Christmas Fun

Hey everyone, I've got a lot of catching up to do and a bunch of fun things I wanted to share. This time of year sure seems crazy busy don't you think.? I love it though. This year I'm not doing a lot of running around like I normally do, but I still feel just as busy at home with all the new Christmas traditions I've taken on :). Just trying to create fun memories for the kids. I've been doing a ton of online shopping, so that has helped. I just love Amazon Prime. Can't beat free 2 day shipping. I use it almost daily, which is fun, because that means I get a package at my door step daily. It's like Christmas every afternoon :). I pretty much buy all of my school and craft supplies from them. Sure saves me a lot of time. So anyway I wanted to share a few pictures from our Thanksgiving week before I start into our Christmas fun.

We tried to get a few family pictures in. Sure isn't easy getting a perfect shot. There's always someone thats doing something funny. So I take what I can get :).

Here's a little Thanksgiving snack we made.

We even made pies...

Play doh pies that is.

Look at Oliver, haha. He's in one of his moods. The one where he just cries about EVERYTHING. I love how Brooklyn's looking at him in this picture, like, what's wrong?

They set up a tea party and pretended to eat their pies.

Brooklyn had her birthday last week. We got her this fun baby roller coaster and took her to Planet Play.

Here is a short video I put together for her. It's the highlights of her first year with some music. Just love this girl. Can't believe she's already one.

I made the kids green and red jello with Aurthor Christmas toys inside. I let them dig into it and just play. And let me tell you, they LOVE to get messy. Man, I wish I was more patient. I know kids need to get dirty and make messes. I like to let them do it, but you should see me. I turn into a mad women. I try to hide it of course but don't always succeed. I find myself apologizing a lot at bed time. I also told them we could make sugar cookies from scratch. Then I was reminded why I usually buy the dough pre made from the store and just let them decorate. Wow, that was quite the mess. And I didn't yell once!

Well, maybe a little... okay, I yelled a bunch, oops :). Word of advice to all you moms. The store bought dough is totally worth buying.

We let the kids sleep next to the Christmas tree one night. It actually turned into 3 nights. Somehow the kids kept talking us into it.

We started the Elf on the shelf tradition. The kids are LOVING it!!! So much fun!

I saw this idea on Pinterest. You wrap up 25 different Christmas books and let the kids open one each night until Christmas. Half of them are ones we already had, the other half are from the library and I bought a few new ones. I didn't realize how much of a hit this would be. Lily is begging me each day if she can open one of them. She already knows they are books and she knows which ones they are too because she was the one that picked them out at the library. She even watched me wrap some of them. I ought to figure out another way I can use this idea. Maybe I should wrap up her school work each day... hmmm, now that's an idea.

We made Christmas trees using sugar cones and green frosting (green food coloring in white frosting).

And last but not least. Today we gathered up all of our old rock hard Halloween candy and decided to make art. I just took some store bought frosting and added some corn starch to it to make it more like glue. The kids thought it was great and I solved my pantry mess problem :).

I also wanted to share this picture with you. I posted it a while ago on Facebook but I just LOVE it!

So there you have it. Our last 2 weeks in a nut shell. How about you guys? What kinds of traditions do you do? I'd love to hear about them. Hope you're all having a wonderful Holiday season. Don't forget to slow down a little and enjoy these moments every day. I'm telling this to myself too :).