Ready for Christmas?!

My holiday list is shrinking and about to come to an end!!!! I am having fun! Stella had her Christmas party at school today and it was a lot of fun. Lucien came and my parents did as well; did I mention they flew in last Monday to spend the holidays with us?! YAY. It was their first time to see Stella as big school girl and were quite impressed with what is going on in my little girlies life! They had brought some cute mugs from the Christmas market in Speyer, Germany. They were perfect teacher gifts filled with yummy chocolate and
I did this fun addition to it.

Turned out pretty good
I think her teachers really liked their present,too.

Stella with friends and her teacher Miss Rosenfeld

Kindergarten girls cookie party
We have been to quite a view Christmas parties in the past week and tomorrow will be the last party before is actually Christmas. whew it is time to slow down a bit
This is what we are enjoying lately:
We are

• listening to/watching a lot of Christmas music( Do they know it's Christmas time by Band aid seems to be the favorite this year)and thanks to youtube, we can listen to it over and over again.......

• trying to keep up with our little elf, yesterday he jumped into a gift bag after the piles and piles of presents appeared under our tree

Elfie in action a couple days ago in the pantry

• We love to watch holiday movies
• Have playdates with great friends

• create and enjoy delicious Christmas treats

Brownies topped with strawberry, covered with icing and mini M&Ms

Christmas popcorn

yummy snowman pancakes

equals happy kids

our Christmas train came out cute but it was not as easy as we thought it would be!

eating A LOT of chocolate, yes we are truly enjoying our german Adventskalender!!!!!

• play in front of our tree

Cars2 meets Mary, Joseph and baby Jesus

• read our books out of the basket, which are coming to an end and showing all the towels I had used as a cushion for our 24 books
  

• do little projects

Stellas version of Elfie

Speaking of projects, it was my goal this year to make some of my gifts myself, and this is what I came up with: I found a cool blog with a nice tutorial about how to make this: It was so much fun to do and so satisfying to get it done by hand.( Cathy, close your eyes right here to not spoil the surprise for your girlies)


I am still working on a bigger project for Stella, which will hopefully be finished by Christmas! I will tell you about this one soon....
Hmmmm, what else: Rick took both kids hunting and in the swamp; they had a blast, especially because they had Rosie with them and she was being such a good dog( well maybe except for the fact that she got carsick two times)Poor puppy or should I say poor Ricky!

• we are truly enjoying the pleasant temperature and go outside as much as we can. Except for the leftover mosquitos, Louisiana is great in December. Today we were outside almost all afternoon long, no jackets necessary !!!!It is so much fun watching the little crazies on their racetrack.

That's all for now, those last days of December will be filled with lots of family fun and off the computer time. That is the reason, why I am already wishing everyone a Merry Christmas, enjoy, recharge and laugh a lot. I hope to be back sometime before the new year arrives.....