Travelers from the West

My fam came into town for Christmas - well a week early, but we still did lots of fun Christmas stuff. Right before we picked them up, Claire had her Christmas concert at school (actually, the school calls it the "Holiday Sing" - very PC of them). I was trying so hard to take videos and pictures and at the same time keep Ava quiet and Cole from playing the huge xylophones right next to us that I hardly got to enjoy Claire's class's performance. Such is life, I guess.

Then, after my family got here Cole had his preschool Christmas program. We all got to go, which was great. I was really glad my parents got to see it. Although Cole was not the most cooperative with me there (much to the surprise of his teacher since according to her he usually is "absolutely perfect" in class), it made for a funny performance which is always good for home movies!

We also went to go see Santa at the Bayshore mall and afterwards went on a sleigh ride (it's an outdoor mall - Santa, luckily, was indoors though).

Cole asked me to take this picture. He told me he was trying to look cool:

The kids right before us were so cute with their "Santa letters" in hand that I had to take a picture. They had been looking over their letters the whole time they were in line - it was really adorable.

So here's our official Santa shot. I also made a collage of the other shots I took. Lucky Maddy was there to hold Ava - I don't know if she ever would have put up with being on Santa's lap alone!

I, of course, had to take pictures while we were eating dinner afterwards.

We then had to kill time before our sleigh ride, so we hung out at Barnes and Noble.


(Cole doing another "cool" pose)



Another fun Christmas thing we did was Maddy, Cole and I made gingerbread houses at home (ok, I mostly made it - Cole and Maddy ate the frosting and the candy) while Grandma and Grandpa went to Claire's school to make gingerbread houses with her class. I realized I never really took a picture of the gingerbread house we made, but I did get a picture of Maddy with her frosting goatee and Cole doing...I don't really know what he's doing in this picture, actually, or why for that matter.

The last day they were here we went sledding, which was actually really fun. Believe it or not, we've actually never gone sledding since we've lived here, so the kids were ecstatic about the idea. None of the grown-ups were nearly as excited as the kids were to go, but we all ended up enjoying ourselves. I was proud of Claire - she was the first one to go down the hill and she didn't even want anyone to go with her. Cole loved it, too, and even Ava thought it was a blast! She kept wanting to crawl down the hill in the snow - it was really cute to watch her try.

We ended the sledding trip with a snowball fight - ok, by 'we' I basically mean the kids and Grant and my dad. My mom and I mostly just watched safely out of the way! We had so much fun with them here. I wish we could live closer!