December 12 and 13

Yesterday was a complete debacle.  Some days I am a complete fail with some of these activities, but we make the most of them and carry on.  On the 12th we were going to make a gingerbread house.  For future reference, I will make said house early in the day and set the walls and roof with super glue and not some crap icing they give me in the box.  With that said, I am sure you can guess how the gingerbread house making activity went.  It ended with Connor in tears and Alaina trying to comfort him by saying, "mommy fix it, mommy fix it."  Sorry kiddo...no fixing this one.

I knew we were getting a ton of snow overnight.  I shoveled last night after the kids went to bed but by the time I went to my room and checked out the window, I knew we were in for it.

Sure enough....this is what we woke up to this morning.  Eventually, school was cancelled for Connor so bundled up we got and went outdoors to finish shoveling the driveways and playing.  To my very pleasant surprise, our main driveway and front walkpath had already been shoveled for us.  This is why I love my military family!  One of the guys in Ben's unit who wasn't able to deploy sent his kids (who are in late middle school/early high school) to my house to help me out since they know how challenging shoveling 3 parking spaces with 2 feet of snow and 2 small children can be.  So, the kids and I played in the snow together for awhile but it was so unbelievably cold (windchill of -10), we didn't stay out too long.  Enough time to get some pretty sweet snow angels in, though.

Today's Advent activity is, of course, Friday night movie night.  My closest girlfriends up here and I planned a get together so we could celebrate with the kids before everyone scattered to the winds during the holidays.  The movie on the agenda- Polar Express.  My very favorite Christmas movie of all time.  While Alma, Lauren and I set up dinner, the kids painted snowmen and gingerbread men.  I found this really neat combination of shaving cream and elmer's glue and it makes this spongy, neat textured "paint".

Then it was Polar Express time!!

And of course, the night wouldn't be complete without a delicious hot cocoa bar for the kids to make their own hot cocoa.  This is mine, with tons of yummy homemade vanilla whipped cream.

Here is a pick of the kids....unfortunately it was at the very end of the night so forgive the "crazy."