December is Here

It's December!  Jingle Bell is back again, and this morning he brought along with him a new advent calendar, this time a LEGO Spider-man advent calendar, complete with some of the Spider-man characters from our old Disney Infinity game.  Maddie put together the first LEGO advent piece this morning, which was Spider-man, delivering a pizza!

We got to church after this.  It's a cold morning out there, by the way.  Freezing temperatures, which you can see because the bird bath is frozen over.  We dump boiled water over it and hack away at places with a screwdriver, and then all the birds rush to the water to get a drink.  

KidPak was great, the start of a new series.  We had a good bit of Christmas fun today, our emphasis being on the Wise Men and the Christmas story.  Maddie took some great pictures as always of our service, putting them on the church website.  I'll share a few below.

So we have this stand-up Nativity set, a larger scale one with big 2-D figures in it.  We used the Wise Men today, and we had to put them somewhere when we were done.  We weren't quite sure where to put our Wise Men so they'd be out of the way, so I put them on top of some cabinets...

We had a great morning.  We went to Sam's Club after this, getting some grocery shopping done - and that's when Maddie spotted the amaryllis bulbs for sale.  We were looking for these the last week or so, and this was the nicest presentation of them all.  We'll be sharing a picture soon enough, but how great to get our traditional amaryllis going and growing in December.  It might bloom a little later than Christmas, but that's okay.

We got home, and Maddie and I had some time playing against LEGO Kang with the Marvel characters in our video game, and we defeated the story mode.  We'll still be playing this game a good bit afterwards, as we're only forty-something percent done right now.  It's been fun, and now we can go back as any character and go collect all the hidden fun stuff along the way.

Tonight's movie was "Santa Clause 3," which was a fun way to start out December.  We also watched the Claymation Christmas, which is must-see television this time of year.  Got to see those California Raisins! Anyway, we watched a few things tonight as the Christmas tree lights glowed.  We have the halls decked here, because December is up and going.

We read "Hogfather" tonight, and we said our prayers afterwards.  The Plush Entourage was off to bed, getting tucked in with Maddie for an earlier night's rest.  School is back tomorrow after Thanksgiving break.  Don't worry, Maddie.  You've got just a few more weeks until another bigger break.  Time to get under the covers though - it's chilly outside!