Elf 2016

Here are some adventures of Hermie, our Elf on the Shelf, this year:

December 1st near the printer with a letter in the tray

2nd Spider-Man cosplay hanging from the dining light fixture

3rd a little reindeer dress up in Faith's closet

4th upstairs in the loft in the old entertainment center curio with science experiment gifts:

instant "snow" (like the filling in disposable diapers)

 

and a tree which grew crystals after a few days 

 

 6th brought a connect four game to play with Lion on the kitchen counter

7th built a treehouse in the family room

 

 8th had a run-in with the nutcrackers near the stove

9th was frozen by Elsa in the master bath

(he melted throughout the day)

11th did some work on the jeep in the playroom

15th spied on the kids using their bathroom from the back of the toilet

 

17th sitting on the piano and had brought a card game as a gift

22nd probably got in the Tooth Fairy's way when she was leaving money for Christian the previous night

23rd showed up in the coat closet with a pretty impressive Darth Vader costume (complete with glow stick lightsaber) and brought gifts of light up Christmas bulb necklaces

24th was playing a couple of holes on my desk

25th Bud woke up that morning to find a photo on his door:

He got to be twinners with Rudolph and Hermie!

I don't know what happened, but I didn't manage to get pictures of Hermie's adventures on the other days :( Not sure if it was phone/camera malfunction or brain malfunction! I did get this picture in January because one day our Elf brought this "growing" alligator. Buddy brought up our ten gallon aquarium from the basement and put him in water. It took a number of days, but he tripled in size!

 

As for the rest, I think there were three days that he didn't move, one day that he brought a cool tiny basketball game, another where he took a warm bath in the crock pot with miniature marshmallows instead of water (and even had a little rubber ducky in there with him), and one more that I remember where he put gift bows on all of our kitchen cabinets. Why would I stop writing in my journal app in November of 2016 when I had done it so faithfully for the two previous years??!! Don't worry, I started back up in January of this year :)

 

 

December 2016

We got right into the Christmas festivities on December 1st with our visit to the Festival of Trees!

I spy the felties that I made:

Christian was doing a ballroom dance performance and it was so fun!

We did a "favorite things" gift exchange at Bunco that night and it was super fun!

Faith's health, overall, had been getting worse, so we decided to have a fast for her.

Here is my Riot group on the 16th. We did a challenge where two needy families got the proceeds from our December class fees.

The kids slept over at Braeggers' on the 16th and on the 17th Tammy took them out to breakfast.

Faith had another pretty good day on the 21st and we were able to stop by Curt and Sherry's for the Mitchell family Christmas party.

On the 22nd I put together goodie plates for our friends and neighbors. The usual ginger cookies, wreath cookies, fudge and caramels; and this year added English toffee and did candy cane Hershey's kiss sugar cookie bars instead of the trees.

I added this for my fab 5 friends! :D

Sarah's kids looked so adorable for the Christmas Eve party on the 24th!

As did mine!

We ate our delicious appetizers and dinner,

then the kids played a game where they rolled dice and if they got doubles, they tried unwrapping a gift (which had many layers of paper) with oven mitts on their hands.

There was an adorable live nativity:

And we got some family pictures.

We went by Roy city offices on the way home, but were unhappy that the big tree was not lighted to the music, but just the individual trees in the park. It was still pretty.

Christmas morning, the kids woke up to find gaming chairs from Santa. (You'll have to read the Elf post to see why Christian's nose is red!)

Gifts galore for kids and pets.

A quick selfie at church that morning.

It was a white Christmas, for sure!

Over the hills and through the woods, our parents went overboard with spoiling us all!

On the 26th, Faith spent hours making this phone charging station for her brother out of Legos:

And Bud did some Lego building himself.

For the month of December, I tried to have our family do the LDS churchwide activity "Light the World" where there was a recommended list of actions each day you could select from to offer service and share the light of Christ. I even printed out the calendar, made a cute jar and little papers to roll and put in it.

It was a huge fail! One day I was sitting in the family room and Christian was in his bedroom, supposedly doing his homework when I received a call from him. He basically just said "Hi" and hung up. Then he wrote "called mom" on one of the papers, rolled it up, and put it in the jar. He said the calendar suggested it as the service of the day! Another day I saw a second paper in the jar, and it turned out that Bud offered his sister the "service" of flicking her in the butt!! Guess he got creative for that one and didn't go by the suggestions on the calendar, LOL!

Here's a daddy and his FuzzyButt on the 27th:

And celebrating a new year on it's way on the 31st.

Faith and I did the challenge of having no soda in 2016 and accomplished our resolution with ease (neither of us are big soda drinkers at all). Still, we had a sip at the beginning of 2017!

Christian went without except on special occasions because Tony promised him $10 for that, and he did great, as well!

Happy New Year!

As a final note, here are two new tree ornaments I received this season. A cute angel from the Relief Society,

and this darling one Shawna made for our Bunco group!

Also, for future reference, this cute bell was from Grandma Quinn and is from a china pattern set.