The 1st weekend of December

Just the sight of my December calendar has me exhausted. 

We are booked solid each weekend. 

Which for certain means a lot of holiday fun,

and hopefully enough time to accomplish all the other essentials...

finish shopping,
start decorating,

wrap presents,

holiday baking,
etc. etc.

Here's all the fun we squeezed into weekend #1 in December....

 

Carousel

I know I've gushed before about how much we love our little town carousel,

and we love, love, love their Annual Carousel Ride with Santa!
Free carousel rides,
candy canes from Santa and Mrs. Claus
and hot chocolate, yum!

little red noses cause it was a bit chilly



Audra knew Santa was behind her and she wasn't gonna look!

Gingerbread houses

This was our "second annual gingerbread house decorating day" at Aunt Kristy's

{I think it's become a new tradition}

 Audra had a little help from mommy

 Maura was focused and decorated with perfection

 

Tatum preferred to build AND taste her creation

 

Poor Teagan just got marshmallows,

no icing for her.  Maybe next year!

 

The finished masterpieces...

Matching Christmas Jammies

Aunt Kristy surprised my girls with matching Christmas pajamas for them and their little cousins.

I think they will be wearing these a lot this month:

{Teagan must have been asleep in hers already}

Christmas Dance Show

This year Maura joined the performance group at her dance studio which means she has opportunities to perform throughout the year, not just at the end of year recital.

Her first holiday performance was at the mall.

Here are the girls before we left for the mall...

The girls are standing in front of daddy's new obsession...

Pallet art !

He's a bit of a Pinterest junkie,

but my front yard holiday decorations are benefiting from it.

He has cut about 12 pallets into Christmas tree shapes,

but only 3 are painted and ready for display.

 

Maura is in the red shirt in the middle



Santa

And since we were at the mall with the girls looking pretty it was the perfect time to visit Santa.

Santa could tell Audra was not too keen about him so he had me pull one of the boxes over near his big chair and Audra sat on that, at least for a few seconds...

long enough to get a decent picture :)