Christmas for Cooper

I LOVE Christmas!!!  And I have tons of stuff to tell you about what we did in December, but I wanted to tell you about one of my most favorite things we did.

Our family has never had a set of matching stockings, and the stockings we have don't have our names on them.  But this year, Mom really wanted to get labeled matching stockings, so we did.



Cute, huh?

But once we had matching stockings, the next question was what to do with Cooper's stocking.  Santa always fills our stockings under the Christmas tree.  Mom didn't want Cooper's stocking hanging all by itself on the mantle and she didn't want it sitting under the tree with nothing in it.  And she really didn't want to just pack it away on Christmas Eve.  So instead, we did Christmas for Cooper.  She didn't come up with the idea until the middle of December, so it ended up being twelve days of Christmas for Cooper.  Each day a paper with an activity written on it was waiting inside Cooper's stocking for us to pull out.  We did something new each day and Mom took a picture of it.  Here are some of the fun things we did.

Watch "How the Grinch Stole Christmas" while eating white chocolate popcorn.

Make an ornament out of Legos.

Paint a snowman with marshmallows.

Make and decorate sugar cookies.

Watch "Home Alone" with a fire.  (And McDonald's for dinner as a bonus!)

Make a Nativity scene out of popsicle sticks.

Visit Santa.  (Sydney was too scared to sit with him.)

Take hot chocolate and money to the Salvation Army bell ringer.

Take homemande caramels to the firemen.  (Bonus: We got to see the fire engines and sit on one!)

 

Paint Christmas sun catchers.

 

Take muffins to Dad's office.  (If you look closely you can see the space in my mouth where I lost my first tooth!  I told you December was busy!)

Visit Cooper.

So on Christmas morning this is what we found.  Cooper's stocking was right there with all of ours and inside were pictures of everything we did for him for Christmas.  So when we looked at everything in our stockings, we got to look through his and remember all the fun we had.  I love my brother.  I can't wait to do Christmas for him next year.



***Side note from my Mom:  Ty loved this so much that he actually looked through Cooper's stocking and all of the pictures before he even dumped out his own stocking.  It was one of the sweetest and most memorable moments of Christmas morning for me.

He's Back!

My good pal Twinkly the Star is back!  He showed up one morning with a special breakfast for me and Syd: snow-covered donuts, hot chocolate in new super cool mugs, and presents.  Syd and I got light up pens, and I got some Christmas stickers and Sydney got a Christmas rubber duck.  He also left a special note for us.

Of course, I couldn't wait to find where he was hiding, and after a bit of searching, I finally found him!

I am so happy to have Twinkly with us again for a while.  I love that little elf!  And even though he can't talk back to me, I make sure to talk to him every day.  Here are a few things he's been doing since he's been here:

My turtles and Imaginext men caught Twinkly wandering around the house and didn't realize he's a good guy.

The first thing I do each morning is to go searching for Twinkly.  This morning he was in Mom's car hanging from the mirror she uses to keep an eye on me!  It was so fun to drive to school with him.  Only 14 more days until Christmas.  I hope I can be good for that long so Twinkly gives Santa a good report!

The Reason for the Season

I LOVE Christmas!  I am really excited about getting presents, but Mom and Dad have been talking about the real reason we celebrate Christmas, and that's because it's Jesus' birthday.  I thought other kids might not know that, so I drew a picture of the nativity and took it to school and showed the kids in my class why we celebrate Christmas.

Thanksgiving in the sun!

For Thanksgiving (and my birthday) we headed to California and Arizona.  We stayed at Gma and Gpa de Jong's for a couple of days and then drove to Phoenix to meet up with the rest of the family for T-day.

Syd has become obsessed with Mom and Dad's cell phones lately.  She wants to play with them all the time.  I think they're fun too.  We got to play with them a lot on the trip while Mom and Dad packed, while we waited to a delayed plane at the airport, on the plane, and in the car ride to AZ.  Mom was almost out of data by the time we got home.

Sydney was so tired on the plane, and slept almost the entire flight--on the floor at Mom and Dad's feet!  That did not look comfortable.

We were the last ones off the plane in California and the pilot let me and Syd look in the cockpit and sit in the pilot's seats!  How cool is that???!!!

I was so excited the night before we left that I didn't go to bed until after 10!  And I was still excited all through our traveling the next day.  But then I guess my adrenaline ran out, cuz I totally crashed during the hour drive from the airport to Gma and Gpa's house.

At Gma and Gpa de Jong's we played at the Children's Museum which is so fun.  Notice that we're all sporting summer clothes.  We were loving the 80 degree weather and sunshine.

They had a big grassy field outside the museum.  You certainly won't see that in Seattle.

When we got to Aunt Kari's house in Phoenix, we decided to take the dogs for a walk and head to a park since it was soooo nice outside.

The dog actually walked me most of the time.

Dad convinced me to go down this slide.  It was not very fun.

Syd and I were supposed to hold hands in front of the sunset.  She just wanted to run circles around me.

I love my Mom.

That night we roasted marshmallows in the backyard and the next morning we went swimming in the hot tub!

That's Aunt Selina (Uncle Mark's wife) with Dad.

On Thanksgiving morning (my birthday!) we took some informal family pics.  The lighting was bad everywhere because the sun was too bright and the shade was too dark.  We decided we could fix most things with photoshop and just started posing.  We managed to get a couple of good ones with a lot of weird ones.

And here's Grandma with her girls:

I wonder why we didn't take one of the boys?  Oh, yeah, cuz I was already off an running.

 

 



It was such a fun trip.  And Sydney even got used to the dogs while we were there.  She used to cry if a dog came within a foot of her.  But by the time we left, she would run up to the dogs, give them a quick pat, and then run away.  (Maybe now Mom and and Dad will let me have a dog.)

 

 

Of course, I LOVE the dogs at Aunt Kari's house.  I shared my Ninja Turtles with Riley.





 

And my new best pal is Dakota.

 

Aunt Kari is coming to visit us next week again.  Can't wait!  And then Gma and Gpa are coming up for Christmas!  I love my family.