Christmas Prep

This may have been my favorite to date.  One reason is that we got back from Utah and still had a whole week of November.  So I got to slowly and intentionally go into December at my own pace.  In the end it was beautiful. Last year out house had just gotten "finished" so I didn't put up many decorations, well... this year it was in the exact same state it was the year before (thanks knee surgery and broken foot), so I almost didn't put up a lot of stuff again (didn't want to put holes in the wall and haven't gotten shelves and end tables).  But I decided I just needed to go for it and stop procrastinating.  So I put holes in my walls and hung  up my favorite Christmas pictures.  That lit a fire in me and I spent the next few nights developing, framing, and hanging wonderful Christmas pictures.  I can't believe I didn't take any pictures of them!  

I did have some great devotionals and Light the World activities for the kids.  It wasn't what I wanted in my head, but it fight nicely into our lives and helped bring Christ into our home and holiday.  

I found these socks at Deseret Book last year in January and bought them for this year.  I have never done anything "cute" like that before.  It was kind of fun.  I am so grateful my kids appeased me with this picture!

We all watched the first presidency devotional together.  

The weather was great so I spent MANY days decorating my house.  That wasn't the plan, but our neighbor gave us a huge box of new lights and the weather was so nice that day after day Dane and Eve wanted to play outside in the afternoon, so I just kept putting up another string of lights.   They have really started to play together so good.  They have very elaborate pretend play and can play together for hours without fighting or needing anything from me.  

They were "camping" in my garden hole. 

Remember from the tornado our tree blew down.  Well... I had a lot of wood laying around and I saw these cute reindeer and snowman at Home Depot for like 40 dollatrs and decided to try and make them myself.  Jason helped me.  I didn't get a picture of the final product or the snowman, but you get the idea.  

 

The nice weather convinced Jason to put our lights up a bit early and got Mads to help.

We got our biggest and best tree ever!

Dane was adorable the whole Chrsitmas season!

Brock has really gotten into cooking.  He has a whole process and likes to work "his way".  This includes an apron.  I love it. 

Everyone helped make all the treats!

Including Dane and Eve, who were the unwrappers of all the kisses for the peppermint popcorn.

I got all of my old preschool christmas craft stuff out for the first time.  I didn't do ALL that I wanted to do.  But I have next year.

The kids stuffed all the Christmas cards!  oh - I also got out my Christmas cards.  

Our house.  It isn't exactly what I would want if I got to start from scratch.  I would much rather have a totally different look.  But everything you see was free.  So even though it isn't my style at all, my true style is cheap.  So... yay!

Christmas time for me was an exercise in shifting my priorities from "we have to do everything together as a whole family/ I want to do that with all the kids" to "I can do fun things with who ever is home or who ever wants to do them".  For example earlier in the post I said we watched the first presidency devotional together, but if you look at the pictures you will notice Noah wasn't there.  He didn't want to watch it.  So I said that was fine.  So many of the activities that we usually do "all together" I did just with Dane and Eve.  Like.... making sugar cookies and ginger bread houses (another post about that).  It felt really good and has helped me to find joy in this stage of motherhood.  

And Dane and Eve were the ones to deliver our neighbor and ward gifts.  

I also convinced Brock to have a christmas party with his friends.  It was a hard sell and so I didn't want to ruin it by taking any pictures, so I "snuck" this picture as I walked by.  

Also a big part of Christmas preparation for me was facebook marketplace.  I bought like 60% of Christmas gifts on there.  Especially legos for Dane and Eve.  They wanted Legos but we have SO MANY - I could not bring myself to spend 50 dollars on Legos that we had.  I discovered that many people will sell their legos with all the right pieces and the instruction book.  So I picked a lot up, but I didn't want to give them legos in a plastic bag, so I made these boxes to complete the "hoax" of them thinking they got NEW Legos.  I was REALLY proud of myself.