Advent Activities

One of Sydney's favorite Christmas traditions is counting down the days to Christmas with our advent calendar. It has lots of little drawers, and she loves opening one up each morning to see what cool activity we'd get to do that day. Unfortunately, sometimes I read the paper inside and she'd decide she didn't want to do it (e.g. read Christmas books), but other times she'd be giddy at the prospect of doing something fun (e.g. decorating the tree, going to the 3rd MEF band's Christmas concert).

Instead of doing gingerbread houses this year, we made Christmas trees using ice cream cones. It turned out to be Sugarfest 2013, as the kids snitched candy and licked frosting like it was going out of style. Shawn decorated his and then ate the whole thing within 5 minutes… all before 11am.

Sydney was a little more deliberate with her decorating, but still did her fair share of snitching.

Sydney showing off her new favorite skill- winking! Now she winks at me like 500 times a day :)

Before winter break from preschool, Sydney's class did a Christmas program. She did a great job singing "Must be Santa" and the Alvin and the Chipmunks song "Please Christmas Don't Be Late."

At the end of the program, Santa came to visit the kids to see what they wanted for Christmas. Shawn was pretty mesmerized by Santa and was asking, "Where Santa go?" for the rest of the day.

Santa gave each kid a present, and Sydney got a Jake and the Neverland Pirates matching game. That would have been awesome had we not bought the exact same game for Shawn for Christmas. I ended up buying it from her so she could get something else from the store.

Since Shawn was so excited about Santa, we thought it would be fun for him to get a turn on Santa's lap. We took the kids to Family Fun Night at the Ocean Breeze restaurant on base and got our chance to meet him.

Turns out Shawn did not like sitting on Santa's lap.

He told Santa he wanted a drum, but since Sydney had gotten a present from Santa right after she talked to him after her school program, he thought he'd get his drum right away. As he recovered from sitting on Santa's lap he kept saying, "I want my drum right now."

We were floored when we got to go into a room at the restaurant that was loaded with toys, and each kid got to pick one for free! The gift Sydney chose at the restaurant was an easy bake donut kit. She was soooo excited to make the donuts the next day.

They were "no bake" donuts, the consistency was chocolate pudding-esque, but more firm. She loaded them up with lots of frosting and they dug in. I don't think either kid finished eating theirs.

I had a doctor's visit on the 20th that indicated I wasn't progressing much in the baby arena. We tried to help things along on my due date (the 21st) by going for a loooonnnng walk to see the Christmas lights in American Village. It was around 60 degrees and windy, and we were freezing! After coming out the gate, we stopped at Starbucks for some hot chocolate, then continued on to walk around on the seawall.

Enjoying the view at Sunset beach.

Afterwards we cruised through American Village to see their light displays, shouting "Yay, Christmas!" as we passed by.

Despite walking several miles, I didn't have a single contraction. But we had a great time, so it was an evening well spent!