"It's Lovely Weather for a Sleigh Ride Together..."

Well, unless you live in Virginia, where it's pouring down rain and 65º this evening.  Apparently, my husband is unimpressed in how long it's been since I updated our blog. So here we go.

We have been Christmassing all over the place the last few weeks. Thankfully, we've been more or less well, so that's been super nice!! Jeremy often gets Wednesday afternoons off, so we have done several things in the area that are probably really crowded on weekends, but not too bad in the middle of the week. We went to the Children's Museum in Portsmouth and saw a special show in the planetarium: "The Mystery of the Christmas Star." We were the only ones in the little theater, so that was helpful with a busy little Katy girl and Reilly's never-ending questions. That same day we took the kids to the Bass Pro Shop in Hampton to see their decorations and get free pictures with Santa, and we also saw a little collection of animatronic Christmas creatures a the Courthouse Galleries in Portsmouth, a few blocks from the museum. Here are pictures of the kids seeing Santa:

Kind of thinking Santa and Jaina both look a little creepy in this picture...

They did well, especially Katy. She was nervous, but didn't cry at all. She -loves- seeing pictures of Santa right now and will say "Santa!... Ho ho ho!" So cute. There were some free little games for the kids to play, and they liked looking at the fish in the big tank there.

Katy was WAY less impressed with Santa at the ward Christmas party last week. "Santa" was super nice, but it was already after her bedtime, and the throng of kids was pressing all around the little Santa stage. We had a nice dinner there that night and a good time, despite the late bedtime.

She was super-impressed with the rice krispy tree we let her have.

If only Reilly wasn't being a goofball, this would be a great picture of us!

Poor baby. Just not happening.

Jaina had a birthday - 4 years old! I posted a bunch of pictures on Facebook, so I won't repost most of them here. Here's the Facebook link. You should check it out. :) She's been looking forward to it for months, and hopefully it didn't disappoint. We had her choice of food for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, played games at Chuck E. Cheese, and had cake after that night. She was spoiled by her grandmas, grandpas, and parents. :)

I wanted to take a picture of the girls in their "Christmas dresses" with Jaina's new doll and its matching dress. (Poor Reilly. I promise he'll get new Easter clothes or something) Katy thought it was a terrible, awful, no-good, very bad idea. Here's kind of how the pictures went:

LOVE these crazy people.

Yesterday we worked hard pretty much the whole day making Christmas sugar cookies. Jaina's been asking for weeks, I think, and we finally took the plunge. It was a huge mess, but they had such a good time. Actually, there was still a mess when Jeremy got home, and for some reason I was feeling kind of awful and HE ended up cleaning up most of it. He's awesome. Hopefully we give away a few of these cookies, because my "Christmas diet" (try not to eat too terribly and work out a lot) does not need them. They turned out really yummy and fluffy. HERE is the recipe. :)

They did such a good job and were so proud!

I don't know why this is flipped. Some are to give  away,
and some are to keep. Can you see which are which? :)

Like I said, it poured down rain all afternoon here. Here is a fun little map from weather.com.  We don't even remotely have our hopes up. But that's okay, we're still super excited for Christmas in a few days!!

And here are a few more random pictures from the last few weeks:

One of those things that looks better on Pinterest...

Cause for celebration: I can finally finangle a tuft of Katy's hair into a tiny
rubber band to hold a bow in her hair. YAY!

Christmastime is here...

Even though it's a ridiculous 70º today (and our cooler keeps kicking on - it's set at 75º...) we are getting very excited for Christmas around here! I would say about 90% of our Christmas shopping is already done, all of our decorations are up, and I've put a few wrapped presents under the tree. Jeremy wonders what I'm going to do when everything is completely done and Christmas is still 2 weeks away. But it's only -3- weeks away right now. SO exciting!
Here is our little elf modeling the Santa hat that just barely fits her. It goes to a Christmassy outfit we got on clearance back before we even had Reilly. Maybe she can wear it the whole outfit to church on Christmas. :)

 Here's some of what we were up to Saturday. It was actually fairly cold that day, but Jeremy was still excited to put up lights on our balcony since we found out it -wasn't- against the rules, like we thought.

I still have several projects to work on. These horses I sort of started last year, hoping to get them done before Christmas. I realized it wasn't going to happen though (early Christmas Eve) and that R & J were already getting way too much as it was, so I put them off until this year. Of course now Katy is old enough that she would definitely feel slighted if she didn't have one too, so I'm just getting started on hers. Reilly's is almost done, except for a few finishing touches. Jaina's is getting there. I really need to get going on Katy's, and find a stick for it. We are enjoying December, though! :)