December Playtime

I can’t believe it is already January! December flew by, and we had a lot of fun with preparing for Christmas, and enjoying the tiny bit of snow we got at the beginning of the month. Here is Oliver chopping some wood with his toy ax. He is trying to help out and be like his Daddy. As a side note, the last time Elora watched Chris split wood, she said, “Wow! You are the strongest Daddy EVER!”

Apparently chopping wood was too difficult, so Oliver moved on to chopping snow.

Elora, modeling her fancy coat.

And enough chopping, Oliver started throwing snow at me. Ha! He didn’t know that I am good at throwing snowballs too.

We like to make gingerbread houses with the kids every year. Usually we use graham crackers, but this year my friend JoAnna had an extra gingerbread house that she had cut out and never used. The we got a tip from another friend to use a hot glue gun to put it together (since we never actually eat them…) SOOOO much easier than trying to put it together with frosting!

This was the first time Oliver actually worked really hard to decorate. Usually he just eats the candy, but this year he very diligently put all of his candy on the house.

I tried to take a picture of the kids with their house… Got to love Elora the goober.

Marion is getting huge, starting to talk, and she LOVES stories. She will frequently carry books over to us and then cry if we won’t sit down and read them. I guess she will be joining her story-loving big brother and sister. We have a massive story time at night where everyone gathers around the couch with their favorite one or two stories to read. The more kids we have, the longer this bedtime tradition takes…

For our church Christmas party, we were invited to be the nativity family. Luckily I have a few friends with nativity costumes. I borrowed this cute shepherd costume for Oliver and he was so excited about it, that he wore it every day for a week before the party. Here he is with his sheep (which he diligently carried around the house whenever his costume was on) and holding his shepherd’s cane (candy cane… I couldn’t find a real cane…) He told me, “I want to dress like a shepherd until Christmas.”

He spent a lot of time looking at our nativity and talking with the sheep in it. He also brought his dinosaur over to see the nativity. I guess he is a nice dinosaur, because he didn’t eat any of the sheep.

Marion came over to steal the sheep, but she couldn’t reach, so she settled for the dinosaur. Oliver was apparently really excited about the sheep, because normally he gets really mad if Marion tries to play with his favorite dino friend.

Oliver also played with his farm and found another sheep to carry around the house. He is a pretty cute shepherd, I am actually a little sad that we returned the costume now so he doesn’t get to wear it. Maybe I need to make him a shepherd costume…

Marion is really getting into music lately. We have a little CD player down where the kids can reach, and we had a Christmas CD in it for all of December. Marion had to turn it on every single time she walked in the room. Here she is (proudly holding Oliver’s sheep, which is actually hers unless Oliver is a shepherd – then he confiscates it) turning on the music and starting to dance. Looks like we have another music kid, I love it!

Elora had a little school Christmas program. She got to be a reindeer and memorize a little part to say. She was so excited, had everything memorized… and of course on stage she looked absolutely terrified. I watched as the microphone got closer and closer to her and she looked more and more nervous. But to my surprise she said her line with no prompting at all, and sang most of the songs. She didn’t look happy, but she did it, and I was so proud.

Here she almost smiled… I asked what her favorite part of her show was, and she said she liked singing “So This is Christmas”.

We got to go see her after the program. Marion clapped, while Elora held her proudly. Such sweet little girls.

We got a lot of packages in the mail because we do almost all of our Christmas shopping online, as well as a lot of our other shopping, including some groceries. When we got this box labeled, “HEAVY lift with care”, we were totally confused because neither Chris or I could figure out what we had ordered that was very heavy. When we opened it we laughed pretty hard when we realized our only “Heavy, lift with care” package we have every received was… Grape nuts. Awesome.