It's Beginning To Feel A Lot Like Christmas

Last night was a great night. I think it was the first night this month that all five of us were home at one time. It's been hectic with Joe working some overtime since one of his coworkers is out on maternity leave and Cole is only here Tuesday night through late Friday afternoon (and one weekend a month, which is this coming weekend). Anyway...

We started off with helping the kids with their letters to Santa. His mom had bought these really cute Santa letter kits at (I think) Pat Catan's for the kids. We had some of the store toy books here and sales ads for them to look through and we helped them cut things out and glue them on the paper. They are all done and sealed up and ready to take to Overly's Country Christmas with us tomorrow night to mail.


Then we had homemade beef stew for dinner that Joe made. It was yummy. There were no problems getting the kids to eat their dinner last night. Do you think Brooke liked it?

She's such a goofball. She does this often lately and it drives me nuts. I probably shouldn't have taken a picture and reinforced the behavior, huh? Oh well :oP

After dinner the kids and Joe decorated a (pre-assembled) gingerbread house (I took all the pictures, of course). I figured this would either go really well or really badly....and it went really well. The kids loved it and had so much fun. They were warned ahead of time that the candy was for decorating and not for eating (they had sampled it earlier). I thought I would be fighting with Brooke about that the whole time, but she only licked one of the peppermint candies. This is definitely something we will do with them again.

We have a folding table here that Joe's parents bought for us before Thanksgiving. Joe had the idea of just laying it on the floor and decorating on top of it. It worked out great! (I cannot wait until we are rid of the carpeting in this kitchen!)

Joe had the idea to make little snowmen out of marshmallows (with gumdrops for eyes) to stand in front of the houses. They looked so funny.


See? Cute, though.

This was the only picture I got of them that wasn't blurry...of course, Ryan's hand ended up in the picture.

I love him!

We finished off the night with watching the Jim Carry version of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. It was a very Christmas-y evening and I loved it!