Our yearly tradition with my grandparents....picking out the perfect tree at Tallahassee Nurseries! This has become one of our favorite 45 minutes of the year! The kids love it and I think my Grandparents do to. This is our wonderful Christmas present from them! The kids love getting hot apple cider in the nursery store and looking at the fish in the greenhouse.
Molly got to put the angel on the top of the tree this year because the big kids were fighting over it. The tree is decorated, the house is Christmas "fied" and John has put lights all over backyard...even the chickens have Christmas lights on their house!
John Daniel's favorite ornament
Molly's favorite ornament or so the big kids say....
Emily's favorite ornament
Emily was in this year's presentation of the Singing Christmas Tree at our church. The children's ensemble made up of 9 kids were wonderful. They learned two songs/dances to perfection. They even got to wear individual headset microphones which thrilled Emily! My favorite up and coming Christian artist, Lukas Bracewell, sang and played guitar to O Holy Night which was a highlight and my cute Daddy sang and tapped his toes with delight in the tree the whole time! After Emily's THIRD performance we waited in a line for over an hour to see the Living Christmas Story done by a neighborhood church. The kids love riding through the scenes of "Bethlehem."
I let the kids both pick out a Christmas treat to make this week. This was Emily's pick...Rudolph cupcakes! I have to admit they are very cute! John Daniel picked a fruity smoothie that we will be doing tomorrow...go figure!
One of the best ideas I've had yet if I do say so myself....Emily wanted to have a craft "club"...she is always coming up with a new club to have friends over for. So I decided to host a craft and cookie swap playdate for each kid and their friends. Have I told you lately how much I love my kids' friends! They are very blessed with such sweet kids around them! One of the little girls told me today out of the blue, "Mrs. Gay, I like your Christmas tree. It is beautiful!" How sweet is that! The girls came over and each brought 12 cookies for the swap. They made a cute beaded snowman pin, ate a snack, drank hot cocoa, and swapped cookies. They each went home with a variety of cookies to share with their family! They had a really great time! John Daniel's craft day and cookie swap is Monday so we will see how that goes.....12 5 &6 year olds all doing a craft...It is an easy one so that is good!
The girls and their cookies!
Yes, I took a picture of Molly's feet! Thanks to one of my best friends, I found the best warm boots for my little Molly...they are fuzzy inside, soooo easy to get on and she is thrilled to be wearing them! It's the little things people! Oh and they were only $10!
Speaking of my sweet little Molly....our van has been in the shop for over a week with some weird electrical problem. The parking lights and tag lights wouldn't go off. They worked and worked on it for two days, thought it was several things, ordered parts (not it), called us wondering if we could give them clues to anything else weird going on....come to find out as a last ditch effort, the mechanic removed the CD player and when he disconnected it the entire electrical system of the car reset itself, he shook the player and out came 56 cents.....56 cents that Molly put down the CD player back in October....it was shorting out the whole system. It never even crossed our minds because the CD player has worked fine. You live and learn. So after over $300 in labor, we are thankful that we have our van back. I joked that Molly was getting a fixed van for Christmas...it might be true because I haven't bought a thing. We just couldn't go out and spend money the past few weeks on Christmas not knowing what our van would cost us. Now we are thankful that it wasn't an entire computer system or something like that. Plus, I've really ENJOYED the past few weeks. I've accomplished things that I really wanted to do with the kids like cooking, crafts, decorating, other holiday traditions and our Advent study. It has been fairly relaxing and peaceful around here. My Christmas cards are done and I'm about to address them. I thought about doing an email type card but I just love getting cards in the mail around Christmas and John told me he would rather have an actual card so that worked out! We took a really cute Christmas card photo that I'm not posting because I want it to be a surprise...the real surprise will be the 20 photos leading up to the good one...those are always a hoot....three kids, three chickens and one dog! I will have to post them on here later! We are off to Callaway Gardens this weekend to camp in the freezing cold and rain. I had to bribe John to get him to go again to see the lights but we are taking "first timers" with us so that should be fun! So Christmas shopping will be put off again until next week....I will be the one out there on Christmas Eve but I'm not the least bit worried....really I'm not! :)
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