Merry Christmas!

Christmas-time favorites

Here are some of the things I love to do most at Christmas:

Parties-  Here we are at Ryan's preschool party.  I love Christmas parties at church, school, home, they are all great.  The more white elephant gift exchanges, the better.

Christmas goodies:  I let the kids decorate our sugar cookies this year.  We've also made peanut butter balls, wassil, cheeseball, almond crescents, fudge, and candy cane cookies.  I look forward to eating Dixie's kringla's and my mom's pecan logs soon!

I love decorating the tree every year.  As soon as I am finished eating Thanksgiving dinner, I am ready to bust out the tree.  Both Spencer and I received an ornament every year growing up so it's fun to look at our old ornaments and build up the boys collection.  Again, I let the boys help me with the task.  I even tried to not rearrange the ornaments too much after they were done.

Christmas books:  We have a LOT of Christmas books and I still buy too many every year.  We do the 12 days of Christmas in books with the kids.  They get to open a book every day and we read it together.  Ryan has got used to me crying through my favorites like The Christmas Oranges or A Christmas Dress for Ellen.  

And the thing that almost always gets me in the most Christmasy mood is singing Christmas songs, I especially look forward to the Sacrament Meeting before Christmas.  Here are the cute kiddos ready to go to church today.  It was wonderful and I loved all of the musical numbers.  I participated in one and asked Andrew if he liked it, but he said "I didn't like it, the singing was too loud".  Thanks Andrew!

Every morning,

we watch the school bus leave.  The bus stop is right in front of our house.  The boys always stop playing when they hear it pull up.  I don't think that Mabel has any idea what we are looking at, but she likes to follow her brothers around.

It's crazy too think that Ryan will get on that bus in August!

Gingerbread house and crazy hair

Ryan and his Dad made a cool Gingerbread house on Saturday.  I made some frosting for them and was quite proud of how strong it was.  Thank you allrecipes.com. 

And now that Mabel's hair is getting longer, she has some crazy hair dos after naps.  With our boys, at about this age is when we cut their hair for the first time.  I hear we aren't supposed to do that with girls though.  I have no idea what to do with the awkward mullet stage.  Babies hair seems to grow a lot faster in the back then on the sides.  At least she's super cute!

some holiday cheer

ok, so this isn't a Christmas picture, but isn't she cute?

The boys both were excited to see Santa at the ward Christmas party and jumped right up on his lap.

Ryan was a shepherd for the program.

And here is our Mabel all ready for church.  I love this dress.

It even came with a cute coat!  Thanks Aunt Lindsey!

Letters to Santa

This is Ryan's first time sounding out words by himself.  He usually insists on me telling him how to spell words but he agreed to do it on his own.  I think he did great.  Can you figure out what he asked for?

more time outside the belly..

9 months!!!

The only recent pics I have of Mabel are the family pics we took, so here's some more to enjoy.  Mabel weighs 16 lbs. 11 oz. and is 28 inches long.  She is starting to cruise along furniture and her 2 top teeth are about to poke through!