Shakespear Shuffle

1st week Adventing 

My favorite time of year again!  I love our newish tradition of doing an Advent calendar & some Christmasy activity every evening in December.  I think this is our 3rd year.  The activities are never elaborate or fancy but we all look forward to them.  And I love that we do almost all our shopping & prepping in October & November so December is more relaxed.  We even skipped swim lessons this month so we can spend more time just hanging out at home together.

Day 1: Trimming the tree & decorating

 

Day 2: Making a Hershey-kiss-count-down-the-days-until-Christmas-chain.  It's one of the first things they all say when they wake up - can we eat our chocolate??!!??!! Oh & we also watched a movie that's not really a Christmas movie but hey in part of it there's snow, so there. 10 points to who can guess what movie it was....

Day 3: Game & treat night.  Ok every night is treat night & lots of nights we play games but there's something about making it the official title that gets everyone excited.  Here we are playing color tag & eating Daddy's delicious chocolate pie!  Some day I want to get my act together enough that we play Christmas games but for now Duck Duck Goose & Red Light Green Light work just fine.

Day 4:  Homemade wrapping paper.  I'd like to thank Nana for this genius idea!  I love to see what the kids draw & lucky for me my presents are the only ones not yet wrapped so I will get to have all the beautiful paper! 

Day 5:  Making Christmas treats & rocking out to Christmas music baby!  5 helpers in the kitchen equals 5 times the fun??  Or it takes 5 times as long??  Ummmm....both!

Day 6:  Deliver treats to friends...in the SNOW!!

We've been told it very rarely snows here so we feel super lucky to have had one of those rare occasions happen during our first year in Oregon.  It was a snow day for the kids & Jeremy has Fridays off anyway so we skipped our plans for the day & played in the snow, delivered our treats early in the day, & went to see 'Frozen' in the theater. Such a fun day! 

 

 

 

My wish came true-Hyrum lost his other top front tooth so now I can sing that song to him this whole month!  I tell you what he loves it when I sing that song.  All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth.....

Day 7:  Ward Christmas party.  We also went to the Festival of Trees (a fund raiser for our non profit hospital in town) & Emma & I had a girlie date to see the Nutcracker with some friends.  For a small town local production I was super impressed at the dancing, costumes, LIVE orchestra & sets!  It was so fun!  Despite the fact that Emma started asking me 'Is it over YET?' about 10 minutes into the production we lasted all 2 hours!  Then that night was our ward party.  It was a "talent" type show with a variety of acts.  It was really fun & everyone had a chance to participate.  It ended with the Primary kids acting out the Nativity which was just perfect.