the stockings are hung...

...by our chimney with care, and excitement about Jesus's birthday is definitely in the air!

where have we been...

-trying to stay toasty and warm! (it's a frigid 2 degrees outside...and the wind chill puts it somewhere in the negatives...our poor little heat pump just can't keep up....so we are bundled up and snuggling under blankets...reading books, watching Christmas shows, listening to music...and so on)

-putting on the finishing touches on a few Christmas projects...the girls' dolls now have faces embroidered on, the bean bags are stitched up, and i just have to finish creating a fun CD to go with the bean-bags....hopefully i can accomplish that during naptime today. pictures to come soon...i promise!

-Christmas partying...we attended our Sunday school class party as a family...and for the other, hosted by one of Mike's co-workers, we actually hired a sitter (yes...this is just the second time we've ever actually "hired" and paid someone to watch our kiddos...and no, that doesn't mean we've only left our children twice...just that we have incredible and generous friends and family who love our children!).

-baking cookies....and a cookie exchange at our final MOPS meeting of the semester. i plan to whip up some red velvet Christmas cookies for mike to take to the office tomorrow, and on Christmas eve we will be making sugar cookies with our nativity cut-out set mike's mom gave the girls...but otherwise all the cookies are baked and in the freezer...

-elizabeth is completely enthralled by this movie...the very first noel....so we've been snuggling up underneath blankets, watching, and then singing the songs together....

-making snowflakes and snowmen, stamping, sorting, and singing...any guess what last week's letter was!?

-and so much more...i promise to actually upload the myriad of photos on my camera and sit down to blog later this afternoon or tomorrow....depending on how much i get done in the next little while!

for now though, i am off to make a tiger craft with elizabeth (surely you already guessed that last week was S week...so now we are on to T...elizabeth is cuddling up with her turtle and tyrannosaurus at night and naptime...and we're looking forward to a week of tickles, turtles, tigers, tinsel, and tremendous times!).