Christmas Advent

One of my absolute favorite holiday traditions growing up was our advent calendar. I was so excited when I finally found the perfect coke crate to make our own a few years ago. I was even more excited when we were going to be in a home AND home all December to really decorate and celebrate all month long! I was so excited to have Harvey start to experience the awesomeness of the advent calendar! I spent a lot of time trying to plan out daily activities etc etc and I'll be honest, sometimes things didn't happen at all and often it was something different than what was written. It was totally fine this year because Harvey can't read and he wasn't really hooking on to what I was telling him anyway. He just thought it was cool opening the presents and playing with the trinket inside and getting a treat :)

These aren't going to be in any particular order of what and when we did things - but here's some of the photo documentation that happened of some of the things we did this Christmas. I tried to make part of the morning tradition be watching a Christmas video from LDS.org and we did pretty good most of the days. It was good for me too, even if Harvey didn't absorb every thing we watched, but just to remind me daily what the point of all of this is. I think we'll try and do that every year as part of it.
Oh man he was so excited about this train. I think he had about 3 of the small pieces and things broken by day two. Ugh. But it was fun to have up - we just had to make it a rule that he couldn't be in there without us. It mostly worked. 

 

I couldn't have been happier about having our own tree!! This is the first year in 5.5 years of marriage that we've had a legit tree. I really wanted a real one but we decided to just go artificial and found one we both actually really liked at Walmart. And then we heard like 3 news stories about trees starting on fire. So Tanner was right again. And just after we got it we went to a Christmas guitar concert and a girl sang a song about real trees and why they are bad. Haha. I'll always love all the real trees we had and it was always so fun going to pick them out as a family - but I'm really happy with ours and we had a great time decorating it!

Tommy Emmanuel was the concert we went to with my parents and Heather and Shane. It was really fun and he was incredible!

He LOVES playing in the snow. I wish I had better stuff for Greta because we didn't get out as much as I'm sure he would like. Luckily we probably still have a couple months to try!

Not sure where he learned how to do a snow angel, but apparently he learned wrong.

 

One evening we went up to Ogden to check out their downtown light display. It was fun but SUPER cold and crowded and he didn't seem as excited by all the little decorated houses as I thought he might be. Oh well. Adventures, right?

 

 And why not ice cream after?

 I don't really have Christmas cookie cutters and wanted to get a pancake mold but ended up improvising. We made pumpkin chocolate chip cookies instead and used tin foil for a tree mold. Haha.

 

  

Zoo lights were a HIT! It was really cold but super fun and the kids both seemed to enjoy it!

 

We thought it might be an eagle at first...

Greta especially liked this light tunnel.

 

 I took Greta and Harvey into the reptile building. Tanner passed - he doesn't do reptiles. It was kind of cool at night. And I can't say I've EVER seen the bats active. They were going to town eating and stuff which was way cool. And gross. I don't like bats.

Not even close. Well - I guess it's still a bird. But pretty impressive!

I went downtown to have lunch with my friend Anne before she moved to Washington. Afterwards we went to the City Creek dinosaur playground and outside they had a thing to get a pic with Santa. I accidentally did it without Tanner - they had a sale for America First members and there was no line. We hadn't been that lucky up to that point.Love this picture though!

We did some Christmas crafts and went to Brooke's to make cookies one day.

 

 

Harvey's favorite were the blue sprinkles.

We celebrated dad's birthday. Yummy breakfast and a sweet new ski coat (that we still need to exchange - oops) and seeing Moana and eating at Rio Grande with Clare and Berrie (and no kids).

Tanner's incredible bday sunset. Love that man.

We celebrated my birthday. Tanner surprised me with a babysitter (my sister) who showed up with this -

Are you kidding me?! I cried when I opened it. It was so awesome. I mean, better than I could have even dreamed of it being. So amazing. 3 hours of relaxing, heavenly bliss! Foot soak, massage, facial and pedicure.

 

 

Then we did some shopping at Nordstrom's and got a pretty stellar birthday cake that no one complained about! I even got a gorgeous sunset on my bday too!

 

Greta climbed up a step for her first time ever here.

Harvey and mom got new shoes. Haha. Jk. Just me. And it wasn't those - surprisingly enough.

Tanner knows how to throw a party! It was great. We did lots of other little things throughout the month but that's all the pictures I took. And we had some fun family parties too (most of those are documented in the next blog). Christmas was so much fun with little kids!