Christmas 2013

I love Christmas with kids. It was so fun having two girls to celebrate with.
 

We kicked off the season with our two big event. We started our advent calendar countdown and the Elf came to visit our house! Ella was so excited to see the little guy and he filled the month with all sorts of craziness. He turned our milk green, made snow angels on the floor, brought us a puzzle to do, toilet papered the bathroom and all sorts of other things!

Our advent calendar was another thing we looked forward to each day! We had something fun to do each day as we counted down the days to Christmas.

The first day of December we had new Christmas jammies to open so we could wear them all month.

We had our ward Christmas party where Santa came to visit! Ella was so excited to visit him and give him the letter she wrote. She was so funny when I told her we could write Santa a letter. She said, "Okay I'll write him an "H" because I'm really good at those." She cracks me up!

We made our annual gingerbread man house. Of course things got too crazy and I forgot to take a picture of the end result. It wasn't anything too spectacular because I think the majority of the candy was eaten before it made it on the house.

Another activity was having a sleepover by the Christmas tree. We got our blankets and pillows all ready. And tried and tried to sleep. But it wasn't happening so after a little bit we gave up and each went to our beds. We had fun though.

We got cute matching Christmas dresses! And of course I wanted to snap a quick picture before church.

 I think the pictures speak for themselves of how that went...

On Christmas Eve we started a new tradition of having the girls give each other the gifts they had shopped for for each other. I loved this idea of doing their gifts early so the gifts were special and stood out.

Later in the day we went to my parents house for a yummy dinner and to decorate sugar cookies.

Then it was time to go home, put on jammies, set out some cookies for Santa and wait for the big guy to come!

Which luckily he did!

Christmas morning was so fun! They were both so excited about everything and had so much fun opening presents.

As you can tell by the aftermath of the morning. Such a fun day!

We then did our typical mad dash across the valley. Starting with Danny's parents for breakfast, my grandma's for lunch and a visit to Danny's grandma's for snacks later.

It was a great Christmas season and I loved having my little family to celebrate with!