December

We did several things this December that were Christmasy and the start of family traditions. There are so many things that our families did when we were children and we want to do the same types of things with our family.

One of the first things we did was decorate a gingerbread house. I bought one from Target that was already assembled. All we had to do was decorate it with candy and icing. Lawson thought it was more fun to eat the candy than to put it on the house.

Judah hung out on the table and watched. He loves his toes!

The finished product!

I noticed over the next couple of weeks some of the candies kept disappearing because Lawson kept eating them. It only made it two weeks or so before it got trashed. I kept moving it around the kitchen and being close to the stove, it started to melt.

We also made Christmas cookies with Lawson. I thought it would be fun to mix up a batch of cookies, but who am I kidding? Break and bake all the way! The batch I mixed up ended up being to tough because I overworked the dough, but Lawson enjoyed watching me roll out the dough. He loves the rolling pin. And cookie cutters. I also had some break and bake cookies that we rolled in sprinkles which Lawson enjoyed doing as much as cutting out the cookies.

Rolling out the cookies.

Dipping the break and bake cookies in sprinkles. This was a big hit and surprisingly we didn't end up with a ton of sprinkles all over the floor.

Judah hanging out on the table again! Watching us make cookies.

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the finished product. But they were delicious!

We are members of our local zoo, so we went to ZooLight Safari. The zoo is decked out in thousands and thousands of Christmas lights. We rode the train around the park to see all the animal lights, enjoyed the dancing lights choreographed to Christmas music and watched the dancing light Christmas Trees. We were able to see the animals in the barn, but all the other animal exhibits were closed for the night. Lawson really wanted to see all the animals, so he wasn't too happy about not being able to see them. In the barn, he wanted to run up and down this grate that is in the barn, regardless of the people who happened to be standing on the grate. When I tried to hold his hand, he kept telling me he wanted to "clap his hands".

Here we are waiting in line for the train ride.

Lawson did great waiting for the train. We also had a candy cane to help him be patient.

Judah the red-nosed baby.

On the train

The boys

Notice Lawson isn't looking at the camera. He didn't want to leave the zoo. Something about the lights. He could have stayed all night!