christmas eve

Happy Christmas Eve!
Kalia has been placing one magnet, carefully selected, each day until today (we may have lost a magnet or it never came with Christmas day- I don't know). Anyway, she has been excited and sometimes mentions a couple times a day to put the new day up. Christmas Eve was finally here! We got a few last minute things done in the morning, then home for naps.

Early afternoon we made our cookies that we would later decorate for Santa.
Kalia helped cut most of them and at the end I got this one of Maya.

Since last year, the cookie decorating was so competitive, I decided to make it a competition this year and Kalia made decorated the prizes. I wanted to make the prizes for "best cookie for Santa", etc. Kalia wanted to run the contest this way: She would decorate a cookie and the person who could most closely replicated it, would be the winner.

Cookies we made from the kit that Auntie Kim sent - thanks!
We also read the books so many times!!

Kalia's cut cookies

Uncle Greg, Tanner & Alana came over later to hang out.
Erik's cousin Shannin & her baby Nicholas came over for a bit too.
Maya looking at the Santa sign.
We were hanging outside playing horseshoes.

I love the hand holding - probably won't always be like this...

We've been playing on these covers in the grass.

Kalia & Maya with the boys

Family Shot
This was prior to Uncle Greg having the best horseshoe winning streak of his life -
yes, we did hear about it for the rest of the day.

We had "fatties" for dinner and then to decorating the cookies

Finished cookies

Although a few of us got awards for copying Kalia's cookies the best,
Tanner was the overall winner as his were selected by Kalia to be left for Santa.

Leaving the cookies & milk - just right

Outside leaving the reindeer food.
We forgot to get cheerios this year, so they
were given rice crispies & a little bit of Kalia's favorite granola & water.

It was a late night and then everyone was in bed and told that
Santa won't come if there are any "creatures stirring".