway, we have reached a milestone! For this giveaway, we are giving one of our readers a print of one of Dad's paintings!

Here's a little bit about how Dad got started with his artwork...Dad was first inspired to start painting by his grandmother, Nellie who lived in the countryside of Virginia, not too far from where we live now. She encouraged Dad as a young boy during the many summers when he visited her old farmhouse, and she was the one who inspired him to draw and paint. God has given Dad a zeal and love for His creation and he has always enjoyed painting nature. We are so excited to be able to share them with y'all!

To win one, all you have to do is leave a comment with the name of the print you would like to win! This is a good chance for all of you lurkers out there to reveal yourselves! :) Oh, and if you post about this giveaway on your blog, your name will be entered TWICE! Just add the link on your comment that shows us you have linked to us so we'll know. There will only be one winner who will get the print of choice, and we will draw the winner NEXT FRIDAY, DECEMBER 14th at NOON!

All prints will be signed by Dad, and they are numbered. Here are the prints to chose from:

"Mid-day Rest" (this is a Giclee print)

8 1/2 x 11 1/2

"Moving In" (this is a Giclee print)

8 1/2x 10 1/2

"Chickadees and Holly" (not a Giclee print)
9x12



Have fun everyone!! We'll see you next Friday to reveal the winner! ~Alli

Monday Fun!

Today, Meredith and I travelled to the Pregnancy Support Center in a neighboring county to help out! We hadn't been in a couple of weeks so it was a real treat to get to go with her, just the two of us. We arrived and found a huge bag of baby clothes that needed hanging and some other items that needed to be placed in our "Little Blessings Boutique" store. We had a great time of laughing and freezing in the shed and quickly finished while we could still feel our fingers!

Afterwards, Mere and I drove over to the storage units that hold all of our extra supplies, clothes, and diapers for the store. We needed to pick up some wipes, and Meredith wanted to see inside the sheds that were completely cleaned about a month ago by some very helpful volunteers! It's absolutely amazing what they did to our poor little storage units! They were packed full of stuff, and if you wanted anything, you had to dig!

This picture was taken a few months ago, and you can see just how stuffed the units were. This is only one of them.
This is what they look like now! Amazing! What a blessing it was to have the help of those volunteers!
They truly worked a miracle, and we are so thankful for the commitment and service that they gave to the Pregnancy Center! We can actually find things now!

Whenever we go to the Center, we love sewing afterward. Although most of our time was spent talking, we managed to get a lot accomplished today!Our quilt is coming along quite nicely and we only have four more squares to sew! I can't believe it. :) Today we put together one square, and got another one cut out to work on during the week. We had set a goal when we first started to have our quilts finished by Christmas, but we decided to move our deadline to next Christmas. :)

Meredith had a fabulous idea to lay out what we had sewn so far just to see what our quilts would look like! This is Mere's! I think the colors that she chose are beautiful! Her outer border is going to be the white fabric that has light blue flowers on it, and I think it's going to look fantastic! I can't wait to see it all finished! Thanks for coming over today Mere!

This is a picture of mine. :) I thought at first it was going to look WAY too pink, but it's not as bad as I thought it was going to be! My outer border is going to be the floral pattern that you see in my quilt. I can't wait to finish it and be able to enjoy it! We only have one more row to sew and then we get to put it all together at last! I can't wait!

Well, that was my day so far! Now I must go and study for the final exam I have to take for my Biblical Wisdom course through Telos on Thursday. How exciting! I always get nervous with tests! Oh well, off to hit the books! ~Alli

(This is our 100th post by the way! To celebrate, we are going to be having a giveaway! Stay tuned... :)

Sprouting Update

It has been twenty-two days already, and they are still growing! I am looking forward to eating fresh green salads during the winter! Now, I need to thin them, but I'm not sure how far apart. I'm going to do some research to see. I'd hate to throw away all of the thinned plants! Maybe we can plant them in the house. :) Anyway, I just wanted to share their progress and keep you updated on my gardening experiment! Oh yes, and there's...


This sweet little angel! He is so bad! ;)

Have a wonderful weekend everyone! ~Alli