Today was Christmas a day for Family. We started the day with Breakfast with my family and finished it with dinner with Melissa’s. It was a long and tiring day but the kids had a great time. The most amusing thing of the day was the way that Violet took to a box that one of Nana’s presents came in. It was a car, a fort and finally a bed. I could go through the over 400 pictures that we took today and pick out the ones that capture the many great moments from today, or I could just share this simple collage of Violet and her box.
Tonight my family came to our house for a Christmas dinner. It’s been a while since the entire family has been together so it was nice to spend the time together. Of course it was a long day and though I took a lot of pictures. I don’t have the energy to go through them tonight. Here is a picture of the table before we sat down. You can see that Jingles was keeping an eye on the festivities.
Today we headed to Sherway Gardens for the Santa Experience, it’s an event the kids very excited about. It’s a time that they get to hang out with Santa, he reads them a story, sing songs, dance and even have a make-believe snowball fight. It’s an amazing experience for the kids to have. At last year (POD: The Santa Experience) Violet would have nothing to do with Santa, preferring to lay on the floor then sit on his knee. Today she ran right up to him and sat on his knee. She was still a little shy but she told him what she wants for Christmas, and even gave him a big hug at the end. It wasn’t just while she was on his knee that I could see the excitement, as she sat in the audience watching I could see a huge smile on her face. She seemed to love every minute of it. To be fair they both did, it was a magical night and one that makes the 5 hours I stood in line to get tickets (POD: Lining up for Santa, sorta) worth it.
Continue reading “POD: Santa Experience 2012”
This week was Jacob’s Christmas concert, it’s the first one that Melissa missed. The school did a Nativity play, with kids from different grades all having roles and the classes taking turns signing. It’s always fun to watch the littler kids sing there songs. One of the kindergarten classes did Little drummer boy and though there singing wasn’t perfect the enthusiasm they showed for the drumming was commendable. Usually I would have taken more pictures of the event that I could have shared, but with out Melissa being there I really wanted to make sure I captured Jacob’s performance on video.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Oy79m7VxXM&hl=en_US&version=3]
This evening I tucked the kids into bed at the usual bed time around 8:30 pm, and I thought they had gone to sleep. It turns out that my boy had fallen asleep, but my daughter decided that she wasn’t ready for sleep. I’m not sure what inspired her to dress up with her back pack and home-made binoculars, I guess she was exploring. but as you can see the only thing she found was sleep.
This morning when we got up we found our little Elf on the Shelf trying to catch our fish Rapunzel. It seems he fashioned a fishing rod with a stick some ribbon and a paper clip. The though of the elf eating our fish scared violet so much that this afternoon that she carefully reached over and snatched the rod from his hands and threw it in the garbage. She was quite proud that she did it without touching Jingles.
This evening Melissa made some Christmas Rice Crispy squares for Violet’s Pre-School. Tomorrow is her duty day and she’s the snack parent. So she felt the personal touch would be good for the little ones. I would like to say I helped, but all I did was hold the pot while she scooped them into the tray.
Tonight we had our Christmas dinner with some of our closest friends. There was 6 adults and 5 kids so it was a bit of a full house. It was a great day of food, family and friends. One thing Melissa and I often find after events our family attends is that we didn’t get a picture of us all together. Though as I look at today’s picture of the day and think back over the last few months, I think we’ve finally gotten in the habit of it of rangling the kids in and posing for a picture.
Today Melissa and Violet headed out for an evening with our friend Susanne, Violet’s God mother. That left me and Jacob to decided what we wanted to do, and after a some pizza at Nana and Papa’s we headed down to the Ice Path for an evening skate. It’s the first time we’ve gotten out to a skate this year. Jacob loves skating around the figure 8. I’m not sure if it’s the shape or that he doesn’t have to ware any equipment other than his helmet while he skates. One thing I noticed today is that I’m pretty sure Jacob’s now a better skater them me, I still can go faster than him, but he’s much more confident on the ice and before long he’ll be skating circles around me.
Yesterday Violet had her surgery, and I used a collage of some of the day’s pictures for my picture of the day. Today I thought I’d take a different sort of look at the day. We have a picture of the two bracelets she wore throughout the day.
