Candy Trees

Last night, we made candy trees out of ice cream cones! We frosted the cones with green frosting and then the kids decorated them with all kinds of candy!

The kids did a good job!

Then came the best part; eating them!

This is definitely something we will do again next year. The kids had fun and could do it all buy themselves. The only thing I would change would be to use sugar cones instead of waffle cones. The waffle cones have a slanted top, and they were hard to get to stay upright until Zach had a genius idea to use mints to hold them up. So it all worked out! =0)

Grinch Night!

On Sunday night, we had our first (hopefully annual) Grinch night! I made Grinch cookies (mint cookies with Andes mints):

We also had Grinch punch. I colored some sugar, and put it on the rim of glasses:

And then poured the punch in. It's just lime sherbet and Sprite.

The kids were SO excited!

After everything was ready, we started "How the Grinch Stole Christmas"!

The kids called this night a success! =0)
(I got all of these ideas off of Pinterest, of course.)

Sugar Cookies!

One of the things on our Christmas Calendar was to make sugar cookies! On Monday, I made the dough while the kids were at school, then that night I let the kids help me roll out the dough and then we used cookie cutters to make lots of cute cookies!

On Tuesday, after school, I mixed up some (store bought) frosting with icing colors and then put those bowls & sprinkles on the table & let the kids go at it!

Some of the cookies had SO much frosting!! Some had SO many sprinkles or chocolate chips. But the kids had fun making them & loved eating them! =)

Getting Ready for Christmas

We actually decorated for Christmas last weekend, but I am just now getting the pictures up on the blog. There were a few fights, and Lily took sooooo long to put up the decorations that are only hers that she missed out on helping put up the "family" ones. So, she went down the basement stairs and pouted. So dramatic.... That lasted until she realized we still had candy canes to put up, so she was OK after that and helped out. So, overall, not too bad. :0)

I'm trying out a new idea this year for Christmas. I always have all of these ideas I want to do/make with the kids, but half of the time, I get to the 20th & I try to cram everything in and it is more stressful than fun (for me). So, this year, I decided to try to be more intentional with our time. I made a calendar and put at least one thing I wanted to do each day until Christmas. I used our regular calendar as a guide so I knew when to put small stuff. For example, on Sunday, we were in KC, so I just put read Christmas stories together. But later this week we are going to make sugar cookies and decorate them when I know we will have more time in the evening. Some of the other things we have listed are:
Watch the Grinch & make Grinch cookies & punch, make reindeer with hand & footprints, look at Christmas lights, make gingerbread houses, and I need to add a Nativity activity that I just found to the calendar, but there are lots more fun things on it! 
We are also doing acts of kindness throughout the month. We know that we are so blessed, and we try to show the kids how blessed they really are, so we hope this will help show them that Christmas isn't all about what they want, but that we need to help others and love one another. And of course, we have our Advent Wreath that we use every night. I am so excited for this season to begin!