Jacy vs Santa (spoiler alert: Jacy wins, Marinda loses)

This week we went to see Santa Claus! He was nice enough to take some time off of his busy schedule of being at malls to come to our church building! Luke was excited to tell Santa how he wants a crawler tractor. He got right on Santa's lap, gave a big smile, and made momma proud. It might have helped that we've been emphasizing how Santa is always watching to make sure he's on his best behavior :) Jacy, on the other hand, cried non-stop whenever we tried getting her near Santa without her security blanket (aka, Amit). We even tried giving her the candy cane beforehand, but even that didn't work! In the end, we had Amit hold her and stand somewhat near to Santa, and she wasn't too unhappy.

Look at the handsome boy!

This is best picture of Jacy and Santa that we got.

This is a more representative picture of how things went

After Santa we went to the most mature 5th birthday party ever! Luke's best friend Liam turned five, and instead of doing a normal 5th birthday party, Liam wanted two things: go rock climbing with his best friend Luke and have a couple people over for dinner: our family, his grandparents, and another close family friend. In total there would be 4 kids at the party: Luke, Liam, Darcy (Liam's sister who's Jacy's age), and Jacy. For dinner instead of wanting pizza or mac and cheese or something, he requested shrimp cocktails and mussels. No joke. 

Jacy Stories:

•Jacy gotten really into putting her "babies" to sleep. She'll pick up a stuffed animal or baby doll, wrap in it a burp cloth (the baby blanket), and bounce the baby to sleep while shushing it. Unfortunately, the first million times we tried to get a video Jacy would just laugh and run away. Thankfully, we managed to get a good video of her being adorable

•Jacy found a picture of Amit that we need to hang on the wall and she walked around saying "Daddy! Daddy!"

•Marinda was trying to rest one day but Jacy wasn't having any of that. She literally came over and say on Marinda's face!

•Jacy likes climbing into Luke's bunk bed. Check out this cute picture of her! And look at the other picture where we identified a ghost in our house.

•More cute pictures:

Luke does alphabet sticker pictures and each time he finishes one Marinda sings a phonics song and points to each letter with a lightsaber. And today after the song Jacy wanted to be like mommy!

Luke stories:

•Luke put up Christmas stuff on the door! He did a great job!

 •We let Luke play one of our grown-up games...sort of. We gave him Monumental moves  (like Cathedral) and told him to find a way to get all the pieces on the board. And he did it! Luke how proud he is of himself!

Luke and Jacy stories:

•We went to get Luke and Jacy's passports done, which meant we had to go to the courthouse. While we were waiting, Luke and Jacy had a blast playing in what must be the most unintentionally amazing government office waiting areas. They had the chairs set up in a giant circle, and the kids had a great time running around, and then they got inside and just ran and spun around.

•Last Sunday we watched the Christmas Devotional, and the kids sort of paid attention during the musical numbers and managed to entertain themselves. Jacy seemed mesmerized by the giant men talking on the screen. Other than that, they decided to get some bins and sit in them and repeatedly fall over!

Luke and Marshmallow fell down again!

•Luke and Jacy spontaneously started reading books in our room the other day. We're not sure what's up with the lighting in our bedroom, but this picture looks like it could be straight from the 70's between the colors and Jacy's crazy hair.