The Start of Our Christmas Fun!!

We are planning to take it easy for the month of December and just do some fun Christmas stuff together. We have lots of Christmas books borrowed from the library and we are having fun making crafts. Tuesday, we started out making hand/foot print Rudolphs!!

Kristen helping Ian making his hand prints.

Aaron helping Ian make his footprint.



Here is Momo helping Aaron make a footprint!



We also made Styrofoam cup bells, and jingle bell necklaces. We had planned to watch The Polar Express movie that night so that is why we did the bells.

Aaron is such a good big brother, even though these were "little kid" type crafts....he joined in the fun and made them too!! I love that he doesn't think he is too "old" to have fun with his younger siblings.

Here are their bells lined up on the table.

Here are all their finished crafts. Notice Aaron got a little more creative with his Rudolph!!

All the Rudolphs hanging around on the door!!

Aaron and Kristen did a word search with words from the Polar Express movie.

Wednesday, we decided to try some origami!! Thanks to our friend Sadie for sharing this project with us. We had so much fun working on it. Heather was also over for the day so she was helping us too.

Kristen learning how to do the folds.

Momo trying it out too!! She caught onto the folding pretty quickly!!

Ian had fun just playing with the paper cutter while we did the folding.

After a bit, Aaron started the gluing for us.

Here are our first couple flowers.

The girls taking a break to cook some mac-n-cheese for lunch.

Back to work....we decided to try some silver wrapping paper for some of the flowers. It makes the flowers really shine! Heather was cutting the wrapping paper.

The first half of the flowers put together.


Morgan holding the finished ornament.

All done!! Isn't it pretty!! We can't wait to make some more.

Momo and Ian taking a break to read a book.

When the ornament was done, we cleaned up our mess and then finished our tree. We had put it up Tuesday night but didn't decorate.

Ian with his Buzz Lightyear ornament!!

After the tree was done, we just hung out until it was time to head to church. I was playing with the settings on my camera and so some of the pictures here aren't the best but I got some pretty neat shots I think.

The baker's rack all decorated.

Our mantle........

A close up of the big nutcrackers. ( You can see them standing beside the fireplace in the picture above.)

This is an ornament I made when I was in Kindergarten in 1979!!! It is part of a plastic 2 liter soda bottle melted down. This is one of two ornaments I have that were made by me as a 5 year old!!

Just a pretty star......

Dreaming......................

That is all so far.....now I am off to maybe read some Christmas stories to the kids before it is time for me to go to work this afternoon. Check back soon to see more Christmas fun!!

More Odds and Ends....

I just remembered I had these pictures and never posted them so here they are. These are not in order. We cooked Thanksgiving dinner the Sunday before Thanksgiving. I took these two pictures of Ian helping me cook and then never took anymore pictures after everyone arrived to eat. We had a nice day though.

Kristen catching a little nap before the food was ready!!! Yes, she is upside down on the recliner....crazy girl!!

Kristen has had her best friend, Olivia, over a couple times recently. When you get tween girls together.....it seems the camera is always involved!! Here are just some fun shots of them!! Can't you just tell how much fun they were having?

Silly Ian!

Just being cute!

GOOFY!!

Pretty girls........growing up so fast!

They made rice krispie treats one night. The treats were yummy and they had a blast making them.....even though there were rice krispies all over the kitchen!