Pre-Christmas Christmas Blog

Where to begin?  I have so much Christmas-related blogging to do!  The best place to start, I suppose, is with all the pre-Christmas madness!  First, the annual Santa visit!  This happened before Thanksgiving, but I hadn't uploaded the pictures until today.  Dashiell was very excited to talk to Santa.  Aurelia, not so much.  She was curious, but didn't seem impressed.  The official photo we purchased from Santa's helpers was overexposed and weird-looking, so I'm going to skip posting it.  Maybe it will make its way to the blog next year as a comparison photo.

Who the heck is this guy?

This year Dashiell and I made salt dough ornaments to give out as presents.  We tried this a couple of years ago but D was just a little too young to really get it then.  This year it was FUN!  The dough is a lot like sugar cookie dough but without all the perishable ingredients.  You roll it out, cut out shapes or mold it into little mini sculptures, bake it on low heat for about a billion hours, then cool and paint!  The painting was the best part since Dash LOVES to paint.  He especially loves mixing the paints into various colors.

Ready to mix!

Looking particularly impish...

'Reelsy checking out the action

We also made some fun gingerbread houses!  Well, the first couple of houses were fun, at least.  We bought the kit that comes with 4 mini-houses, which to me meant "4 times the fun"!  I was wrong.  The first house was awesome - D loved adding all the candy and making it look pretty.  The second house was still pretty cool - I made it look like there were icicles hanging from the roof, there was still some good candy left for decoration.  By the third house we were starting to run out of good candy and Dashiell ran out of interest.  So did I, but I kept going.  The fourth house was mostly all me - D left to do something else.  I think he came back to put a doorknob on it an the last two gumdrops, but that was it.  Everything was a big sticky mess, and I was so done with this project!  But, we ended up with some cute houses regardless!

I set up the scene with Paul and Babe, the cars, and the lego thieves.  The lego thieves are no fools -they know the best time for a home break-in is Christmas.  And look at those fancy cars!  Obviously these people have nice stuff.

The best part about making gingerbread houses was destroying them!  I let D destroy one house a day until we left for Minnesota.  He was pretty happy about that!

The last thing we did before leaving for Minnesota was write a letter to Santa to make sure he knew where to deliver our gifts!  D had already told Santa what he wanted (wind-up robots) and what Aurelia wanted (a Hello Kitty doll) but he had forgotten to mention where we would be and didn't want Santa to be confused.

I had to transcribe the letter for him and I will admit to shortening it a bit - I couldn't keep up with all he had to say!  But I think I got all the important parts.  Santa must have understood, since he delivered all the presents to the correct location.