Pre-Christmas Activities

Leading up to Christmas, we did some of our normal traditions and added a few new ones.

One Saturday we were watching our nieces and decided to try out a Christmas Light Scavenger Hunt I saw on a blog.  It was so much fun!  This is definitely a tradition we will be continuing!  Luckily we had a reader in the car (Mia) so we gave them each a copy of the checklist, a clipboard and a pen, and we drove slowly up and down all the streets in our neighborhood with the interior lights on.  They got so excited when they spotted something and Mia helped them identify which item they needed to check off.  We found almost every item on the list just in our neighborhood.

 We met Santa at Bass Pro, as we do every year.  We had a few attempts because the lines were crazy this year, but we saw him at long last.

Two smiling boys on Santa's lap!!  That is a first in our house...

We broke our tradition of getting a real Christmas tree this year and bought an artificial one.  I'm not ruling out getting a real tree again some day (I'd love to have one tree upstairs and one downstairs eventually), but for now we're going with the artificial tree, and it was SO easy!

Another new thing this year: Breakfast with Santa at the Zoo. Our friends the Dahls had three extra tickets because their friends got sick, so the boys and I got to go with them, and it was so much fun.  Well, I should clarify: Jack had a ball and couldn't wait to get his picture taken with each of the characters that were there.  Charlie on the other hand was scared to death of them all and quivered anytime any of them came near.  His buddy Clara was the same way; it was rather entertaining.

Clara's "get him away from me" face

Charlie's "get him away from me" face

Jack and his buddy Owen

 

 We also got another great picture with Santa.

We had a great time!  Hopefully we can go again next year too!

We had our annual cookie decorating party at the Mitchells' house this year.  The kids loved it.

Paige

Leah - haha!!

Reese

Evan

Will

A bonus Leah picture after she dumped out an entire bottle of sprinkles - oops!

Graham & Caroline

All the kids (minus the 2 babies), posed so nicely.. Charlie, Jack, Paige, Reese, Will, Leah, Evan, Graham and Caroline

For fun, here's a picture of some of the kids at our 2012 cookie decorating party...Ben & Kaitlyn (not at 2014 party), Evan, Caroline, Graham, Jack, Charlie and Braden (not at 2014 party)

Jack and Charlie's classes each had a winter party.  Jason and I were lucky and were both able to make it to both parties...

 This was one of the highlights...Jack's class made a book of their favorite recipes for all the parents.  Jason (who makes mac & cheese from scratch) cringed when we saw Jack's recipe for mac & cheese.  He made sure to tell Jack's teachers this is Grandma's recipe, not his.  We had a good laugh...

We also made gingerbread houses one night...

It was a busy month but we did a lot of fun things and made lots of memories!

Classes at the Zoo

In December I took each of the boys to a class at the Zoo.  We were lucky and had Ms Julie as the instructor for both classes; she has been the favorite of all the classes we've attended.  First, I took Jack to a class called Winter Wonders.  We talked about hibernation and animals who do and do not hibernate.  It was very interesting and Jack participated in the discussion A LOT.  His friend Colby from his class happened to be there, so that was a fun surprise.  As always, we got to meet and touch a few animals.  This time it was an owl, a big rabbit and an albino snake.

 Charlie's class was the following weekend, and it was called Critter Crafts.  It was a cute little class.  We read a couple books and then did some crafts (as the title suggests).  Charlie was shy during the books and songs, but he really had fun doing the crafts.  He enjoyed the animals at the end too.

I wish we could do more classes at the zoo.  They tend to fill up quickly, especially the weekend ones, but I'm sure we will sign up for more of them in the future.