One story before bed (The Night Before Christmas of course!) and they are off to dreamland. That's the plan anyway, we'll see how long it takes for them to settle down.
Our little angels dressed and ready for church this evening. We arrived at 3pm for a 4pm Mass and found the church was already very full. So we ended up in the gymnasium of the school for the service. We had told the kids to be on their best church behavior as usual. But as soon as we sat down on the bleachers in the gym Ellie announced that "this isn't a church, it's a gym. So I don't have to use church manners". And that set the tone for her for the rest of the service. Luckily as it was the Children's Mass it was brief. Paul and I were definitely ready for a glass of wine by the time we made it out of there though! At least she looked angelic!
Here is our little man at the eight month mark. Sorry it took me so long to post, it's been a really busy week!
It was Ellie' s last day of school for the year and they had a Christmas concert in the sanctuary for the parents. So cute! But obviously very brief as the 40+ three year olds have an attention span of about 3 seconds at best. Elle looked a little dazed through most of the program, but did manage to pull herself together to sing "Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer". Here she is doing her reindeer antlers. 
We took the kids to the mall to see Santa Claus today. Boy were they excited! We were very impressed that no one cried. William did the "tug test". Yep, it's a real beard. Eleanor wants jewelery and princesses, Nick wants a Hot Wheels race track, and William just wants something to chew on. (The Hot Wheels track was news to us, we hadn't heard that one before. Not sure if "Santa" can pull that off this close to Christmas)
Eleanor picked out her outfit all by herself today. Pretty cute! And matching! The beret makes the outfit I think.
Nick and Ellie had a fine time decorating Daddy's birthday cake. The theme being a "battle between the Christmas army and Disney Forest Friends". Don't ask me, I just do the frosting. But Daddy thought it was funny and that's all that matters!
William making snow angels in a snow bank. (Not really, he actually can't move very well in his snowsuit. Like the little kid in The Christmas Story. But he was thinking about doing it, I could tell.) We are due for another snow storm tonight so I thought we should play in the snow while the sun is still shining!
We had lots of snow yesterday and today, probably six inches in our yard. The kids had a wonderful but brief time playing in it today. Ellie wasn't terribly thrilled with having cold hands and came inside after about five minutes. Nick made it a little longer, but didn't find shoveling to be very fun and decided not to help Paul with the walkways after all. The rest of the day they played with all of the Christmas decorations. I should say they are collectively "un-decorating" the house. I spend quite a while each day tracking down and returning santas/snowmen/reindeer etc. to their rightful places. 
This tree may just be the incentive William needs to learn to crawl properly! It is quite fascinating for him and he was using every trick he could come up with to get closer. Army crawl forwards, army crawl backwards, up on all fours rocking, and his own unique head on the floor with arms/legs straight "crawl". Hopefully between his siblings redistributing the ornaments and him eating them we will still have a decorated tree on Christmas Day!
