Christmas Time at the Morley's

This Christmas season we started a couple of new traditions. One of them was Elf on a Shelf. I was a little hesitant to start this because I don't always have the time to be super creative with where he ends up. And although it was nice to have a reminder for Brockston  -  "Buddy is watching you!" It wasn't always effective. However, it was exciting to see Brockston wake up and immediately look for Buddy the Elf. Jamison even would see him and point (he's our pointer) and get excited.

Here's Buddy eating a cookie in the cookie jar

Another tradition I started was a Christmas Advent. I painted and mod podged a wooden tree with drawers that I got at a local craft store (Benion Crafts, formerly known as Ben Franklin). In each drawer I put a scripture and a Christmas activity to do for the day. I am really glad I did this and loved how it turned out. We had to read the Christmas scripture before we could find out what our activity for the day was. One of our first activities was making our own snow globes out of old baby food jars.

 

My boys hard at work

Another activity was our annual gingerbread house making at Grandma Sherrie's with cousins. I'm not sure how I didn't get a picture of our house - oh well.

Hannah's House

Making Faces

Tori

Some of our other activities were: reading Christmas books, making Christmas cookies, watching a Christmas movie - one LDS one and How the Grinch Stole Christmas, writing letters to Santa, going to see Christmas lights, getting Candy Cane shakes, buying a toy for the Toys for Tots drive, making Christmas suckers for B's friends and delivering them, and other fun things. I'm looking forward to doing this again next year.

Whenever someone asked Brockston what he wanted for Christmas he would reply - a radio with tweezers, a whistle, and a microphone. What?!? I asked him where he had seen this radio and he said it was in his head. He also told me not to worry, Santa's elves would make it for him. I was stressing up until about a week before, trying to figure out what to do - but then it all came together. We found a cute radio at Target, a whistle at Zurchers, some tweezers out of a bug collecting kit that just happened to be the same color as the whistle and an echo mic to go on the side. I guess B was right Santa's elves could pull it together.

Testing out the whistle on his radio

Christmas morning was a lot of fun with these two little guys. Jamison came out and kept pointing at everything and saying "Oh wow!" They had no clue they were getting a four wheeler and a wagon (spoiled little guys - although we did get a pretty good deal on the slightly used four wheeler).

Notice the matching BYU jammies we all got on Christmas Eve