Random December Happenings

December is always so crazy busy that keeping up with blogging is never a high priority. Here's a recap of some of our month leading up to our vacation.

Bridget loved decorating the tree this year. Felicity loved removing the decorations but was unable to put them back on by herself. Even with all of the undecorating and redecorating, it held up pretty well for the month.

Bridget wanted to pose like this under the tree because there's an ornament with her picture as a newborn under the tree. Five years later, she's just a wee bit bigger. ;-)

The finished tree looks so much prettier all lit up.

For a family night treat, I made these peanut butter reindeer cookies. Bridget thought they were great and enjoyed helping put on all of the decorations.

For the first time in a few years, we actually made it down to Temple Square to look at the Christmas lights. We went just before all the frigid weather set in, so it was nice to enjoy it with just a slight chill in the air. We met up with Megan one evening after she got off work and also walked through the new City Creek Mall. Sadly, the kids didn't get to see Santa there as we'd planned because they were only letting people with dogs see him that night. Lame!

This is a picture of the primary kids during the live nativity they did as part of our church Christmas party. There's a bunch of animals off to the right that you can't see. We had pretty nice weather earlier this month until this particular weekend. It was so cold outside, so the kids had to bundle up hiding their shepherd and angel costumes. Bridget's in the middle of the front row dressed as an angel. They sang a couple of songs and then we hurried inside to get warm.

As a side note, I should mention that tons of people in our ward got sick the Sunday night after the ward Christmas party. I know of at least 50 people that got sick, including me, Nate, and Felicity, and there were probably a bunch more I didn't know about. We're pretty sure it was some type of food poisoning and not a stomach bug because Bridget never did get it. All I can say is taking care of a puking toddler when both Nate and I were puking our guts out was horrible. I'm just grateful Bridget didn't get it because I think I would have starting crying if we'd had to try and take care of her too. Luckily she was able to take care of us the best a 5-year-old can.

Felicity thought this present of hers made a great little chair, and we thought it made a cute picture.



Megan and I teamed up for Bakefest 2012 to spend an entire day making tons of delicious Christmas goodies to share with our friends and neighbors. The treats included heath bars, sugar cookies, spritz cookies, 2 types of fudge, ginger crinkles, white chocolate and chocolate dipped pretzels, mini monster cookies, chcolate mint cookies, and peppermint bark popcorn.

Sadly, I was unable to get any pictures of our kids with Santa this year. I mentioned how City Creek didn't work out, which I was a little bummed by, but my backup plan was to go to a local bakery/restaurant where they were doing a breakfast for dinner with Santa a few days later. As luck would have it, that didn't work out either because it was the night after the food poisoning incident, so we were in no condition to leave our home or eat normal food. My plan C was to take the girls to the mall or some other place nearby before we left to go out of town, but Felicity was really sick that whole week right up until we left with some weird GI thing. Sitting on Santa's lap just wasn't meant to be for them this year. I was a little disappointed because I really wanted to see Felicity's reaction to him.