Holiday Recap - Wandering Through the Days

On Christmas eve day we decided to start a new family tradition and went bowling. At 10:30 am we had the alley entirely to ourselves. We bowled two games each and had quite a bit of fun. We came home for lunch, watched some Animal Planet videos together, and then headed out for the chaos that is the "children's mass" on Christmas eve. The church was standing room only and so hot it was unbearable. (I learned today that the A.C. was even turned on, but you wouldn't have known it.) Dinner and the quiet that followed were terrific. We visited the NORAD web site to track Santa and then headed off to bed.

Christmas day was lovely and quiet. We spent it building and read lots and lots of books. While the overwhelming majority of them were nonfiction, the two picture books were huge hits. If you haven't seen these yet, you need to check them out.

Skunkdog, written by Emily Jenkins and illustrated by Pierre Pratt (You can see some excerpts and learn more about the book at Emily Jenkins' web site.)

Tadpole Rex, written and illustrated by Kurt Cyrus (You can preview some of the pages at Google Book Search.)

Here are a few pictures of the boy with some of his favorite gifts.

Today was filled with making art, constructing a LEGO fire station, and building more marble-run arrangements than we can count. This is one of our favorites so far.

Here are two of the projects we worked on. One used old toilet paper tubes while the other made good use of leftover tissue paper. The results were fairly nice and we had great fun making them. The directions were very easy to follow and are linked below.

3-D Snowflake Craft

3-D Designs

Unlike the folks in the Northeast, Midwest, and Northwest, we have no snow. It was nearly 60 degrees on Christmas, though it was much cooler today. We've been housebound (by choice!) for two days now. Perhaps we'll actually get outside before the week is out!

That's all for now. I hope everyone is enjoying the break as much as we are.