December 2019 Happenings

No surprise to anyone December was filled with activities leading up to Christmas. Some of the Dads went away for the weekend so C organized a gingerbread house night with the ladies and kiddos. It was a lot of chaos but also lots of fun. We also discovered how much you can tell about a child from the way they build their gingerbread house! The next night was the annual Santa Lucia Parade in Kingsburg and the boys and I camped out with the Nonna, Pepe, Zach, and the Rodriguez family to watch all of the fun floats. C and some of our other friends spent a ton of time putting together the Kindergarten float and it turned out so well! I was a little sad Kieran didn't want to ride on the float but was happy we got to sit and watch everything go by.

 

Of course the holidays bring school and music class recitals and parties. Kieran and Lyla performed in their Kindergarten's holiday concert and then we got to go back to the classroom and receive gifts from the kids and make gingerbread houses. A few days later was the boys' keyboard recitals. We were out of town when they set the times and Reed and Kieran ended up performing in back to back recitals instead of in the same one like we normally try to schedule. They both did really well but three hours of listening to four to ten year olds sing and play keyboard is quite long! Later in the week was Reed's schoolwide Christmas Concert. The theme was Christmas Around the World and each class sang a song in a different language. The last day of school before break Reed's class had a holiday party and I was able to attend and put faces to so many of the names I'd been hearing about since he switched schools. They had a photo booth, games, and a ton of fun!

As has become our tradition we celebrated Nonna's birthday a little early by going to Pajama Train. It is more fun every year with the boys getting so excited to ride the train and less likely to have meltdowns or wander off. It is just such a quaint, small town event - carolers, hot chocolate, tons of Christmas lights, and a limited number of people. We just love it!

We had lots of other fun sprinkled into the month - the 2nd annual window decorating contest at HMC (these were my favorites - I did the Home Alone Window), the boys had a slumber party at Lyla and Zach's, they also decided to summons our Elf Gus back by building a Christmas tree out of Hotwheels, HMC joined forces with a couple other local agriculture companies to open a free clinic for our employees, and we celebrated Connor's 7th Birthday.

To end the year we had a New Year's Eve party at our house. Our group of friends has so many kids now, get togethers are so big, but they are also a lot of fun with the kids all so close in age. Reed was devastated he fell asleep before the ball dropped and woke up sobbing on New Year's Day.