Baking Elves

One of our advent activities was making treats to show appreciation for the workers at Daddy's hospital. We had a surprisingly fun night! Usually baking with the kids is slightly...stressful for Mommy, but we ended up having the best time!

I was calling them my little elves so Daddy found a website where you plug in your name and it gives you a Christmas elf name and profile. We had so much fun giggling at all the funny names. Here is Brandysnap Iciclecrackers!

 

Mistletoe Mullingstockings and Stollen Silverbaubles

 

Gingersnap Pepperlog was such a good little elf baby. She sat in her walker for over an hour while we made all the treats.

Eggnog Greenlights 

And I was Nutmeg Snowsparkles. After we did all our names we spent the rest of the night testing it out for everyone we know. Grandpa's was the funniest as Gingernuts Goldencake. Haha!

Usually the girls get all fired up and excited to do stuff like this and then lose interest after twenty minutes or so, but they worked hard for an hour and a half until we were done. Peanut was especially impressive as she happily unwrapped Hershey's kisses and piled the garbage in a bowl. 

The finished product!

We took them up to the hospital and went around to all the departments handing them out with smiles and wishes for a Merry Christmas. Many people said it made their day and we actually made an elderly patient cry because she loves little ones and was so happy to see them. It was a wonderful way to spread some love and cheer at Christmas!

Night Night

I love the way Peaches waves to me when she's going to bed. T always puts her down so on my way out she waves. I tried for three different nights to get a good video and of course she only did about half of what she usually does, but I got a little bit of her cute waving. :)

Peanut's Nose

Peanut has this hilarious nose thing she's been doing that cracks us up. She pinches her nose, sucks in her nostrils, and can somehow hold it for 10-20 seconds.

So the other day at lunch we were all trying to do it. Boo tried several times and finally got it for about 2 seconds.

I tried and tried and could not do it...probably because I was laughing too hard!

Trying again...

See? Like this!

Daddy managed to get it for a few seconds.

Buggy could get one nostril in, but it would quickly pop out again.

Peanut is definitely the master! Haha!

Leftover Thursday

 The other day Daddy and the oldest two went out to work at the house. They ended up being gone for hours. Peanut was my little shadow and followed me around most of the day. After Peaches woke up and I fed her, Peanut and I played round after round of Candyland. She actually beat me most of the time. Haha!

 

She wanted to take pictures too...here's one of the only non-blurry ones.

Peanut got to go on her first playdate the other day after preschool. She had SOO much fun! She was there for three hours and would have been happy to stay for ten more! She told me, "We just played and talked and laughed ALL day!" And she's asked me about 1,000 times when she can go again. My friend sent me some pictures of the girls playing. 

Cuties!

We used to have game nights with our friends that recently moved away so we decided to try to have a Skype-Game Night. And it actually worked pretty well! We had already had one Skype date where we just talked and the kids made funny faces at each other for half an hour so we decided to get two sets of computers going. The kids had the main computer in the kitchen and T and I took one of the laptops in the living room.

How's this picture for creepy?? They're Skyping with Lord Voledmort! Ha!

 Peaches joined us for our Skype session and was quite fasicinated with the people in the computer. Haha! We taught them a dice game, and it worked fine. It was a fun night and made it feel like they weren't quite so far away. Hopefully we'll get to do it again soon.

Happy Thursday!

Wordless Wednesday

The First Noel

Noni had the girls practice and perform another handbell song. I absolutely LOVE when they do this. SO cute!

They also sang Luke 2:11-12 with some of the other church kids. We've had three families move away in the last year and lost 6 of our boys! We've still got lots of girls though. Our family helps out with that a little. Haha :)

The next week they sang Luke 2:13-14

Noni does such a great job with the kids!

:)

Christmas Lights

 On Sunday we spontaneously decided to go look at Christmas lights. Noni and Papa took the baby with them after church so she could have a nap at her house while we took the big girls to Walmart to buy angel tree presents. We also did shifts in the toy section so they could pick out gifts to each other. We ended up spending a little over two hours there and still weren't quite finished! 

We ran back to Noni's so I could feed Peaches and then piled up all the kids, Noni, and Mama in the car (Papa went to youth group). Having a Suburban works great for these kinds of excursions! 

We headed to the city and our first stop was food. We found a cute little Mexican restaurant and had a nice dinner together. Then we went to the city gardens where they turn their conservatory into a awesome light display at Christmas! Everything was so pretty!

Boo and Peanut wanted a picture with this reindeer. :)

She's in "that" stage for picture taking. 

 

Look at these cool leaves to Mama's left! There were some that were 5-6 ft long!

 

It was actually a lot more crowded than I anticipated. We had to wait about 10 minutes just to get in and then we slowly shuffled through the place in a big winding line with everyone else. The girls took a break on a bench mid-way through.

It was really neat to stroll through and check out all the cool plants though. Everything is labeled. This is a 98 year old tree! So pretty!

Cheesin' with the littles. :)

They had a whole wing of cacti. Some of them were 110 years old! I never knew there were so many different species.

We had to get a picture of Peanut in front of the "Peanut Cactus".

It was freezing cold outside but Mama was a good sport and loved looking at all the lights.

After we left the conservatory we drove through all the old historic homes and saw their Christmas decorations. They were really beautiful! 

What a fun night!