Let the Christmas fun begin!

December is here and I am as excited as a Emery! I love this time of the year and I love all the craziness that comes with it. The first two weeks of December started off with a bang. This year we did something different then our yearly sub for santa this year. I love the book called "Christmas Jar" and did a little version for our family. During November we saved all of our change and added in extra dollars for any extra chores or service done. Then during the first week of December we counted up all the money and took that to Walmart for the kids to buy some toys for the toys for tots. They kids had fun buying the toys, but Emery had a hard time with the concept of giving the present away and not getting to keep it. I love looking for new traditions and this is one that I think we will keep but start a little earlier than November.

We also love doing the 12 days of Christmas and did this different too. Our ward did a wonderful Relief Society meeting about random acts of kindness and the meaning of Christmas. Well those awesome ladies in the Relief Society presidency came up with a cool idea of doing the 12 days of RACK or random acts of kindess. The kids were excited to do this and so far we have been doing Okay. One day was just complementing someone of holding the door open to taking cookies to a fireman. Along with this we did the 12 days of Christmas to our niece who is out on a mission so the kids had fun helping me wrap and send that package off to her.

Tyler also advanced a rank in boys scouts along with his best friend Carter

While shopping for Ashley's 12 days of Christmas we got to see Santa at Walmart. No christmas is complete without seeing Santa sitting on his throne of Diet Coke. A dream come true for this diet coke drinker!

Over the first weekend of December we had our first Christmas party which was our Ward Christmas party. Ryan was gone that weekend so it was just me and the kids. As always we had a great time and the kids loved the table decorations and couldn't stop playing with them all night!

Emery has had more fun with our annoying musical Christmas decorations that anyone else and making dad tear his hair out!

Dec. 7th brought the kids annual Grandma Carolee's Gingerbread house party! This kids had a ball eating pizza, decorating their houses and gingerbread trees, along with a talen show and then off to see the Spanish Fork Lights. It was a busy night but a fun one. Treven even wrote about this party in his class and reported all the fun things we did! The talent show rocked with all the kids singing, Luke doing fart noises to Christmas music, Treven sang a song from his school program, and even Emery sang her jingle bell song.

 Emery has had so much energy lately that I feel she is like the energizer bunny more than Treven, so I love our down time together! I am lucky she still takes 2 to 3 hour naps in the afternoon. Like I said Emery has loved all our singing Christmas toys and dad has tried to make sure they don't make it passed this year by telling skip to chew on them or hiding them, so now Emery has to Hide when she plays with them.

Treven had a school Christmas program and it was great, the only problem was we had to sit way in the back and he was on the front row making it hard to see him, but I snag a cute picture of him and Carson. When we got home he did a little concert for us and it made up for not seeing him well at the program.

Grandma and Grandpa Averett we of course in attendance for his grand preformance.