tiny dancer

Our Stella-Bella is a lovely little ballerina and danced so gracefully, so sweet.  The three of us sat near the front of the theater, a great view of her busting some sweet moves. 

~ Momma P

Team Canada Women

We headed to Rogers Place and watched the women of Team Canada win! Our seats were incredible, the second row!!!!!! Our ladies made signs and we all wore red Canada gear, it was pretty awesome. 

 These three are my favourites in all the land!

This guy! Gosh with him working so much, when we do have time with him I just want to sit by him, hold his hand...enjoy every minute because we love him so darn much.  Grateful that he finds cool things for us to do as a family. 

~ Mrs. P

christmas baking

One of our cherished Christmas traditions is baking with the family!! As the littles get bigger gosh they are actually quite helpful.  We were excited to have Leslie living closer this year so she could join in with her people. We were also able to have Gma Hinko sleep over for a few days and Leslie brough Gma Hudkins out for Saturday. There were christmas songs and festive shirts, lots of laughs and tons of baking. 

 I am 36 years old and get to hang out with both of my Gma's and can honestly say they are two of my best friends. I know I am lucky!!

Ok, how cool is it that Jon and I have matching shirts?! We didn't even know until he showed up to help with the kids and so of course we took a picture to memorialize our matchy matchyness. 

These two gals in their matching shirts, dang those shirts are awesome!

'I JUST WANT TO 

BAKE STUFF

AND WATCH

CHRISTMAS 

MOVIES ALL DAY'

Pictures are memories and goodness what fun baking memories we make. 

 

~ Mrs. P

christmas lip sync

I counted our Christmas cds and goodness we have 27...27!!!!!!!!!! We are clearly lovers of music and Christmas music is just an extension of our family's love of tunes.  We have dance parties often but doing a lip sync kind of just happened before bedtime and gosh was it super fun.  Oh these ladies and this guy, it is funny how sometimes the unplanned moments become these super special memories.

Also, this year we discovered SPOTIFY a music app and it rocked!!!! Continuous good tunes!!

Sometimes one goes to bed with the best feelings about how family time/parenting went down and tonight was one of those nights.

~ Momma P

our deer girls

How could I not title this post with a cheesy line?! It is just how I role. Our dear girls have been blowing my mind with how capable and kind they are becoming....it makes my mother heart so proud.  When we pull out decorations there is a stash of hats and antlers because I had to buy them for a young women activity years ago and they have surprisingly lasted a long time!!! They have been helping decorate so much this year, they have been super helpful.  The girls have fun playing around with the festive head pieces and wearing them throughout the month.  I like the adorable pictures I get of my darlings.

With 'Light The World' one of the daily suggestions was to do random acts of kindness.  The girls decided we should bring candy canes to school and hand them out in each of their classes, just to be kind.  It was so well received and so wonderful that the following day I picked up another box and when we went to our doctors apt we offered candy canes to complete strangers and wished them a 'Merry Christmas'!!!  Now I am a pretty out going person so this wasn't hard for me but my girls are a touch more timid.  The people we came across in the parkade were adults, in the elevators mostly adults and in the lobby mostly adults, that was intimidating BUT something amazing happened as I began offering the candy canes and the girls witnessed the smiles on strangers, they WANTED to do it too!  They literally witnessed serious faces turn to smiles and in this simple gesture we helped to light the world around us.  These girls of ours, capable and kind.

~ Mrs. P

two sides of Chirstmas

 Our chalkboard art has recently been done by our ladies and I am so proud of their ideas. It is fun that they like to help me create and do up the chalkboard. For our letterboard I had seen the mistletoe idea on Intagram and simply had to re create it in our front entrance.  Gosh did it make me and our guests smile!!! We even made kids kiss their parents hahahaha  I feel like we really captured the two sides of christmas with these different boards. 

~ Mrs. P

loving all things gingerbread

 The Christmas season seems to have alot of food related traditions hahaha

This year I took the easy route and have no regrets, we were able to do our special things with less mess and greater ease....I call that success!

Pillsbury had premade gingerbread men on sale so I bought a few packs of those and whipped up some icing. It made for a fun FHE and shockingly our dad was on his day off from his crazy shutdown hours. It was pretty special that we got to decorate with him.  We made some deliveries to neighbours and we were all smiling - it feels so good to be kind #lighttheworld

Often we do gingerbread houses with our cousins but we've been sick so much that we did these with our little fam jam.  I have a recipe and pattern for homemade gingerbread and one day I will do that but we took the convenient route again.  Costco sells assembled houses that come with packs of candy. Coupled with our leftover Halloween candy (I always save the leftovers in our pantry) we had quite the selection.

 I just loved looking into the den and seeing the 'Joy to the World' chalkboard the girls made, the 'Be Merry' banner from my sweet friend Christa and then the village my mom gave us with our gingerbread houses. This view just makes me happy and feel all Christmasy inside.

~ Mrs. P