December 2015

The first weekend in December we carried on the tradition of making gingerbread houses.  This year we decided to make two houses instead of one.  One for each kid.  It worked SO well.  They have such different decorating styles and last time we tried to do it together Van just kept getting frustrated with Brielle so having their own was great:)

I absolutely love this tradition.  It's so fun to watch the kids concentrate and be creative.  

This girl (in her dance leotard:) was so into it!  She sat like this and worked on her house for well over and hour.  She totally would have kept going too but we ran out of candy:)

The finished products.

One day Brielle was drawing and she drew our whole family.  I thought the difference between her drawing of me and her drawing of Brian was hilarious.

Me....

Brian..... ha!!!

We went to the Alpine living nativity again this year.  It was a great night.

He held my hand!!! Love my big boy:)

Brielle had a little dance showase this month which was so fun.  It was just during her regular dance time and the parents were invited into the studio to  watch a little performance.  Brielle was so excited about it beforehand but got really nervous once we got there. 

At one point she stopped dancing and ran over to me and wrapped herself around my leg.  She finished strong though:)

One day my boys dressed exactly alike for school.  I had to take a picture and I got the bonus of a cute little photo bomber in the back:)

We have had so much snow this year!  We are all loving it.  One day when Brian had to work late the kids and I played in it until it was too dark to see anymore.

Both kids were so into buying/making/wrapping presents this year.  

We rode the train up to temple square again this year.  Pretty sure the kids would have thought it was the best night of their lives if we had just ridden the train up to Ogden and back without going to temple square:)

Scott and Shauna met us there.

The two Asian (or part Asian:) girls in front of Brielle's favorite Japanese nativity.

Christmas Sunday.  Believe it or not this was the best of about 30 pictures I took.


Christmas Eve!!
The boys spent much of Christmas break building snow tunnel.  Brielle sporadically got bundled up to help.

Making cookies for Santa.  It's a great coincidence that Santa's favorite cookies happen to also be Brian's favorite:)

We tried to get a pic in front of the tree and it morphed into a wrestling match.  Oh well!


We used our little people nativity to "act" out the story of Christ's birth.  We have done this several years and it works well when we don't have enough people to act it out ourselves.

spreading reindeer food.  We actually have a lot of deer that wander our neighborhood every night so we pointed some out to the kids the next day and they were SO excited thinking it was from Santa's reindeer.

Cookies, milk, and a note from Van.  All waiting for Santa;)

Christmas Day!

We didn't get many pictures of opening presents but we did get this one.  This was the one that had the first clue to a treasure hunt in it.  Van was SO into the hunt and Brielle just followed behind excited because he was;)






At the end of the treasure hunt they found this!  It has gotten hours and hours of use this winter so far.

After presents and a delicous french toast breakfast we decided to take advantage of the 6 inches of new snow that had fallen that night and go sledding.  Since Van got us all up at 5:30 we were out there by 9 and were the only ones on the hill for most of time.




Right before Christmas I finally bought Brielle proper gloves and guess what?  She finally like the snow!  She loved the sledding and was making snow angels and playing and playing.  She doesn't have near the stamina Van has (that kid plays for hours and hours in the snow) but she has pretty much matched his enthusiasm now:)


We spent the rest of Christmas day packing to leave for Idaho the next day....