“Mooey Dooey!”  That is Gracie’s way of saying Merry Christmas!  What a fun Christmas this year!  We had so much fun celebrating the birth of Jesus as we gathered with the church Sunday morning for a time of worship and then as we opened gifts later that afternoon.  Here are some pictures from this wonderful day!

Here is Gracie doing her “Happy Christmas Dance” before church.

Gracie posing in front of the Christmas tree wearing Daddy’s tie.

And now for the presents…

Gracie “helping” Daddy open his present.

The Mickey and Minnie Gracie painted for us.

Now that the presents are done and Christmas is over we are focusing on New Year’s Eve, the day we will celebrate our sweet new baby into this world!  We hope you had a blessed Christmas and have a happy new year!

Well, we have officially adopted a new tradition for Christmas Eve, acting out the nativity scene with our children.  Thanks to our friend Natalie for the adorable idea, we decided to transform our little sitting room into a manger, complete with baby Jesus, animals, Mary (Minnie) and Joesph (Mickey), and the most adorable shepherd I’ve ever seen!  We had a blast watching her interact with baby Jesus (wrapping him in his blanket, rocking him, giving him kisses) and determined we would make this a tradition each year.  We hope you enjoy the pictures and we hope you have a blessed Christmas!

So, the marshmallow creations started out sweet and innocent enough.  We had been talking about how God had created all of the animals and so this little craft was a fun way to bring the story to ‘life’.  So, here you see we made this adorable little elephant….

…and sweet little piggy…

…and their buddies, little bear and Mr. giraffe. And then….out of nowhere……came….

..The Marshmallow Monster!!!

And after a cynical monster laugh, the monster proceeded to destroy all of the sweet baby animals, one by one, until all that remained was….

the monster.

Victorious.

Christmas is definitely our favorite holiday! This year our Christmas tree went up before Thanksgiving and we have already done our Christmas shopping, completed four Christmas puzzles, and watched several of our favorite Christmas movies.  It has been fun decorating the house this year, but not much fun keeping Gracie from touching everything.   We did let her help unpack the ornaments and decorate the Christmas tree. She loved to look at all of the ornaments and decide where they should go (of course the Mickey Mouse ornaments were her favorite!) *By the way, that is marker on her face – we got a little out of control that morning with our coloring*
After decorating the tree we had some fun family time dancing to Christmas music and playing with Gracie.
My attempt at a Christmas centerpiece.

Another Christmas craft that I attempted this year was the no-sew ruffle tree skirt my sister found on Pinterest.   Thanks to Nicole’s belief in my ability to do this craft, I actually finished it!  It only required $8 in fabric, a lot of hot glue, and quite a bit of time to finish, but I do actually love the way it turned out! (in the pictures above you can see what it looked like before I refashioned it)

Another thing that has made December so much fun is watching Gracie do the advent calendar I made for her.  I made  a scavenger hunt advent game with numbered tags from 1 to 24.  On the backs of the tags I put pictures of items in our house that she knows well.  Her present for the day is hidden in the item pictured on the tag.   She is so cute as she finds the correct number on the tag (with our help), looks at the picture, and then throws the tag down and runs full speed to find her present.  In this case her present was hidden in her mickey mouse clubhouse toy.  She got a baby bottle ($1 at the dollar store) which she loved as you can tell.

I praise God for this time to celebrate Christ’s birth with my precious family!  Soon we will be celebrating the birth of Silas – crazy!!!  God Bless!