Some final Christmas photos.

I started this post over three weeks ago, and right now it just sits in my draft folder, wordless. I know there were several things I wanted to say. Oops. Hopefully the pictures will remind me what that was. Anyway. 

We have/had a big Christmas themed Sesame Street coloring book that my kids went nuts over! And of course, I couldn't throw any of their masterpieces away, so if I mailed you one or two (or six) that's why. I thought it was pretty genius, having other people throw away my junk for me -- all the while my kids thought they were doing something nice for their family members. Ha! 

There were two big takeaways from the great colorfest. One, Nell loves putting one random scribble on all of Reid's pages. It was quite annoying, as it almost always made him cry and I had asked her repeatedly to stop. She started getting time outs each time she did it, but even that didn't seem to stop the pattern. In fact, just the other day we were coloring and she did it again. What a little terror (adorable terror, but terror nonetheless). Do you see the pink streak at the bottom of Big Bird's rug? That's Nell's signature scribble on Reid's page. The second pattern I noticed was that Reid just couldn't completely finish any pages. He'd come so close but decide to just leave one thing uncolored. "I'll finish it later," he'd say ... and then never revisit the page. Overall though, I was super impressed with his coloring. He was so focused and really improved his ability to stay in the lines. He always wanted to look at the cover of the book so he picked just the right colors for each character. He called this "quality coloring" and told me coloring was good practice for the tiny muscles in his hands. I'll say it again, preschool has been so good for that little boy! 

This pictures is just a shot I got of Ben and Coraline at Reid's school program. She's been so lovey lately, and the two of them have had a lot of special time together during and since the holidays. She makes the flirties eyes, and mostly reserves them for him. Each morning she spends a good five minutes batting her baby blues at him. It is adorable.

And thinking about Reid's program, I'm suddenly remembering we sang one of the songs for weeks. Weeks. We didn't get it on video, but it was hilarious. "Christmas cookies, Christmas cookies, yum, yum, yum! yum, yum, yum! I love Christmas cookies, I love Christmas cookies, in my tum, in my tum." I don't know why, but it was so cute to watch all the kids act that one out, rubbing and patting their little tummies. And I think that might have been the one song Reid yelled. I don't know, but I do remember there was one song where you could clearly hear him over all the other kids. Either way, we were shouting Christmas cookies loud and proud at our house. 

We were also loving all our Christmas cards. I felt bad we didn't send any, I even had 25 free ones (plus free shipping), and still never got around to making them. Next year we'll do better, because we loved, loved seeing all our dearest family and friends each time we sat down for a meal. 

We did not have a white Christmas, and I was totally okay with that. I knew the snow would show up eventually and I was right. It came just before the New Year. The kids were in heaven. I even made them a little sledding hill out front.  

Playing after the first snowstorm

And if there was anything else about our break or our holiday that I wanted to remember, it is forgotten by now. So there you go. The End.

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For the sake of journaling, here I am 5 months later (May 18th) adding a few more pictures. When I started this post I meant to get some photos off our camera, but I forgot and only included phone photos. So, here are the a few from our rarely used SD card camera. 

This was the first year that I've put out my childhood (Avon) nativity since we've had kids. They were pretty good and no pieces were broken. Even though they regularly matched up all the pieces with their Fisher Price nativity. I love how much my children got into the nativity scene and the birth of Jesus. True meaning of Christmas.

And here are the photos we tried to take on the Sunday before Christmas. One day we'll get a good photo. One day.