Miscellaneous Christmas Activities

One of our favorite family Christmas traditions is going to the Festival of Lights. One of our local cities decorates a park with all kinds of lights and people can drive through and see them. They have all kinds of scenes and each year it is fun to see the different ways they set them up and the new things they have added. 

One of the favorite parts for the kids is getting out of their car seats and sitting up front with us to see the lights. You drive through the park very slowly and the kids can see so much more if they are able to get up and see out. Don't let this picture fool you. Leah was having a great time, she just didn't want to smile for the picture. Corbin was more than happy to grin with his chocolate covered smile!

In the middle of December, Leah had her Christmas dance recital. The girls' costumes didn't get ordered in time, so all of the girls got to wear pajamas as their costume. Leah's class did a dance to a song called "Christmas Sarajevo." It sounded like a supped up version of "Carol of the Bells." She did a great job!! And I thought her class did the best in the entire "little kids" program. She is dancing with Kylie and Millie again this year, but I didn't get a picture of the three of them together. I wish I would have.

Leah had a lot of fans come to see her dance. Here she is with some of them. One of her good friends, McKay, came to see her dance. She was really excited about that.

We weren't sure if Grandma Leslie would be able to make it, but she did and she brought Jackson along too.

Leah and Corbin were both especially excited that Grandpa Tucker came. (Oh, and Grandma Tucker was there too.)

Another fun tradition is going to a Gingerbread Decorating Party at our neighbors' house. Leah always loves decorating her gingerbread cookie.

Corbin's favorite part was picking off all the decorations and eating them.

After decorating her cookie, Leah insisted that her dad would want a cookie so she volunteered to decorate it for him. She did it all on her own. Not too shabby!

Leah's preschool class had a "Polar Express" Christmas party. So all the kids got to come to school in their pajamas. I went to help with the Christmas party that day. It was really fun to see Leah in her classroom setting. It also gave me an even greater appreciation for her teacher. She is so patient and kind with the kids. She had a great party planned for them and the kids seemed to have a great time. They ended the day with a Christmas program where they performed all the Christmas songs they had been practicing over the past several weeks.

The Millers invited us to join in their family Christmas party. They had invited Santa to come visit with the kids. After the kids all had a chance to sit on his lap, he read them a story about how the birth of Christ was the real reason for the Christmas season. Our kids refused to sit on Santa's lap, but they were willing to accept his candy cane and listen to his story though.

After the story was over, we were able to convince them to take a family picture with Santa as long as they didn't have to get too close to him. Leah also wanted to get a picture of her and Kylie with Santa.

I'm sure we did a lot of other fun Christmas things, but this is all I have pictures of and all I can remember right now. December is such a fun month with so many great things to do to celebrate!

My Birthday

When December rolled around, it was time for another birthday for me. I love having my birthday at Christmas time. We weren't sure what to do to celebrate. I knew I wanted to go out to eat with Ross, but we couldn't think of anything else to do. I wanted to do something festive, but I had a hard time finding anything that was happening the night of my birthday. Then on the afternoon of my birthday I found out about a Christmas light river cruise near us, so we went to check it out. They took us down a little section of the river that was all decorated with Christmas lights. We even got a visit from Santa who happened to be rowing by on a canoe. I thought it was really fun. Here's some pictures I took on the river cruise.

Afterwards, we went out for dinner. And as we were leaving the restaurant we ran into a couple of my dear friends that I served with in young womens, Debbie and Janice. They have since moved from the ward so that they could take care of their aging parents. But I have missed them a lot and it was the highlight of my birthday to see and visit with them. Don't you just love "divinely arranged" coincidences?! 

It was so nice to have a night out without the kids (Ross's mom was taking care of them for us). But after a stop at Wal-mart to pick up a few things, we decided that it was probably time to go rescue Ross's mom from our two hooligans.  

My kids love playing with the cameras whenever they come out. So here's a few pictures we took that night after I opened up my birthday cards. 

So I decided that I wanted to wait and find out the gender of baby #3 as part of my birthday celebration. When we went to the ultrasound, everything looked great. When they got down to checking things out in the lower body area, they had us turn away so we wouldn't accidently see anything. And when we were done, they put the picture of the baby's gender in an envelope so that it could stay a secret until we were ready to reveal.

I asked my friend and neighbor, Bonnie, to make a cake for my birthday party we had planned for a couple days after my actual birthday that would reveal the gender of our baby. That way it would be a surprise, even for us. So the day before my "pretend" birthday as Leah called it, Bonnie picked up the sealed envelope and then I anxiously waited. 

This was what the cake looked like when she brought it over for the party. Didn't she do a great job!

After the guests arrived we gathered around so we could cut into the cake to find out if the inside was blue or pink.

And here we are revealing the first slice of PINK cake! It's a girl!! I was fully expecting the cake to be blue, even though in my heart I wanted it to be pink. So seeing that it was indeed going to be a girl made the cake all the more sweeter. (But for the record, I would have been happy having a boy too.) But now we get to put our abundance of baby girl clothes and such to good use again! We also have to try to come up with some girl names that we like. I was totally thinking in boy mode and definitely had more boy names than girl ones in mind at that time. 

By the way, the cake tasted as good at it looked. I still get people commenting on how great the cake was. Bonnie is a baking genius and I knew she would do a great job! Overall, I'd say this was a fun and very memorable birthday. Thank you again to everyone who had a hand in making this time special for me!