Christmas Lights & Santa

Saturday night, we headed out with our hot chocolate to look at Christmas lights.
It is one of the things we do every year with the kids.

We started out at our favorite place; The Lights on St. Paul.
You drive through and look at all of the pretty lights while listening to music.
The kids love this place!

Then we went inside the building and saw Santa!!!
Lily was super excited about seeing him.

Riley is such a hugger. =)

While the kids were eating their candy canes from Santa, we headed to see more lights.

This house's lights were set to music you could listen to on your radio. It was really cool

This house was bright!

It was crazy how many lights were here on this one house.

The kids thought it was cool.

It will definitely be on our list to see again next year. =)

We had a lot of fun looking at lights again this year!!

Advent Calendars

I wanted to get the kids Advent Calendars this year.
I actually wanted to get them last year, but waited so long that it seemed pointless to get them by the time I got around to looking for them.
Yep, that's the kind of mom I am.....very dedicated. ;-)
So this year, I decided to actually look for them in November.
I saw these CUTE calendars at Target the other day & grabbed all three designs.
This way each of the kids could have their own design!

I was going to look for some Wilton candy molds that were small so I could make chocolates that would fit in the tiny pockets.

When I told my sister Mary about this, she said that she had saved the molds from her kids' advent calendars from last year.

She brought them over & I started making candy!

I filled them with mini chocolate chips:

Then put them in the microwave, carefully watching them.

I pulled them out every 30 seconds or so & stirred up the chips.

Then the phone rang......

and apparently I am easily distracted.....

because suddenly I smelled something burning.......

(Sorry Mary!!)

Yeah.......

that's not good......

I then did what I probably should have done to begin with.

I melted the chocolate in a glass bowl.

Then I poured it into a baggie and cut the tip of the bag to squeeze the chocolate into the molds.

That's better. =)

Then I stuck them in the freezer.

When they were done, I immediately tried to pop them out.

Turns out that was not such a good idea either.

I broke a few molds.

Fortunately, my sister is very nice & will not hold this against me.

I doubt she will let me borrow anything from her anytime soon though. ;-)

Anyway....after letting the molds get a tiny bit warmer than frozen, I easily popped the rest of the chocolates out.....and repeated this process two more times.
(Only this time I didn't burn or break anything!)

Here are some of the cute chocolates:

Now I just need to wrap them & put them in their calendars before December 1st.

The kids were really excited to see their Advent Calendars & to choose which one they wanted.

(Surprisingly, none of them fought over them, they each chose a different one!!)

Although it was fun (once I got the hang of it) to make the chocolates myself, I think I will just buy tiny chocolates next year. =)