December happenings

December is always a busy month! As soon as we got home from Thanksgiving vacation the fun started. Our Elf Nicky came back, the Christmas tree went up and Luke left for Korea. Right before Luke left, I made sure he went and got our Christmas tree (a Costco special)! Jack and Lily set to work decorating the tree right away:

Lily got bored after a while, but Jack continued on and decorated the entire tree!

Meanwhile Luke left for a work trip to Korea. He stayed at a fancy hotel and ate fancy food and took pictures for me:

 The hotel breakfast:

 Assorted cheeses at breakfast

Assorted sausages at breakfast

 More breakfast:

Back at home, i was looking for crafts to keep the kids busy so we decided to make a wreath. The kids went searching for pinecones and then painted them:

And then we used the tree trimmings to make a wreath and placed the pinecones all around. It turned out really nice!

One of Jack's classmates was the honoree for the Juvenile Arthritis Foundation and they had a 5k Jingle Bell Run. So I braved the cold December weather with all three kiddos to make the race. They had all sorts of fun things for the kids including Frosty:

And Santa

And kids from Jack's class

The girls in the stroller ready for the race!

Also in December we had a visit from my Aunt Kristi. Lily was excited to see her again!

Lily with Farrell:

We went to our local farm for a holiday outing. The kids got to see all the animals and ride on a tractor:

Santa was at the farm

We got to roast s'mores

Drink hot chocolate

And decorate ornaments

A notable event in December was the death of our little frog jumpy. We decided to just set the other frog free so Luke and Jack set out to take Froggie back to his home. They did not come back empty handed, they came back with a beta fish named Zak. We didn't really have anywhere suitable for a fish, so our Elf Nicky brought us an aquaponics aquarium. A hundred dollars later we finally had a nice home for our new pet:

 The cool thing about aquaponics is that the aquarium also grows food. We planted wheatgrass and sprouts

 A week later we had our first harvest:

 And finally, the last day of school before the break was an adventure. As the room mom, it is my job to organize the parties, so we had a holiday party in Jack's class and then later that night we hosted a raclette party for the families in the French class. One of the dads in the class is Swiss and he arranged to get raclette cheese from Switzerland and he even brought his raclette machine:

Our class Swiss dad cooking the cheese:

 In addition to the real raclette machine, we also had three table top machine plus all the raclette sides:

It was a really fun party and I just love being around all the native French speakers

And we also took the kids to see Santa