This year Hayden and I made a bunch of white paper ornaments to hang in the windows.  I like how they turned out.  They were super easy to make and remind me of groovy 1960′s design.  We sat out on the patio tonight with the fire.  The patio pic has the indoor Christmas tree reflected in the window.

The boys had their Christmas pageant on Thursday at their Catholic preschool.  It was so adorable!  Hayden had a big role in the recital.  He was one of the Wisemen and got to wear a really cool robe and crown.  Jake was an angel.  Hayden was a very animated singer!  Jake was a champion finger sucker on stage (not much singing going on), but he looked oh so cute doing it.  Afterwards, we all went to the dining hall and had a Christmas potluck feast with all the other families.  Daddy was away all week and was not able to attend.  Below are some cell phone pics.

 Tim was gone all week for a conference but came home today.  We celebrated by making a campfire after dinner out on the patio.  Tim was teaching Hayden how to safely tend to the fire.  Jake was very snuggly after having missed daddy all week.

Earlier that week while daddy was away we made Christmas cookies.   Jake did not like the red hots…”too spicy”.

We had a small cocktail party with friends Saturday night.  It was a fun night.  I took a few pics of the set-up before folks arrived.  I forgot (or was too lazy) to take pics after actual people arrived.  These are not great photos (no flash and very high ISO).  The lit-up martini bar was made out of plastic translucent drawers that I turned upside down and inserted christmas lights underneath.  easy-peasy mood setting bar!  We were going to have this party outside mostly on the patio, but it had rained that day.  So we covered the kids toy storage shelves with white table cloths and pushed it all against the chalk wall in the playroom.  We also wrote the do-it-yourself martini bar recipes on the wall with chalk (tim’s idea).

These were not taken at the cocktail party obviously (kids & cocktails don’t mix), but I wanted to throw these pics in the post.  I liked the emotion in these pics.