Pre-Christmas Recap

I'm pretty far behind on posting but wanted to do a quick recap on the weeks leading up to Christmas.

Zach is starting to understand Christmas better. His favorite Christmas song was Jingle Bells and he loved watching "Mickey's Christmas Carol" and a Christmas Classics sing a long DVD. Zach learned that the answer to the question "what is Christmas?" is that it is "Jesus' birthday". When we asked him how Santa laughs, he'd put his hands on his belly, scrunch up his face, then bounce and say "ho ho ho". When we asked him what he wanted from Santa, his answer was always "candy!" Zach had fun playing under the Christmas tree and with the child-friendly nativity sets. A generic Lego nativity play set got the most use. Most nativities come with a camel, donkey and sheep so Zach loved all the extra animals to play with.

Zach was super excited to see Santa at our ward Christmas party up until it was his turn to sit on Santa's lap; then he is scared for his life.

One afternoon I got out the markers and paints and let Zach go to town making Christmas cards. He was pretty excited to use "big boy" art supplies. Caleb hates to be left out of the action so he contentedly hung out at the table with us.

The masterpieces:

What kept me busy for the first half of December was planning and carrying out a big Relief Society Christmas party. I'm the RS Activities coordinator and learned from this that I need to get better at convincing my committee to help with the big stuff or I end up doing too much on my own. We had a program with Christmas carols, a service angel tree, a hot chocolate and wassail bar, as well as a table full of Christmas goodies people brought. With all the work that went into the party it was a big relief that it went pretty well. I didn't get many pictures of this event but here's one of the hot chocolate bar.

Zach enjoyed helping use the leftover chocolate-dipped serving spoons.

Since we were flying to Colorado we opened up about half our presents early. Jamon and Jean invited us to have an early Christmas over at there house complete with a Christmas dinner.

Trying to pack lightly for 2 babies for 2 weeks during winter time was no easy feat. As evidenced by our two previous diapers bags I am not a light packer. I hate getting someplace and not having something I need or want. To combat this with packing for trips I need to make checklists so we mostly have only the essentials. Zach likes empty suitcases so he and his animals can hang out inside so packing mostly happened after bedtime.