A Pintrest Christmas, Part 3

For years, I've wanted to get my Grandma one of these fabulous personalized cake pans from the Cake Pan Lady. Granny cooks A LOT and is always bringing one thing or another for this or than potluck. She's also often losing containers. But I put it off because the cake pan lady is a bit pricey!

Fast forward to this fall and I found a great idea for etching your own glass. I have a Cricut Cutting Machine and thought, "huh, I can do this." Thinking through my gift list, I figured a lot of my family actually cooks for parties and potlucks and away I went. I simply bought some nice glass containers with lids on them. I then cut out thier names using my Cricut Machine and vinyl material. I stuck the vinyl to the side of the glass, and then applied etching cream to the name stencil. Wait 2 or 3 minutes, wash it off, remove the vinyl stencil and wah lah! I loved how it turned out. Not perfect (getting my sisters FULL name straight turned out to a bit challenging on a round bowl...) but nice!

Christmas Morning and Santa's Footprints

When I was about six years old I started catching on to the fact that Santa wasn't real. I'm not sure how I came to that conclusion, but I asked my Dad, and being my dad, he told me the truth. And I was fine with that harsh reality. As long as I still got the presents. Of course I went to school and shared it with my friends. My cousin Michelle's mother still hasn't forgiven me for killing the Christmas innocents in thier home (sorry Linda!) In light of that information, and in light of the fact that my oldest has been (so far) much like her mother, I figure we have, at most, another year or two of Magical Santa Belief. So we lived it up this year! We throughly enjoyed the starry eyed wonder all morning long!

Isabelle came downstairs in the middle of the night, jumped in bed and said, "Mom, Sants came! He left presents and footprints all over the living room!



I had cut out my own shoe print on a piece of paper and mixed flour and glitter and sifted onto the foot cutout all over the living room. Clever, right? Well, I am original, you know.



Along with eating all of our biscotti (we wanted to leave something unique for santa) and milk. Santa left a note for the girls. He also marked the packages with special North Pole Delivery Tags. How cool is Santa? Thankfully, no one noted that the wrapping paper was the same that Mommy used on all of our gifts to our family. Shew!



MY favorite gifts that we Santa got for them were these pesonalized plates from etsy. You design one to look like your child. I also got one for Abby and Jack. I love love love them. Grace was all like, "ahh..whatever...next." And Isabelle was all like, "Ahhh Braids! I don't wear braids, anymore! I wear ponytails. ONLY ponytails!" Oh well. They'll appreciate it when they're older. Hopefully. And you gotta love the "reality television" looks we were getting that morning. If they weren't small children I would describe these pictures as "hung over."



A good time was had by all and caos ensued!

Christmas Eve

As is our Christmas tradition, we traveled north to my family's home and had several more family Christmas parties. My kids were in wrapping paper clouds of joy, as they piled up gifts, opened presents, and ohh and ahhed over toys and clothes. Isabelle got a dog that barks and whines whenever you pass it and it's almost better than a real dog (or BETTER, depending on who you ask!) And Grace got a rupunzel dress and long flowing blond wig. It's kinda cute, but mostly creepy. No matter, she loves it.

We just had fun hanging out with our famiy, giving the gifts we had searched long and hard to buy or make, and eating yummy Christmas food. I snuck roughly fifty percent of the presents away before they were looked at and hid them in our closet (good thing Isabelle doensn't yet read). Hope all you gift givers are okay with this. We will go ahead and get out one at a time, in the next few months, so they can really enjoy each one. Love you all!

A Pintrest Christmas, Part 2

I saw this great idea on pintrest of hosting a scarf making party. I'm usually not one to overbook myself during the holidays, but I had no other Christmas Parties in the calender, so I scheduled this little Scarf Making Shindig. We only had a few kids there, but I made some cookies and hot chocolate and I bought some cheap fleece and cut out tons of circles! We made these very cute, no sew scarfs. Well, almost no sew...at the end you had to stitch a bit to close it on up!





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