December Fun

We got to do some fun Christmas-y things in December. We went to the Palo Alto Creche display on night. It had been years since we'd gone and they've made it even cooler. They had an awesome marionette show program:

Dress-up area in the kids' room:

They had art from one of my favorite LDS artists--Brian Kershisnik:

That one was called Nice Words and I loved it.

They had a cool station where three different artists were painting a model dressed as Mary and you could sketch yourself or watch them. Elizabeth spent a long time sketching there:

Eli made this cute picture of our family:

They had an instagram room, too: :)

After being bribed to read the first book by his sisters, Nate recently discovered that he loves the Wings of Fire book series. Now he can often be found like this:

Who would have thought? He's almost finished the whole thing.

Joe and I got some authentic Chinese food one night. We were actually supposed to meet the Allreds but they got the dates mixed up so it was just us:

We had our ward Christmas breakfast and I only had one child that wanted to sit on Santa's lap! How did my kids get this old...

I went into Eli's class to help out with their holiday party:

I finally pulled the trigger on an idea I'd wanted to do for a while--a children raising money for children Christmas concert. I texted some friends and got a good response! The only challenge was fitting people in our house. I didn't want to make anyone else host and I really wanted to invite our neighbors and make it easy for them to come so we hosted. We ended up moving our furniture around and setting up as many chairs as we could. I still couldn't fit too many so we just invited a few neighbors and the people who were performing of our friends. I hope no one was offended. The Allreds asked if we could fundraise for their charity, which raises money for school fees for kids in Guatemala and I thought that was a great idea.

Here was our program:

We were missing the Ogden kids who performed and also Larissa Allred. It was great! The kids all did so well. The girls had played their Carol of the Bells duet at their piano recital and made some mistakes but they conquered it at this!

I was so glad we did it. We might have to make it an annual thing.