More Festive Fun

I didn't realize how many Christmassy things we have done until I went back and looked at the pictures. We celebrated my Gramma's 84th birthday and decorated gingerbread men in the same afternoon. Here's a rare picture of most of the children with their great-grandparents.

Decorating gingerbread was a strangely calm experience. I guess most of the kids are growing up! We didn't even have any mountains of frosting on the cookies.

Isaiah did use plenty of sprinkles. This was his first year decorating gingerbread men.

I have no explanation for Anna's choice of attire. The girls were very excited to help make our Christmas pretzel treats.

Isaiah got involved with putting the M&Ms on after the kisses were melted. He didn't burn himself which I was thankful for. I then hid the tray until we decorated the tree.

This year I decided to get out all of my tree decorations. I hadn't seen them since we've had children. It was pretty fun to rediscover all of the treasures. Anna was very excited to take everything out of the box.

I'd be lying if I painted this to be a lovely experience. The children were over-the-top-annoying excited. Think running around, loud, bouncing (jumping?) on the couch. They felt they could do everything by themselves and the pieces of the tree came out of the box and they were trying to put it together. It was chaos and Jeremy and I did not handle it gracefully. Then we realized that we only had one working strand of lights so a trip to the store was required before we could decorate the tree. No one could quite understand why lights needed to go on before decorations.
Lights were acquired and Jeremy and Aliza put lights on the tree.

In no time at all the decorations were on the tree.

Here's a gem that Jeremy painted when he was a boy.

This week was our last CBS class until January. The children read a poem and sang a couple songs and then the adults had a beautiful potluck luncheon. The big kids read a Christmas poem. This was the first time Josiah read in public and it made me very happy. He did a great job.

Anna and Isaiah did not participate. Anna stayed with her teacher which is an improvement over past years. This time the program was at a time when the children needed to return to their class so I was trying very hard to not make eye contact with Isaiah. He cried when he saw Aliza and then was fine with a teacher holding him.

A gal from my core group that I've been wanting to get to know found me and we chose a table on a side where we could kindof keep to ourselves and talk. We talked as fast as we could and I completely lost track of time. I didn't leave until 12:15--when Aliza's dance class starts! Oops. Aliza wasn't sure it was even worth going to class, but we did and she was glad because she got to see of a picture of her recital costume and they learned the first part of the recital dance.