My kids are so excited because tomorrow we get to light the fourth candle on our Advent wreath and then the following day is Christmas Eve...can't believe it.
According to them the best part about lighting the Advent wreath is blowing out the candles after dinner. But now we are at the point where they ask every 2 minutes if they can blow out the candles yet. And tomorrow will be great because they each will have 2 candles to blow out. Sometimes life is fair after all.

We have started a new Advent tradition this year. A few years ago I bought a stocking for Jesus. I thought it would be fun to have this because, well, we are celebrating His birthday.


We have never done anything with it except to hang it with our other stockings, but this year, since Emma is almost 5, I thought we needed to do something special with it. After brainstorming with some friends, I decided to write down with the kids the good deeds they had done that day and then they put them in Jesus's stocking. The plan is to surprise the kids after Christmas Eve Mass with a piece of chocolate replacing each good deed. If you can't tell, I am pretty excited about this idea.


Last night I was putting the kids in bed and I told them that they need to go to sleep because when they wake up it will be three days until Christmas!! They both giggled and Emma happily yelled, "and then it will be 2 days, then 1, and then..."
And I then jumped in and yelled, "Santa comes!!!!"
Emma stopped and looked at me with a serious face and said: "Mommy, we have to be excited about Jesus. It is not just about Santa."
I told her that she was absolutely right and was so proud to be corrected by my little girl.




And yes, I know, my pictures for this post are random. But so is my life.

Merry Christmas!! (Almost) ;)

It's been a little while since I posted...so here are a few thoughts and stories to catch you up on our lives.

I can't believe that Christmas is two weeks away! When did this happen?!


We just got back from Memphis and we had a wonderful visit with Dan's family. The kids loved spending time with their grandparents and great-grandparents and they had so much fun playing with Uncle Pete and Uncle Matt!





Emma said that her favorite part of the trip was getting to play with Grammy's childhood baby doll, "Toodles".
My favorite part was having family time and having Dan with us for 4 days away from work. :)



On Sunday we decorated our tree and we brought out our nativity sets and Christmas books. I was so excited to decorate the house. While we were waiting for Dan to get home from LifeTeen, we cleaned up the living room, had bath time, baked cookies, and made hot chocolate. Finally Dan walked in the door and the craziness began, complete with Mickey Mouse singing "jingle bells" and Justin Bieber's "Santa Claus is coming to town." While decorating, Joshua cried because he couldn't eat the tree and garland. Kolbe cried because I dropped and broke one of his ornaments. And Emma cried because we had to hide baby Jesus until Christmas. She said passionately, "You can't hide Jesus! He needs to stay with his mommy!"
And for this reason we have multiple Nativity sets. One beautiful, but breakable one:



And two for the kids to play with:




Despite all of the tears, we had a lot of fun decorating and our living room looks beautiful.

Joshua is 6 months old today! Time is flying by. We are just starting to feed him rice cereal:








I think he likes it- it's hard to tell sometimes when there are a lot of little helpers. He isn't crawling yet, but according to Emma he is speaking. She said, "Mommy, Daddy! Joshua just said 'eeb', it is Spanish for 'eew'!" There you have it folks, our little baby prodigy!

And this concludes my update for the evening. Good night.

Ha


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