December.

I'm finally blogging about the holidays! We'll start with a quick pic of the family when we went to see the lights at temple square.

The girls had their dance recital at the Festival of Trees on December 3. They did such a great job! They are the shorter girls in the group, below, in the center of the pic. Trin in front, Bailee in the back.

On December 12, for FHE, we decorated gingerbread (aka graham cracker) houses. I hot glued the houses ahead of time, so the kids had time to just decorate them, without them having to worry about the house falling apart. It worked like a charm!

But of course, there was too much going on for me to remember to take the picture of the final results! Oh well. They were cute. Trust me.

The girls sang in their Winter Song Festival at school on December 20th. They each sang a couple of songs, but the video camera was low on batteries, so I only got a portion of each of them singing.

On Christmas Eve, we went over to Grandma & Grandpa Chapmans for the annual party with dinner, nativity, and gift exchange. I didn't take my camera! We had a lot of fun though.

I made a point to make sure all of the presents were wrapped BEFORE Christmas eve, so I wouldn't spend the whole evening wrapping gifts. It gets exhausting. So I spent the whole month of December working on the wrapping. It was nice to not have to do any the night before Christmas!

Instead, we read some Christmas books and set out cookies and milk for Santa, and carrots for the reindeer.

Christmas morning, the kids were so excited to get up. They got up around 7:00, and we hurried and opened up our stockings, before we had to get ready for church, which was at 9:00.

After church, we finished opening all of the gifts. I only took these 3 pictures first thing in the morning, and didn't take a single picture after that. What's wrong with me!?

Christmas 2011 was also a special day for me, because it was the first day I made a turkey, all by myself! I got the recipe from my SIL Dawna, which she got from the Food Network. It was really not as difficult as I thought it would be. I have to say, it turned out perfectly! It was moist and delicious. I had tons of leftovers that I used for other recipes. But alas, I failed to take a PICTURE!

We also did a family picture for our Christmas card (it was late November, I'm out of order). I wanted to re-create our family picture from 2008 that we did on our bed. So, we did.

Our Christmas card.....

And on New Years Eve, we went to the annual party at Ty & Shannon's. We played Just Dance 3, and some other games, and ate lots of yummy food. We left shortly after midnight since we had church at 9:00 the next morning.