Doll House

My mom drove up here several days before Christmas to get my brother. Since we were going to Greg's parents for Christmas we had a little Christmas with her while she was here. We opened all our presents from my mom. She had been working on "remodeling" this doll house she got at a thrift store for Jaelee and this thing is huge! The twins loved it. Jaelee is usually into something for 5 minutes and moving on to the next thing but she played with the dolls in the doll house all night. Jaelee also got a cooking set and I happened to have a smaller box of brownies so we let her make us brownie muffins. After we opened all our gifts, made brownies and played for a while my mom read them The Night Before Christmas. Then I had to get a picture of my brother and induct him into our silly Christmas balls photos.  It was a great night!

Random December Stuff

I have always loved the Holidays.  We always get a tree pretty early in December and decorate it but I have never gone full blown into decorating the house for Christmas like I do for Halloween.  I decided this year that since the kids are getting older I would make the house a little more Christmasee.  I brought in a palette from our garage to put the little tree cone advent Calender I made out of paper on.  If I can find the link for where I got the idea I'll post it later.  I also created a banner to go around our kitchen, used more pickle jars to create a lighted Happy Holidays sign and made a Merry Christmas sign to go between our media center.  It looked pretty festive.  Below are some pictures of our decor and random pictures of the kids.

Lights at the Botanical Gardens

Greg got some tickets to visit the Botanical Garden light show for free.  Love when things we all ready want to do are free!  After seeing Santa we went to the food court in the mall and ate some diner.  Then we headed over to the Botanical Gardens.  The lights are really amazing and each year it's more fun to see the how much the kids enjoy it.  We stopped and got some cookies & hot chocolate and then walked through and looked at all the lights.

Silly Pictures & The Trip to See Santa

It all ready seems like this was so long ago.  I can't not put up a post about our trip to see Santa this year.  We had been talking with the kids quite a bit about Santa and how if they sat on his lap and told him what they wanted for Christmas he would bring it if they were really good.  They both actually seemed really excited to go see him.

We had a whole day planned of fun.  We were going to go to the mall to see Santa, go to dinner and eat and then go to the Botanical Gardens to see the lights.

We made sure we didn't go until after the kids had their naps.  While they were napping I was sitting on our floor working on some Christmas projects and I looked over at our tree and saw my face in a Christmas ball.  It was distorted and really funny so I told Greg to grab the camera and take my picture in the ball.  It was too funny so I had him put his face up the ball and I took his picture.  When the kids woke up we had to get one of them and of course a family picture as well.

Marsing

I went to Marsing to take a picture of a family that just got a horse.  They wanted the horse to be in their family pictures for Christmas.  I took the kids with me and they had a lot of fun.  They liked the horses, the dogs and running around.  After we were done we went and had pizza at a local pizza place and it was DELICIOUS.  I would go out there again just to have pizza. There are also a lot of fruit orchards out there so on our way home I stopped to take a few pictures of the kids.  Here they are, just so darn cute.  You can tell it was super cold.

 Jaelee did this all on her own.  She posed and told me to take her picture.  I am training her well.

Catch Up - Getting Our Christmas Tree

Wow I am behind on blogging.  The time has just flown by since the first of December.  I was looking forward to a slow down at work in December like it usually does but that didn't happen and it just seemed like we have been so busy.  I'm going to catch up and start with getting our Christmas tree.

We got our Christmas tree after we took our family pictures.  We went to the same place we did last year because you can't beat $25 for a real tree.  This year the tree guy remembered us and threw in a free wreath.  It was freezing and really windy so we picked our tree really fast and then Jaelee and I got back in the jeep and waited while the guys put the tree on top.

We came home and put it up.  Greg put the lights on and I waited until the kids were asleep to put the rest of the decorations on it.  I think they are still just a little bit to little to help with most of it so I just wait until they are asleep.  They have pretty cute looks on their faces when they wake up in the morning and see the tree all decorated.

Here are a few pictures of our tree adventures: