Christmas Time Is Here

The past few weeks have been crazy busy with all the fun of Christmas! I wanted to make an advent calendar that assigned a Christmasy activity each day in December. The idea being that this would spread things out throughout the month and remind me to do the little things like watching Christmas movies with the kids and making Christmas treats. However, I waited until the last minute to try to make the calendar and it didn't happen. Probably for the best anyway, December was a crazy month!

So, as always, we ended up cramming everything into the week before Christmas!

We went to see the lights at the temple.

We watched Christmas movies and drove around the neighborhood to look at the lights. I even made a cherry braid to eat during the movie, which brought back some great childhood memories.

We made our first gingerbread house. It was not beautiful and made a huge mess of the kitchen, but the kids had tons of fun!

We got all dressed up in our fancy Christmas clothes for church on the Sunday before Christmas. Yes, there is a child missing from the picture. Unfortunately, during all this craziness, William got bronchialitis. So, while we were taking these pictures, he was in his train jammies, sleeping. William and Grandpa had a sick party during Sacrament Meeting and then Mom came home to hang out with the sick boy. He had a little bit of a rough time of it, but did surprisingly well overall and is much better now!

On Christmas Eve we went to Grandma and Grandpa's house for the festivities. It was Mom's turn to be sick, so I laid on the couch for most of it. We did the nativity play and Emily and Edward loved being Mary and Joseph. William did a good job as baby Jesus, other than the fact that he is too big for Mary to hold.

We also opened some gifts and we all got spoiled! The kids are loving the costumes they got!

Christmas Day was a wonderful day of relaxing and playing with all our new things. The kids got tons of new books and board games and Mom is loving the variety. Candy Land and Matching got old about 10 months ago.