Christmas 2017

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CHRISTMAS

We had a lovely Christmas. It was low-key. In years past I have gone ALL OUT and wrapped lots of presents, stuffed the stockings, baked lots of cookies, and done every Christmas-y activity I could think of and possibly fit in the schedule. I even have two little Christmas Mice who skitter about the house in the night and set up fun activities for the kids or give suggestions for things they can do to spread love and kindness at Christmas time.

This year I did very little of all that. The Christmas Mice got up to a few things but most days they hid in the tree. I wrapped some presents with the kids because they thought it was fun to wrap the little gifts they picked out for each other. Most things, however, got wrapped in Trader Joe's paper bags. Well, they were printed with snowflakes, so they were almost just like Christmas wrapping. The kids and I made Shea butter soaps as presents for friends and family and my husband drew the label for the soaps based off the kids' requests.

Mister 4 also made "squeezies" (balloons filled with flour) to give to the men in the family since giving soap seemed a little "girly". Both the soap and squeezies were well received so that was fun! Also Miss 7 no longer believes in Santa so now she IS Santa! And she loves it. We had fun after her siblings went to sleep filling up the stockings :). She still had a few surprises in stockings that I snuck in there later though.

LEGO

We checked out so many Lego Idea books this year that for Christmas we bought the kids a giant Lego Idea book to share. It even has a timer they can use to diffuse their own arguments about special pieces!

Santa put small Lego kits in the stockings for everyone and I bought Lego base plates. Mister 4 is using his entire plate as a house.

OVERCOOKED

My husband uses Steam for video games and occasionally we find games that are good for the whole family. Just yesterday we tried out Overcooked, a cooperative (I LOVE cooperative games!) game where you try to cook dishes for customers and you have to divide the work to be efficient.

Also, your kitchen can catch fire if you leave food on the stove too long. Life lessons. In harder levels the counters slide across the floor and you can be pushed into a moat.

FABLES

We have finished the entire Imaginary Veterinary series - much to the dismay of Mister 4. He asked if we could re-read the series again. I told him we would but not right away because we have other things to read! We will likely read it again next year.

For Christmas, Miss 7 received the Usborne Illustrated Book of Fables Around the World. And we've been reading one fable each night. We also read a page out of The Book of Dragons and Other Mythical Beasts and a couple chapters from Dragon's Milk. Soon, I hope to start reading D'Aulaire's Book of Trolls when we finish one of the other books.

And that's all we are doing lately.