December 2020

 The girls couldn't wait to kick off the holiday season. I had bought a few crafts and things to do during December and they wanted to do all of them right away! We made gingerbread houses, paper snowflakes and went to see the Zoo Lights all in the first week of December! 

McKenna's house kept falling so instead of getting mad, she got creative a made up a story to go with it. She showed us how Santa had crashed his sleigh and had a lot of fun decorating how she thought it would look after the terrible accident. 

The weather was warm enough that we were able to go find a few more RiverBoxes.  It has been such a fun challenge! The snake one was one of our favorite pieces of art and probably took us the longest to find too. 

We got a little bit more snow that was perfect packing snow. The girls convinced Richard and I to help them build a giant snowman.  It was about as tall as Kaylee! It has been years since I've built a snowman and it was actually really fun. 

Kaylee heard about an outer space art contest through school and wanted to enter it. She sat down one afternoon and painted all of the planets. I was super proud of her! 

Another one of our favorite Christmas traditions is going to see the Christmas lights at Columbus Commons. It is still so eerie to me to see how deserted everything is downtown.  For the most part, we don't feel how much the world is still shut down in our own little bubble, but it was crazy to see how few cars were parked and how few people were walking around. We were sad we couldn't combine this with seeing the holiday train at the downtown library like we normally do but the lights were better this year than they have ever been so that made up for it. 

We also decided to go to a drive through light show this year since there aren't too many places we can go indoors. I'm not sure it's something I would do every year, but it was perfect for this year!  We started off the night a little rocky and it seemed like thing after thing after thing kept going wrong. It was something that could have made us all very frustrated and grumpy but we just started laughing at how many things kept happening! We got lost multiple times, we sat in line to pick up our dinner forever, we kept having to make U turns because our GPS kept having us go really strange ways, we got stuck behind an accident that completely closed off the road we needed to go on, we got super far out in the middle of nowhere (close to where the lights were) when we realized we needed to find a bathroom so we turned back and drove 15 mins back the way we came to find a store, on our way back we got stopped by the longest train I have ever seen and just as that train was about to finish, a train going the other direction came past and we were stopped twice as long, and then when we FINALLY got to the lights after going very far out of our way to avoid the road with the accident, we found out it was an hour and a half wait to get into the lightshow!  Oh and did I mention it was pouring rain through all of this?  By the time we got through the light show and drove home, we had all been in the car for almost 4 hours.  It could have been a very miserable night but instead turned into a very fun, memorable night for all of us!

The girls did the winter reading program through our library.  Besides entering in the hours that you read, they also had activities for you to complete.  One of them was to read a biography and then dress up like that person. Brooklyn and I read a biography on Gandhi and then she dressed up like him. She made the cutest little Gandhi!

Another fun thing we did was this color by number nativity. Every night you would color one piece of the picture and there was a song and a scripture to go with it. Sometimes we start things like this and then it peters out but all of us looked forward to doing it every night! Maybe with COVID we are just excited about anything we are doing in the future but I guess that made it perfect for this year ;)

Christmas Eve we had a Zoom party with my family that was so much fun. We filmed a lip sync video to our new favorite  Christmas song, I Believe In Santa, and then we also did a little Christmas video with 4 different endings, like in the movie Clue.  Sometimes I have way more fun than the kids do filming these, but this time everyone was really involved and loved doing it!  Each family also filmed a different part of the nativity and then we watched them all in order. 

That night the kids exchanged their sibling gifts.  We had some really creative ideas and hard working girls this year! I hope this becomes a favorite tradition of theirs. Brooklyn got a picture frame with a picture of the 3 girls and an amazing unicorn that Kaylee made from scratch!

McKenna got a painted frame with a picture of her and Brooklyn and a friendship bracelet Kaylee braided.

Kaylee got bookmarks made of pictures of herself and a snow globe. 

Christmas was pretty much the same as always for us.  The kids got extra gifts this year thanks to the generosity of their aunt and uncle who are starting a foundation in honor of their sweet baby Neil. 

We were hoping to go sledding but since the weather app said it felt like 5°, we decided to wait until the next day when it was a much warmer 17°!  Ha ha.  Sledding is one of my favorite winter activities and I think I go down more times than the kids do!

Our New Years Eve was pretty chill and I didn't get a single picture! As usual, we put a bunch of activity ideas inside balloons and would pop one when we were ready to do another activity. It seems like a very fitting ending to 2020 that a lot of our ideas didn't work or we kept having to change things around. Richard wanted to be in charge of the mixed up menu and he went a little overboard!  He bought a ton of appetizer type foods for the kids to try. It's always a big hit! Since none of the cities were doing their big firework shows, we just watched some countdowns from previous years while we did our Spanish grape tradition.  I don't think anyone was sorry to see 2020 go!