More Christmas Events

Last Thursday was full of Christmas events for us. I have pictures from a couple of these events, but will just have to describe the rest in painful detail. ;-)

To start off, Joel had his class Christmas party! Steve and I were both able to go, and it was fun to watch the 3/4-year-olds interacting with each other and all of the parents. (At least I thought it was.) The party started off with one of the moms reading "Twas the Night Before Christmas". I forgot my camera, so I asked one of the other moms to take this picture for me. Joel and the little girl beside him are sitting literally side by side.


After the story, the kids ate pizza and then decorated gingerbread men. Joel had fun decorating, but his main concern was whether or not he could eat it, too. He did eat it after he was done decorating.


Then we had the book exchange. All of the kids were very excited about this part, as you might imagine. My son, however, has a gift-opening problem. He likes to complain about the gift first. After a while he usually decides that he really likes it, though. That is what happened here. He got upset once he opened it about 1/4 of the way. He finished it later and decided that it was a neat book. His teacher read it to him that afternoon, and we read it again last night. It's a really nice book called "Dinosaur Detective".


We had a little break and then it was time for Evan's party. Unfortunately, I fell asleep during our little break and was a little late to the party. And I forgot the camera again. It was kind of crazy in the room and the kids were just eating and playing with their treat bags by the time I got there, so pictures weren't really necessary after all.

We went to Chick-fil-a for an early dinner and for the event that I had been waiting for -

pictures with SANTA COW!!!


I let the boys have their ice cream after the pictures. It worked pretty well, except that while they were eating ice cream ...


an ELF COW came out, too! Of course, we had to get more pictures!

After Chick-fil-a, we drove around for a little while looking at lights. There are a couple of really cool houses around us, so we went to them. The first one we went to had a lot of neon lights. Santa and Mrs. Claus come out there, too, but apparently we were too early to see them.

The next stop on our trip was a house that has lights synchronized to music. We tried to go a couple of years ago, but could only stay a minute or so. For some reason, this display scared the boys that year. This year there were projection screens set up, too, and part of the "show" was a video of Mr. and Mrs. Claus traveling from the North Pole, across the United States, to Hollywood to be on "Dancing with the Stars" - where they performed beautifully, by the way. The boys really enjoyed it, so I was glad that we went by this year. Of course, we also saw several yard and house displays as we were driving around, and the boys liked that, too.

It's hard to believe that Christmas day is less than a week away! We are enjoying our vacations from school and work, so far. We hope that you are all enjoying the season as well!