Decorating for Christmas

 I love decorating for Christmas on Thanksgiving weekend.  It seems that the holidays go by too quickly, and I want to squeeze every last second out of our beautiful Christmas time.  

Our "formal" tree and the special First Christmas ornaments.

   Our beautiful nativity scene that was Daddy's Grandmas. 

 First Christmas hand and footprints.

 The downstairs "informal" tree.

Book boxes by the two fireplaces.  Filled with lots of good reads, can't wait to snuggle up and read these. 

Thanksgiving Week

What a busy week!  We fit in some school work with all the fun activities.  We took Great Grandma to lunch for her birthday and then shopping for Christmas dresses.  We had our second Pizza Hut Book It party for Selena. At the library, I picked out some new easy-reader books and they were a huge hit.  We have hit a block with our reading lately, and this helped get some motivation to keep trying.  I think we were in a rut with Bob and phonics readers.  (She especially likes "Hop, Hop, Hop")  We also practiced setting the table and making place cards.

  Cleaning the floor before setting the Thanksgiving table.  

 Our friendly Elf on the Shelf, Chris, made his appearance! 

 Our new "pets," cast offs from the public school's third grade classes.  SNAILS!  We've had some before, the sure make for interesting entertainment! 

 Our place cards, we made each person a little Pioneer, Indian, or Pilgrim and Selena wrote everyone's names on a leaf doily.  

 The table, set with some yummy bread and dip and my little helper!  Thanks Bean! 

Snuggle Bunny time!

Thanksgiving books from the library...

We especially liked "Thanksgiving Mice" "A Turkey for Thanksgiving" and "Setting the Turkeys Free"

Abby's Birthday Party

Happy Birthday to my little baby.  We celebrated with a family dinner.  Unfortunately the pictures are on Grandma's camera... I'll have to come back to this post  :)

More Footprints in the Snow!

Another dusting of snow this morning, and even better footprints!

 These rabbit and kitty prints are up to the slider door, where the bunny cage is.  It looks like the bunnies have night time visitors that look at them through the window!  There were also lots of tracks around the patio.  We wondered how many different animals were out or if they were all the same one just moving around a lot!

 There were also TONS of little bird tracks, and some strange stripes/scratches in the snow.

Then we went to Lowe's for Build and Grow, it was a Santa sleigh and reindeer (the reindeer are no longer attached).

Footprints in the Snow!

Footprints in the Snow!

In the snow this morning, we saw all kinds of footprints in the snow.  It seemed to be perfect timing, since Footprints in the Snow is our book this week!  

 We followed rabbit tracks from our back porch all the way to the river!

  Along the way we also spotted cat prints!

 When we got back to our yard, we noticed that the rabbits were hanging out in the play house.  The girls were really excited to see that!

Later when Daddy got home from work, we built a Frosty and a Crystal!

Numbers, Words Review and Piano Lessons

We got out the 100 pocket chart and practiced putting the numbers in order and skip counting.

 We also did some fun folder games, beginning sounds for the big one and matching upper and lower case letters for the little one.

We recently got a keyboard for beginning piano lessons for the girls.  Selena has even "written" some music.

In other news... our local learning store is going out of business :(.  We found some great deals, but are still incredibly sad that we wont have a place that we can just stop in and browse or pick up that "one thing" anymore.  I think we should be good for teacher resource materials in nearly every subject till about 8th grade... so that is good news.