Christmas Begins.

I finally got our pictures uploaded from Christmas-all 184 of them (which is after both me and Matt going through and doing some deleting)-so pardon me if I'm a little behind. I should be talking about New Year's resolutions and family goals for 2012 by now...but I'm not. Maybe I'll make my first resolution "be more organized":).

Anyway, Christmas always starts in our home with putting up the tree, then starting an Advent calendar on December 1. This year, we also had a 12 days of Christmas countdown, in which the kids had to find the number 1-12 on a slip of paper and the back revealed a Christmas activity for the day. On a side note, the first day said "make peanut butter balls", in which Nathan laughed out loud and stated, "What does that have to do with the birth of Jesus?!"

December 23rd has turned into our family Christmas, the paper that day said "Make a birthday cake for Jesus" (no, they didn't all have to do with food). Since we had a plethora of baked sweets already, we decided instead to frost the already baked sugar cookies. The end result was messy, but lots of fun. They won't end up in Martha Stewart, but they tasted terrific!

Most pictures I took had Ella eating the frosting!

After we were finished the kids ran and played outside. Nathan tried to build a hot air balloon out of wrapping paper, string, a basket, and some sticks. He came in defeated after about 30 minutes and said all he had to show for his work was "a pile of sticks and a basket of mess". We talked about the process of invention, but I think he's done with hot air balloons!

After lunch, just for good measure, we decided to make these:

a pretzel, a Rolo, and M&Ms. We've never made them before, but we will definitely make them again!

Christmas with the kids is a lot of fun-hopefully soon I'll put up the rest of our day, as well as Christmas Eve and Christmas weekend!