Oh shoot, Christmas is flying in here quick and I’m starting to panic.  I like to have everything buttoned up well in advance.  I’m a planner, an analyzer, and a list maker.  But for some reason this year I’m just off pace!

A blizzard blew through here last week so of course I took a day off doing Christmas prep to hang with my kids. Snow days are the best!  Unless you have a billion things to do.  But this time we decorated gingerbread houses!  I loved every minute of it!  I’ve had these houses in storage at my sister’s since last year!  Ok that probably sounds really weird, but when you find these kits super cheap after Christmas, you snatch them up!  No one actually eats the house, so who cares how old it is!  Morgan made hers perfectly perfect in Christmas colors.  Jake’s was totally weird with gummy octopus, sour patch kids, and swedish fish! and Reece and Drew’s were super fun and bright.

I could’ve decorated all day and night but kids lose interest in arts and crafts after awhile and really just want to go sledding!

In the meantime, we also got all of our Christmas decorations up and it’s a Christmas wonderland around here now!  We added some lighted garland to our stairs this year and Brian (aka Clark Griswald) put up lights on the house.  We are in the Christmas spirit!The kids got their tree decorated downstairs, Morgan added lot’s of cute decorations to her room, and of course Reece has gotten a hold of the tape and added some Christmas stuff in her room too.  Santa, please bring me some tape.  Reece keeps using all of mine!We mailed our letters to the North Pole, made cute little bags, and left Bass Pro Shop with a new pair of PJ pants that are now permanently glued to Jake’s body, and an expensive pair of sunglasses. How did that happen!?  We just went in there to talk to Santa and mail our letters!!

Sparkles (our Elf), Snowflake (our reindeer pet), and Besler (our St. Bernard elf pet), have come to visit us again and Reece has been treating them so well!  She has made an entire habitat for them, given them gifts, and written them multiple notes!  All of this and they’ve only been here for 3 days!  There’s no way this girl is going to be on the naughty list…she is covering all of her bases!She read all of our elf books to us and made a promise (with her girl scout hand signal) to love and take care of our pets! 😉  Reece, you are rockin’ it this Christmas season!All the while, Morgan and I are learning how to be cookie decorators in our spare time!  It’s surprisingly fun and stress relieving and Morgan is a natural!  We’ve spent about our entire Christmas budget on supplies to try to whip some up ourselves from start to finish.  Yikes, we have a lot invested here, I hope we can pull this off!We also had the amazing opportunity to volunteer at the Children’s Mercy Leukemia & Lymphoma Holiday Party at Sporting Park.  Morgan worked for “Faces of Hope” to paint fun holiday designs on kids currently battling disease or within 3 years of remission.  Shauna and I worked at the ring toss and had so much fun!  These sweet kids and their families got to enjoy a fun-filled day with gifts, games, food, and so much more.  We left there with such happy hearts…this is what the season is truly about!

and bonus…Blue the SKC dog proposed to me at the ring toss 😉 and we got a tour of the locker room.  It’s such an awesome facility right here in KC!