Advent Week 2 Saturday

Today was a nice day.  It was a tiny bit slower than things have been of late, at least for me.  There was the usual Saturday morning skating lessons but after that, my official duties were done.  Dh was going down to the city to see the MLS finals (he is a HUGE soccer fan so this is a wonderful treat for him, despite the fact that it's -10 celsius down there tonight) so it was a good time to have some fun with the kidlets.  Pk was supposed to go to "Tween Scene" at church for a cookie decorating night but illness by the leader cancelled that so we had a nice evening at home.

Last year, we baked the pieces for our gingerbread house (my really good friend gave us this awesome gingerbread pan quite a few years ago) but we never actually put the pieces together.  I was determined that our house would get done and this year, it did.  The kitchen was covered in icing and I think that more candy got eaten than put onto the cake but they still had a lot of fun.  I also baked some gingerbread cookies, since they are Lb's favourite (and he's really picky so he gets spoiled when I find something that he does like).  Pk had fun using up the extra icing on those cookies!

We have another family tradition that I borrowed from dear friends - we give each child an ornament every year so that when they leave home, they have a collection of ornaments that all have Christmas memories to take with them.  We didn't want them to get absorbed into our more general collection of ornaments so we bought each child a little tree and they are very excited every year to decorate their trees.  While I watched the game (and relished the fact that I was at home in the warmth rather than down at the game in the freezing cold), the kids had a wonderful time traveling down memory lane and getting their trees together.  What a lovely snowy, Christmas-y day!