A Little pre-Christmas Fun

I had plans to blog through the Twelve Days of Christmas, but all of those days were filled with so much that blogging fell by the wayside.  It has been a good two weeks of Christmas-y things around here.

Our family welcomed a new baby girl at the beginning of the month, which also gave me an opportunity to photograph one of last year's new additions.  He's such a fun little guy.

We're thankful for this sweet little baby girl.

I wrote a little about James' participation with the preschool choir at church.  He adores his teacher, "Miss Em-ly," and we're so thankful for her, too.  She's an incredible teacher, and he is really learning in her class.  One Sunday on the way home from church he told us about the 5 pieces of bread (He may have called them 5 sandwiches.) and 2 fish.  "And then!  He [Jesus] fed, like, 100 people or something!"  It was the cutest thing.

I tried to snap a few pictures in front of the tree.  Ella's enjoying chocolate milk in her Clarisse mug and watching Jack Frost.  We were excited to find it on Amazon Prime one night.

The first night James put on Christmas pajamas I wanted to take his picture.  It took a few tries, but persistence paid off.

The Friday before Christmas we decided to have a "Family Fun Night" and take advantage of some of the city's holiday activities.  Ice skating proved to be a bit of a debacle with poor James, who was scared he would fall the entire time he was on the ice.  I used to feel perfectly at home on ice skates, but it had been so many years since I'd skated last that I was nervous, too.  I just didn't holler as much as James.

The family fun got a little better after ice-skating.  We enjoyed the lights on the Christmas trees.  James and Ella picked out trees to have their picture taken in front of.

I love that little kid.

We hung out at Barnes and Noble for a while, where we ran into friends.  I discovered that James thought Barnes and Noble was Lowe's, which explained why he cried about wanting to go to a different Lowe's that had trains when we were in Lowe's last week.

Bookstores make me really happy, and so looking up and seeing this made me feel pretty happy, too.

We ended the night with some of our favorite people at Starbucks.  The kids were up past their bedtime, but it was worth it.

I failed to adjust the settings on my camera so I ended up with dark video so used an effect to try to mask it.  I hope everyone had a happy Christmas.

  12 Days of Christmas from KJ Pugh on Vimeo.

And all of that was just the beginning of a week full of Christmas fun for us.