Gingerbread Houses

As part of the holiday festivities that I'm just getting around to posting, some friends came over and we made a gingerbread village (out of a gingerbread village kit the kids talked me into buying). We are definitely not architects. Here are James, Sam, and Athena with some product placement :)

The A-frame looks structurally sound:

 Ta-da! See all that leftover Halloween candy?

I don't think we got one of Emma's finished product, and hers was the best (and used the most frosting!) She graciously left it with the kids when she went home, after Instagramming it, of course.

It appears Amelie's hair got more and more disheveled as the project went on.

The kids started eating theirs almost immediately, but we did put one up on the mantle for decoration and let it petrify.

Athena with her masterpiece:

Ta da!

Photo credit to my co-worker Sophia :)

Dentist

The kids went to the dentist (back in November) and I finally uploaded the pictures.

No cavities!

Christmas-palooza

Here are some photos from Christmas and Christmas Eve. Grandma Mary and Papaw brought over a set of Magnatiles, which the kids were very strategically building with here. They wanted to show me that they'd re-created the picture/castle on the front of the box.

Sam put up lights, as usual. Amelie brought home paper snowflakes to put up, too, but I just learned that she might not have been the one to cut them out! Ha! (She said her friend from adventure club "donated" them to her.)

We went to the Christmas Eve candlelight service at church as usual, too. Grandma Mary and Papaw came to hear Sam play the vibraphone. The kids definitely didn't want to be still for a photo, though Amelie was calm when holding her candle at least.

Aunt Holly got her this enormous hair bow:

  
James fell asleep pretty much immediately after they dimmed the lights. This is him all the way at the end of the program when the lights came back on! Sure looks comfortable, huh?

And then these pictures are from Christmas morning. James slept until after 8:30am, and then he had to wake Amelie up.

Sam got them a Star Wars book. We've read it several times already.

James made us an ornament.

I asked James what his favorite part of Christmas was, and he answered, "The candy."

New water bottles for all!

Star Wars figurines:

And here's the wreckage!

They played peacefully with all of their new loot the rest of the day.

They had a big day :) and then we went to Luke & Barb's for dinner that evening, where James got a little overly excited, started coughing, and then threw up.  He didn't act sick before or since, so I'm not sure what that was all about - he did that once before about a week prior, too.

Christmas Card Outtakes

How did I ever pick one to send in the Christmas cards, you wonder? Why didn't we try to get one of the whole family, you ask?

Then I adjusted the flash on the camera:

They are not impressed.

I think this is the one I ended up making copies of. Did I make the right choice?

That horribly offended and put-out face!

This one would have been pretty good, too.

Merry Christmas, all!

Vibraphone

Sam is playing at church tonight. (He played last year, too: Here's the link.) His folks have already been by today & helped him load the vibraphone up.

School Work

I'm very impressed with the school work coming home for both Amelie and James.

James is writing and writing and writing. Can you see where this one says "Happy Halloween"?

James also loves to draw and draw. They've pretty much quit giving him clean pieces of paper at preschool because he goes through so many every day, and he's using the backs of other things they've printed out.

Amelie is doing addition and subtraction in math with number bonds (and with regular addition/subtraction problems). If you can't see it clearly, 2 of the numbers are filled in and the student has to come up with the other one, either by adding the two bottom numbers together or subtracting one of the bottom numbers from the top one:

Here, they're suppose to draw pictures and write the word underneath of things that start with the same sound as the picture and letters at the top. Under S, she put "snake" and "sun." Under T, she put a tiger going "grr" and my absolute favorite - a tire swing! I thought the Buffaloes would get a kick out of it as well. For St, she has "stairs" and "stamp."

We went to parent-teacher conferences yesterday and got a great report. I mentioned that we hadn't seen any writing come home in her folder, and Ms. Hanney had Amelie get out her writing portfolio. She had many good pieces, including one 4-page story all about her cousin Ellie's birthday, and then several that weren't finished.