Ready for Christmas!

The Christmas season this year has been the best we've had yet - Rachel is old enough now to understand everything about Christmas, but still young enough to believe in Santa and be really excited about everything without any of the stress of wanting specific or expensive toys. Reed is starting to get into it all too, and we've had a lot of fun!

It seems like everyone has an "Elf on the Shelf" this year, and we got in on the fun too. Our elf got delivered from the North Pole a couple days into December, and Rachel named him "Snowman". For anyone who isn't familiar with this tradition - the Elf on the Shelf is a little elf sent from Santa to keep an eye on kids during the day, and then at night he uses his magic to fly to the North Pole and report to Santa. When the kids wake up every morning, they find him in a new, and sometimes silly place. We're not really stressing the "the elf is watching you" aspect of it, and our elf also does not do anything naughty, as some of them tend to do. Our elf mainly just moves around and does silly things. Here's some of what Snowman has been up to.

Drinking syrup from a straw.

Taking a cotton ball bubble bath. Do you know how many cotton balls it takes to fill a sink?! I do. It's a lot. Like over 200. Luckily they can just go right back in the bag since I cleaned the sink really good first.

Ziplining on Christmas lights.

Making a sugar snow angel.

Hanging out atop the tree.

Sledding with Santa.

Riding the school bus.

Making Qtip snowflakes.

Sitting in a lego house.

I also did one where he was kneeling by the baby Jesus from our Nativity, but I must have forgotten to take a picture of that one.


We've also done a lot of crafts for Christmas. Pinterest has given me a lot of great ideas for holiday crafts. Here are the ones I've tried:

We add a cotton ball to Santa's beard every night to count down to Christmas.

Saw this one on Pinterest and I already had the foam circle and white yarn, so I just picked up some cheap red yarn and a few cheap decorations from the dollar store and voila! Cost me less than 4 dollars.

This was just a way for me to test out some homemade Mod Podge (which worked great, just half water, half Elmer's glue), but I liked how it turned out. Just a board I cut to size and a printable found on Pinterest.

This one I made at our Relief Society craft night.

Paper snowflake ballerina. Rachel loved helping me make these. And she is imitating the ballerina's pose for the camera. Too cute.

Last one. This is just a cheap dollar store ornament with book paper mod podged onto it. I used paper from an old copy of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe I had lying around, which seemed fitting and had some cute pictures in it. Plus glitter.

 So, last year, Reed pulled down our Christmas tree and broke it. So we got a new tree this year and I love it! I had a lot of fun figuring out how to decorate it too. We had a fair amount of red ornaments, so I just ran with it and used all red and silver ornaments, plus our keepsake ornaments (which happen to mostly be red and silver anyway).

 Here are just some other random pictures from this month.

Rachel drawing. She loves to draw and it's really fun now that she's starting to draw actual things and concentrate on it.

Showing me her picture.

Every time we go to Costco now, we make robot suits. The kids love it.

We got Rachel this little pink tree for her room that she can decorate herself. Both kids love it.

Rachel totally climbed up on these stools by herself and laid down. I just told her to put her head down and her arms at her sides. Planking Rachel.

We don't do naps anymore, because if we do, Reed won't go to sleep at night, but sometimes he still crashes. Cute.

And this is what we woke up to this morning! Merry Christmas everyone!