Scenes of Christmas

The last week has been a busy one-- full of shopping, crafting, wrapping, partying, baking-- all that good stuff.  Here are few scenes from the week...

I've been doing a little gift wrapping-- often with two "helpers".  Let's just say that rolls of paper, scissors, tape, a one year old, and a four year old are not a good combination.  But, we managed to get a few gifts wrapped and under the tree.  This year the boys get brown kraft paper, the girls get pretty red and white bird wrapping paper, and everyone gets ribbon.  Now I've just gotta find a few more boxes so that I can wrap the rest of the gifts!!

We did some card making this week.  Caleb made Christmas cards for all of his preschool buddies.  We started with a basic Christmas tree design-- but as soon as Doug and I got involved the designs started to become more elaborate and complex.  We kind of hijacked Caleb's card making party-- but he was pretty pumped about our designs.

My favorite was the moose.

I baked and decorated more gingerbread and sugar cookies.  I think I've set the bar too high with the decorating-- now Caleb only wants to eat "beautiful cookies"-- as he likes to call them.  But now that I think about it-- that might be a good problem to have..."Oops, I guess we don't have any beautiful cookies left... well, no more cookies for you!"

Poor Doug.  I'm pretty sure he's the only guy on the job site with "beautiful" cookies in his lunch.

Yesterday I attended Caleb's preschool Christmas party.  His class sang a few Christmas songs for the crowd.  For most of the songs Caleb had the "deer in the headlights" look on his face... until it was time to ring those bells.  Wow, those bells were certainly a-ringing...

Is it wrong of me to be thankful that those bells didn't come home with us?  Cause I sure am...

After dinner last night Doug and I decided to dart out to Ikea for a quick shopping trip with the kids.  Within minutes of leaving the house Caleb fell asleep in the car-- as I saw him sleeping in the backseat I thought to myself-- it's gonna be a looong night shopping with two sleepy kids.  We pulled into Ikea only to discover that their Midnight Madness event was on that evening-- and wow... was the place ever hopping.  Great.  Once we managed to find a parking spot, we braved the crowds and got our shopping done.  In the end the sleepy kids were happy-- probably because I brought them cookies to enjoy in the shopping cart.  And Doug and I managed to make it out of the store without experiencing too much distress.  And we are definitely the masters when it comes to the self checkout lane.  Just saying :)

And what were we shopping for... you might be wondering.  Well-- more plates and cutlery!!  Our old set is getting quite beat up-- and-- we need more place settings because we're going to have a whole lot of Christmas company.  My whole family is coming to our place for Christmas-- that means there will be 7 extra people at our house for a week!

Yup, more plates and cutlery will be needed.  And best of all-- it gave me an excuse to get new stuff :)