Holiday Traditions

Sometimes I feel a little sad that my "almost twins" have cruised through babyhood.  The time has flown!  At the same time, each stage is sooooo much fun.  The kids have been really excited about Christmas this year.  Costco has had Christmas trees out for months now, and every time we go Karis says, "Mommy, let's go down this pile!" (a.k.a. "aisle").  They both love looking at the "pretty lights," and have memorized on which aisles baby Jesus and the snowmen are located.   So, they were beyond excited when we put our own tree up a few weeks ago. 

And I was beyond excited to start the first of many fun Christmas traditions today.  I have early memories of making sugar cookies and gingerbread men with my Mom at Christmastime, and I love that my kids are now old enough that I can begin recreating those memories with them.

I worked hard to get everything in place.  I got the dough rolled out and ready.  I helped the kids into their chairs.  Then, I turned around to get the cookie cutters...  

Little Man took advantage of the two seconds it took for me to grab them and dug right in!  Of course, I put the cookie cutters down and grabbed my camera. :)  

Karis saw what Kai was doing and there was no way she was going to miss out on the action!

I quickly realized they were going to be less interested in cutting out shapes and more interested in eating cookie dough. :)  However, after I did some demonstrating, they jumped right in. 

They spent some time doing this:

But in all actuality, they did a lot more of this:

If you look closely at the photo on the right, you can see that Kai even tried to do both at once!

Collectively, Karis and Kai probably cut out about 5 cookies.  It's a good thing that memories were my goal and not productivity! :)  

Kai even got in a little practice on his sharing skills:

And we finished it off with an...

We had so much fun.  I can't wait to do it again next year!