Family Staycation

Every year Nate usually gets to take off work the week between Christmas and New Years.  This year, he will be on call, so he had to choose a different time.  We chose the first week of December and decided to have a little Staycation!  We still had to go to school 2 of those days, but we had fun the days we weren't there!

On Tuesday, we built our first ever gingerbread house.  I bought one of those kits from a store, curious to see how good it was.  It proved to be surprisingly easy to do and ended up looking pretty great!  The girls enjoyed sampling the icing and the candy that we used to decorate.  Monkey had a lot of fun decorating and making it her own.

On Wednesday night, we took the girls to see the Dancing Lights at Jellystone.  I found a half off coupon online and we decided to see what they were like.  They were actually pretty AWESOME!  The girls loved it.  You drive through so slow that we were able to take them out of their car seats and let them sit up front with us.  They each had a bag of popcorn and they loved watching the lights as they changed to the beat of the music.  Every now and then Lil Bit would just say "WOW" in awe and Monkey loved pointing out her favorites.

On Thursday we headed over to the Adventure Science Center.  I read that they had a Megaladon that you could walk through.  That disappointed, but the rest of the day was great.  Lil Bit enjoyed running around and seeing everything.  Monkey loved "driving" the cars that were there and LOVED playing doctor.  It took us a lot to pull her away from her patient.

On Friday morning we headed to the Factory to paint pottery.  We are going to start a new tradition and let the girls each paint an ornament.  The inaugural year was fun!  Monkey chose a penguin and loved painting it pink, green and blue.  She chose a cross for Lil Bit to "paint".  She painted a little bit, but then got tired.  She and her daddy went out and roamed the halls to look at trees while Monkey finished up.  I loved the finished products!

After that we headed home for naps and then had some Hot Chocolate and watched a Christmas movie.

On Saturday morning we baked 2 different kinds of cookies and decorated them.  It was a little too involved for pictures, but those cookies sure were yummy!!  

It was a really great week full of family fun!  I'm so glad we had the chance to do it.