Advent activities part 2

My little helpers with making cookies for the neighbors. They sure liked the cream cheese.



Last year we did a little cousin party and I thought it was fun, so I thought we'd try it again. I thought it was even more fun this year. We did it after school so dinner and then some games and playing. I took a ridiculous amount of pictures of the present wrapping activity too, because they all got a kick out of that and it was just funny. We did that and the pin the nose on the snowman and then a candy cane hunt - which I didn't photograph at all. I think the kids had fun.



That's red and green jello - but you can't really tell.

We made some "snow" out of conditioner and baking soda. They thought it was cool for about 20 minutes :) We actually did two other crafts throughout the month - one was with the babysitter...painted ornaments, and one was Christmas tree cards that I didn't take pictures of, which is weird. And we never ended up writing in them or delivering them. Oops.

Zoo lights for my birthday! (No other pictures were taken of this but I did go get myself a massage the night before which was heaven. Then a pretty normal day and then zoo lights at night. And then Brooke came up the next day for to hang out and eat yummy food...so it was a perfect 3 days worth of lots of good things.)

Zoo lights was pretty fun. It was not too cold (like last year), but that made for a much larger crowd. They had a bunch of big lantern animals which was new this year, which was fun to see. We met Brooke there too, but we had to eat and so we kind of were not together the whole time. It was fun though.

I love this girl.

Harvey was not excited about being in this picture. I had to pick him up and put him in it and he wasn't going to smile, that's for sure. It was funny, because at the end of the night I showed it to him and was kind of getting after him because he looked so grumpy in the picture and that was our memory now. But then I realized it was dumb of me to even make a big deal about it. It's okay to feel grumpy. We don't ALWAYS have to be happy. Impossible, anyways.  And it's great to have pictures documenting the reality of it all.



Her face in this picture kills me!

Stoddard Christmas party. Breakfast and gift exchange the Saturday morning before Christmas. Good times. My dad's a goof. And it's awesome.

Hat from me.



So serious about his gift opening. I think this was from Vienna? Or one of the Stoddard kids.

From someone in Ben and Julie's family :)

Harvey gave her a game.

Some of Shane's fav coffee and these AWESOME dog bowls made by Tanner.

Pickleball stuff from my dad.

Down East gift card from Dallin.

From a Stoddard child.

We gave my parents their Christmas presents too there, mostly because we wanted everyone to enjoy Tanner's wrapping job of my dad's. My mom got a framed picture she wanted that I took, a piano book and a temple sweater.

Tanner welded a box and then wrapped that in a cardboard box. Inside was a fancy wireless meat thermometer.

The Niederhauser party was Christmas Eve evening. In the afternoon they delivered some of the secret santa gifts and then we had dinner. These were my little appetizers that I thought turned out pretty and also delicious. Tanner traeger'ed the prime rib (that is pictured in "misc December"). It was huge. And turned out so amazing!

We had dinner and hung out for awhile. Then we did the family CD. Then a fun gift card game. And then the ornaments and then they tried to play Christmas songs with the chimes. My kids were SOOO tired. Harvey had a meltdown because someone stole the gift card he wanted and I had tried to put Lottie down but it didn't really work out with all that was going on - so she was a disaster. We busted out pretty quick after the gift card game and let Tanner finish up with the ornaments. Eek. I think it was a little too late for all of that with our kids and I was sad because we didn't do any of our own Christmas Eve stuff. But it was a really fun party. It always is!