It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas

It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas:


On Sunday we went to our first party of the holiday season, the annual Gingerbread House Making Party at the house of some friends from college. There were 4 other little kids there so Alex and Chloe had a nice day of playing and Casey and I got to catch up with some grown up friends.



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On Tuesday we put up the Christmas tree and this year let the kids help with all the decorations instead of relegating them to the non-fragile ones. Of course they could only reach the lower half of the tree, so I decorated the upper half. They thought the tree was beautiful and were very enthusiastic about the ornaments especially ones with their names on them, or ones they’d made last year. The next morning the kids wanted the lights on the tree turned on as soon as they came downstairs and then we realized that it was snowing!

The rest of the day felt like playing hooky, even though we didn’t have anything scheduled, we just played hooky from daily life. The kids sat in front of the glass door for a while and just watched it snowing, and then Chloe wanted to make something Christmas-ee for breakfast and asked what we usually eat on Christmas. I told her about the egg casserole and the sticky buns. She didn’t like the idea of the eggs, but the rolls sounded good. The rolls we make on Christmas have yeast and take a long time to rise, but I remembered a recipe I made a long time ago that uses Bisquick. The kids stood on chairs next to the kitchen counter and helped me dump the ingredients into the bowl and then helped me roll out the dough and sprinkle on the cinnamon and sugar mixture and roll it up like a jelly roll. Alex said “I wuv making these rows (rolls)!”. While the rolls were baking the kids decided to move the kid sized plastic table into the den so they could look out the glass door at the snow while they ate their breakfast. When I made the icing for the rolls the kids insisted on putting food color in the icing.















After breakfast we bundled up and went out to play in the snow. They jumped on the trampoline with the snow for a while and then realized that the snow was just the right consistency for making snow balls and we had a pretty good snow ball fight with lots of giggling.


Then we made a mini-snow-girl (we decided it was a snow baby) with dried basil for hair.
Afterward we got the sleds out and they pulled each other around the yard and then went inside for hot chocolate and lunch.









By 3pm we had enough snow to cover the grass so we headed to the neighbor’s hill for some sledding. The kids rode the sleds by themselves and pulled the sleds up the hill by themselves, so all I had to do was stand at the top of the hill and hold the sleds still while they climbed in. The next day was a school day and after school the kids sang a song that they had learned. I’d never heard of it, but as we were driving home, we heard the song on the radio, it is called “Come on, ring those bells”. The picture below is a video of Chloe singing. Click the arrow to play.