Other Christmas-y stuff

 I have vivid memories of doing this as a kid around Christmas.  You stick one of those thick peppermint sticks into an orange and suck up the juice through the peppermint straw.  I loved it as a kid.  I think that the girls were not 100% sold on it.

 They had a sleepover with their friend Lauren.  The girls were all very excited when they realized that they all had pink PJs to sleep in.  The slumber party went great and they are ready to schedule more!

 PJ day at school!

 The little angels in the choir show.

 We did not get a great picture, but here you can see the general layout. The first row were the 3 year olds.  The middle row was the 4 year olds (the kids that I teach in mission friends on Wednesdays) and then the back row was the 5 year olds.  In the picture above, Audrey is in the middle of the little cluster of kids in the middle row.  Brooke is the one with her mouth open - yawning, not singing.

Christmas countdown: 16 - 20

And to continue:

Day 16: Decorate a gingerbread house.  This is always a fun activity.  This year I saw a cute kit that said it was a village.  For some reason, I pictured it bigger.  So putting them together was a little bit harder than I thought it was going to be.  But they totally enjoyed decorating them.  And my mom was in town for part of the weekend to see the girls church choir performance so she was able to help.

Day 17: Make toilet paper snowmen.  I saw this on pinterest and thought it was so super cute.  Though I actually used paper towels as there was close to a shortage of toilet paper in the house...This was probably the most fun of the activities that we did.  They loved busting out of them at the end! Again my mom was here so she and D were able to participate and I could take pics!

 And the race begins!

 The finished projects!

Day 18: Watch a Christmas movie together.  We saw Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer and the Island of Misfit Toys.  Cute.

Day 19: Drink hot cocoa.  Clearly starting to get desperate. 

Day 20: Make treats for teachers. Another pinterest project.  We made some oreo, peppermint popcorn.  I love it.  And the girls enjoyed crushing the oreos and peppermints!

Countdown to Christmas: 11 - 15

And to continue our adventures:

Day 11: Eat a Christmas treat - Not sure what we did, but we love treats so I can assume that we must have loved whatever it was.

Day 12:Take a bubble bath by candlelight- This one was a surprise hit.

Day 13: Unwrap and read a new book - I got the girls the Dr. Seuss book The Sneeches.  And the girls were super excited to open a present early and even more excited that it was the Sneeches.  They love that story!

Day 14: Take a photo with Santa - We did this on a Friday night and I was very worried that it was going to take forever!  But we had no wait at all and just walked right up.  There was a little mailbox there where the girls were able to put in their letters to Santa - though they would not let me take a picture of them putting them in.  Boo. The girls loved seeing Santa and talking to him.

Our scanner is still not up and running so this is a picture of a picture!

Day 15: Make an ornament for the tree - this was not very successful.  I tried to make some salt dough ornaments, but they do not seem to be drying very well and they stuck to the waxed paper some.  Not a win.

Gingerbread Men

 Our friends the Rubishes had a little get together the other day, so all the kids could decorate gingerbread men.  The kids loved it....as did the adults who got to relax while the kids amused themselves.

 They were so proud of their little gingerbread men!

 Getting ready to eat their creations!  And as an aside, the girls' classes did a week long unit of study on gingerbread men.  One of the things they did was graph what body part was eaten first by each kid....head was the overwhelming winner!

Delicious!!

Countdown to Christmas: Day 6 - 10

The fun continues....Though we did have to shift some stuff around due to poor planning on my part..and now I don't remember which days we actually did stuff.

Day 6: Drive around and see Christmas lights.  This one is a family favorite for sure! Though the girls go a little crazy running around the van/car as they "move and groove"  D let them drive the van around the neighborhood a little.

Day 7: Make a Christmas pizza.  This was a huge success - though there was quite a bit of doubt regarding the coloring of the cheese green to make to Christmas tree.  Overall the candy cane pizza turned out a bit better as I thought the green was a bit off putting. They had their friend Anya over to help with making the pizza....and eat it!

Day 8: Write letters to Santa: The girls both said that they wanted a remote control car and Audrey wants a bag of candy.

Day 9: Make a Christmas craft: We made some shaving cream paint candy canes.  The girls mixed up some shaving cream with some red food coloring and some peppermint extract.  Then they put the cut out candy cane in the mix.  It turned out super cute and smells yummy too!

Day 10: Make cookies to take to neighbors: We made some chocolate chip cookies and took them to three of our neighbors.  We still have a few neighbors to do, but the girls LOVED it.  And of course I did let them eat a few too :)

Countdown to Christmas: Day 1 - 5

I have had the cutest little advent house for several years and we have never done anything with it. So this year I decided that I would put (sort of) Christmas activity behind each little door.  Not to toot my own horn or anything - but the girls LOVE it.  I mean it has surpassed the excitement of Elfie.  And as I have zero memory ability anymore, I thought that I would document our 25 activities.

Day 1: Eat a Christmas treat - always a popular option with these girls (which is good as I have used this as a filler cause 25 things is hard to come up with!).  For the treat, the girls got to split a 3 pack of the new peppermint Peeps that have bottoms dipped in chocolate.  Let me say, these are THE BEST TREAT EVER!!!!  I am concerned that I am going to be a giant hoarder of these.  On the upside, they are Peeps which I assume have the shelf life of at least a decade.

Day 2: Make popcorn garland for the tree.  This was not a win at all.  They did enjoy eating the popcorn.  They each strung about 5 pieces and were done.  Note that Elfie is sitting in the fruit bowl!

Day 3: Make a family video singing Christmas songs.  Huge excitement here as this combines two of their favorite activities - doing a performance and making a video.  They sang Jingle Bells and Rudolph. So the girls don't know the intro to Jingle Bells but they insisted that we sing it.  And both of the girls have recently learned to snap....Brooke is obsessed with it, which is why she is randomly snapping in the video.

Day 4: Make chocolate covered pretzels, complete with sprinkles. Another win.  And sadly these have already been consumed.

Day 5: Have a family dance party to Christmas music.  What's not to love about this? Lights off in the den and dancing to the twinkle of the garland and the tree. 

Decorating for Christmas

We have really enjoyed getting ready for Christmas this year.  Here are some pics of our house decorating

 We got the girls a mini-tree for their room. They insisted that it have colored lights - Audrey does not like the white lights - and they decorated it will all purple and pink ornaments.

 We had to get a new Christmas tree as our old was totally bit the dust in VA.  We wanted a 9 foot tree cause our ceilings are so high, but our choices were very limited here (and I was too lazy to drive down to BR) and so we had to get a tiny slim tree. But the girls were thrilled with the box!

 The first night the girls got to put on one ornament each...so of course they are right next to each other!  The girls were super excited to put up the tree cause we had told them that Elfie would not come to our house until the tree was up.

 The next night we finished decorating the tree.  The girls are just so cute helping. Though they do like to make patterns and put the decorations in groups which does look a little odd, but cute.

 Our fully decorated tree - and I made the bow for the top!

 And then I went crazy with the mesh and put it on our stairs and our mantle (which I did not take a picture of)

And I made a huge wreath for the door

 What? is that another bow on the mailbox by Kerry? Here is our house decorated....though I still dream that one day we will have lights along the roof.

FSU game

Since we were already "close" to Tallahassee around Thanksgiving, we decided to swing by and go to the FSU / Florida game.  We still have some friends that live in Tally and we were able to stay with them and hang out with several of our friends from college.  It was so much fun....only thing that could have made it any better is if we had actually won the game.  That dang fourth quarter was a killer!  Here are a few pics - though I forgot my camera charger so they are all with my phone.

Fraternity boys will always be fraternity boys!

Brooke is in love with Eric!

I just think that this is a super cute picture of my little Brookie!

Once the sun went down, it got totally cold....how adorable is Audrey in her little Hello Kitty hat!

Our family photo from the game....this was almost our Christmas card picture.

Did I mention that both of the girls actually loved Eric?

Backing up to Thanksgiving

This year for Thanksgiving, we went to Hilton Head with all of the Hadden clan. It was a great trip! And in keeping with our family tradition, we also celebrated Christmas the day after Thanksgiving.

We redid our family beach photos and got our pic for the Christmas card.  And I LOVE the picture of the girls at the top of the blog....total snapshot of our lives.

The four cousins sporting their turkey hats for Thanksgiving

 

Again the four cousins posing before opening their Christmas presents.

How cute are they in the matching PJ's!!

It was not really warm enough to play on the beach, but play on the beach we did.  And on the last day, the girls even braved it to splash around in the water...which was so super cold.

Since D and I were to first to arrive, we spent one day early in the week in Savannah.  We had a great day walking around along the river.  And we had a fabulous lunch - one of the best sandwiches I've ever eaten - a BLT with avocado, fried green tomatoes, and goat cheese.  Yumm-o!

The girls with their Great-Granny

Driving home - totally using and enjoying their new presents!

A new blog...

Well I seem to have finally filled up our first blog.  And since I am super cheap and don't want to pay for additional storage space - and it is too sad to delete all those cute itty bitty baby pics - viola.  A new blog.  Of course since I do print out my blog as a book each year, this is going to create issues for that.  But otherwise, I feel like the 10 of you that read this will be able to insert a 2 into the address!

Wow.  Post 1 done.