Getting ready...

We are completely ready for Christmas in our home.

My holiday recital is over and done with... a great success that exceeded my expectations.

The house is decorated with all sorts of Christmas crafts made by the girls.

The ground is blanketed with an excess of snow, guaranteeing it to be a white Christmas this year.

The cabinet is adorned with photo Christmas cards that have trickled in daily from family and friends, a mosaic of familiar faces.

We've read the nativity story several times and re-enacted it with little figurines, only breaking one wise man in the process.

The Christmas baking is done. Turtle pretzels, cut-out cookies and gingerbread cookies are stored and ready to be assembled into gift boxes. (The cheesecake brownies unfortunately didn't last long enough to be shared with others!)

The gift wrapping is done and packages have safely arrived at their destinations (WI and FL.) Our own gifts, except those from Santa, are arranged nicely under the tree, a colorful assortment of green, red and blue packages.

Amanda's "fancy dress" and tights are laid out for tomorrow's surprise trip to see The Nutcracker, a special mother/daughter date that will hopefully become a tradition.

The food for our Christmas Eve dinner is bought, with a menu of citrus scallops, angel hair pasta and green beans with prosciutto. The food for two other Christmas celebrations awaits preparation (buffalo chicken dip for one party; French dip sandwiches and slow-cooked pork roast for another.)

The girls are sound asleep in their beds and hopefully having sweet dreams after a busy day of sledding with Daddy and a family dinner at Poopsie's.

The house is quiet.

The silence is welcome.

The air is bursting with anticipation.

It's going to be a good Christmas for the Lindsay family - celebrating the birth of Jesus, and five weeks later celebrating the birth of our own baby.

These are the times to remember.

Here are some photos/videos of our activities the past few weeks.

Fascinated by the nutcrackers

Christmas dresses


The girls love to play with the Nativity set, but after this scene, we're down to just two Wise Men.

Making cut-out cookies

Decorating the cookies

Painting Christmas trees

Merry Christmas to all of you! Hope you are busy making Christmas memories of your own.

A gingerbread campground?

Yesterday the girls and I attempted to make gingerbread houses out of graham crackers. We did it last year and they were eagerly anticipating another shot at it.

It all started well. We had everything set up and ready to go: walls, roof, "glue", and a wide assortment of decorations like marshmallows, gumdrops, raisins, popcorn and M&M's.

But whereas last year we used white frosting as glue, this time I decided to try something more festive - green and red frosting. This was a huge mistake because the consistency was more like decorating gel than frosting and had no adhesive quality to it!

The walls are up and things are looking good.

Right after this picture is when things went horribly wrong.

As I gently placed the roof on the first structure, a wall collapsed. Then the entire roof collapsed.

Before we knew it, we had a bunch of frosting-covered graham crackers, all lying in a rubble heap.

But after assessing the situation, we quickly turned lemons into lemonade. I declared one of our "buildings" a tent and Amanda named the other one a cottage.

The girls then proceeded to gleefully decorate them as if this is what we had intended to make all along.

The end result

A few hours later, the demolition crew came in... and happily devoured the entire North Pole campground.

First Snow

We had our first dusting of snow overnight. Even though it was just enough to give the grass a frosted look, it caused quite a bit of excitement around our house this morning! When I promised they could play outside after breakfast, the girls rushed to find snowpants, hats, mittens, etc. Amanda declared,"I'm going to make a snow angel!"

And a short video...

December?

I can't believe it's December already! And with today's temperature of 64*, it's even harder to convince myself that Christmas is just around the corner! If this keeps up, a white Christmas seems doubtful.

We got our Christmas tree this past weekend, although we haven't yet decorated it. The kids have been asking daily if it's time to put the ornaments on yet. We have promised them that we will do it on Saturday but to tide them over until then, they painted their own Christmas trees this morning.

These girls would paint for hours if I let them! I'm kicking myself for not buying art smocks for them, but my shopping is done.

Here are their festive works of art: