Christmas festivities

Christmas this year was full of fun activities! Thanks to pinterest I kept feeling like I needed to do more and probably overdid it a little for being pregnant and tired. Oh well, at least we had fun! I did my advent calendar this year with an activity for each day. I started taking pictures each day but accidentally deleted the memory card halfway through so I don't have full documentation unfortunately, but just trust me we did some fun things! Some days we baked, we made a snowman, many Christmas crafts, hot chocolate, Christmas movies, nativity and Christmas concerts etc. I also wrapped 24 books (some form the library since I didn't have 24 Christmas books!) and each night the kids got to take turns opening a book to read before bed. They love this tradition, I will definitely do it every year! These photos are alittle out of order because blogger does that to me and I am too lazy right now to fix it.

Heidi helping me with the Christmas swirl cookies

Jadyn and her friend at the grade 1/2 Christmas concert that was seriously so well done. The title was "The mice before Christmas" half in English and half in Spanish. These kids are so talented!
At the Taylor family Christmas party we hold every year at the church. Jenni brought such great games to entertain the kids!! Here they are building felt snowmen.

Josh's dad arranged to have a Santa come for the party to surprise the kids, here they are as he is walking in! I love Brigg's face like his best friend just walked in the door!!

I had a bag full of little toys for him to give each of the kids. Heidi nearly wouldn't go near him but her name was on one of those presents so she hesitantly gave in!


The snowman hat brownies we attempted to make. They looked a lot better on pinterest!

The kids had the opportunity to sing Christmas Carols at the community retirement home. It was for all the primary kids but Mya thought she should join in, plus she knows all the words to jungle bells anyway so she might as well be part of the group!

Heidi's gingerbread house she made at preschool and promptly ate when she got home. I barely got a picture in!
LOVE these stencils from Usborne books, I am pretty sure the kids spent the entire month of December doing crafts at the kitchen table, this was a huge part of it!


Jadyn doing her piano duet with Aunt Jenni (her piano teacher). They played "Jolly Old Saint Nicolas"
I also got these Christmas doodles form Usborne (this is not an ad!) they were awesome too. Just use a dry erase marker and they spent hours playing with these!

My muffin tin advent calendar. Every morning the kids woke up and first thing ran downstairs to see what we were doing that day!

Helping daddy put up the new tree. I finally got rid of the $2 garage sale one and went with the Costco prelit tree. Much better. Thank you Costco. I wonder if I ever got a picture of it completed...

And of course I had to do a Christmas photo shoot even though we only sent cards to family and a few of Josh's mission families in Mexico. Oops. I'll be better next year! I love these girls so much!!!