I love the Christmas season. We always try to make time for our favorite traditions...

Watching lots of Christmas movies! Our favorites are The Santa Clause, Elf, The Grinch (with Jim Carrey), and Home Alone.

I always like going on Pinterest for fun ideas for gifts for our neighbors. This year we did homemade caramel with a red and green apple.

The kids like helping deliver them all over our neighborhood.

This was our second year Christmas caroling at a senior living place with our church friends.

We had another movie morning with our neighborhood friends.

I've always wanted to go to a Living Nativity so when I found out that there was one at the church where I do Bible study, I was so excited. They did a really great job.

 After we walked through the "town of Bethlehem," there was a craft, cookie decorating, and hot chocolate. I'm hoping this will be our newest Christmas tradition!

Speaking of new Christmas traditions, we just finished reading "The Best Christmas Pageant Ever" while drinking hot chocolate. We had never read it before, and we all loved it. We laughed and cried (well, I cried). I hope to do this every Christmas Eve morning.

Rachel and Michael wanted to take a day trip down to San Diego minus the kids. Lauren won't take a bottle, so it ended up just being minus kid. And we got to have Ben for the night! My kids were pumped! 

We brought him home with us from Nana's house after the wonderful annual brunch my mom hosts. We had to make a quick stop at Trader Joes. It was an adventure grocery shopping with four kids. I don't even normally go with all three of mine!

Dinner was a success because Ben loves grilled cheese sandwiches. He was much less enthused about the broccoli soup. Thankfully aunts don't have to make kids eat their vegetables! 

Bath time.

And then we watched Mickey's Christmas Carol before bed. 

The next day I met up with my brothers and sister-in-law for an early showing of Star Wars (Andy, Joey, and Hannah had already seen it with my parents and brother-in-law a few days earlier) so Andy had all four kids until nap time. He took Ben outside to our neighbor's basketball hoop to shoot hoops. Shooting hoops meant Andy lifted Ben up to the basket and Ben would drop the ball in the hoop. Apparently, this lasted all morning. Andy was actually sore the next day. But Ben was worth it!

We went to see Santa again this year as usual. However, this year it was extra special because we went with my sister, brother-in-law and their two kids who flew here early from Indiana. My kids were SO excited to go see Santa with their cousins!

 Ellie (almost 4!), Joey (9), Lauren (9 mos.), Hannah (6 1/2), Ben (2)

 Ellie made it very clear again this year that she did NOT want to sit on Santa's lap. Hopefully she's up for it next year because Joey is getting awfully big for poor Santa's knee.

Santa was able to persuade her to get close enough for a picture. 

 All five cousins with Santa. Ben and Lauren did great with him.

The Gallo family

 Since Andy and the kids saw the new Star Wars movie that day (with my parents and Uncle Michael), it seemed appropriate to take a picture in front of the Star Wars decorations.

And one last cousin picture.

On Saturday, the Gallos came over to visit for the day. They had just flown into town a couple of days earlier so we were so excited to get to spend time with them. We first met them at Hannah's basketball game bright and early in the morning. Hannah had a great game and even made a basket! After the basketball game, the four Gallos came over to our house to hang out...

and get some snuggles! Although Ellie's not really sleeping.

See?

Andy had his own cuddler.

For lunch, Rachel and Michael headed out to get some Mexican food while we watched the kids. Lauren was super content sitting in Andy's lap eating Cheerios.

Octavian's no dummy. He knew who to stake out for falling crumbs.

After lunch, Michael and Rachel came back, put the two kids down for a nap at our house and then they headed out with Andy, Joey and Hannah for Joey's basketball game. My parents met them there. Then after Joey's game, Rachel came back here while the rest of them went to go see the new Star Wars movie. 

Rachel and I had a great time hanging out, having a hair curling tutorial (Rachel taught me how to curl my hair the right way!), and making cookies.

What's cuter than a thumb sucker?

TWO thumb suckers! 

Rachel, the kids, and I had a quick dinner and then headed out to meet the other group at Santa...

Andy and I were talking about carving a turkey on Thanksgiving...
Joey: Wait, you can carve a turkey?! Can I carve mine into a barfing turkey?
I never thought about how carving pumpkins and carving a turkey are very, very different.


Hannah has turned into quite a lover of books...
Hannah: Mom, this library book has a page ripped. It's barely hanging on. Poor thing!!


Ellie is still unsure about how she feels about Santa. She's made her peace with the fact that he comes into our house at night since she knows that means she gets presents, but then she said this:
Ellie: I'm not going to sit in Santa's lap, but I will sit in Jesus' lap.


Ellie: Mary had a little lamb, little lamb, little lamb. Mary had a little lamb, and Jesus Christ is born.

Last night we headed south about twenty minutes to visit "Candy Cane Lane." Every Christmas, 3.5 blocks go all Griswold on the neighborhood. The houses are connected by candy canes and each house is lit to the max. We parked close by and then walked all around each block. We got a little sprinkled on when we first started, but then it cleared up, and it was really nice.

I had heard about Candy Cane Lane before, but we had never gone. Our neighbors invited us to go with them so the kids were extra excited to be able to go with their friend Chloe.

Since Ellie is the baby of our family, she got to go in the stroller with "Pooh," her blanket. Man, she loves the stroller! She was so relaxed that Andy said it was like she was in a coma. Clearly, it was a happy coma!

The girls especially loved this "Frozen" house. In the background, there was a screen and chairs set up, and they were playing the Frozen movie!

Andy, the Philadelphia boy, laughed at how bundled up we were for the 58 degree weather. 58 degrees is chilly to us!

The lighting is not the best, but here's our little family of five!

 Joey came home in September all excited about joining the school band. I had been wanting him to learn an instrument, so I immediately agreed. At the informational meeting the next night, the band director was talking about different ways of finding cheap instruments. He said the best way is to ask friends and family if anyone has an instrument they aren't using. He said, "You'll be surprised that some random relative has an old instrument just lying under their bed." I didn't think anyone in our family had a clarinet we could borrow, but I put it on Facebook to see if any local friends had one. Turns out my aunt had an old clarinet in her closet! It made me laugh that the band director called it almost perfectly!

This past week, Joey had his first band concert. 

Getting warmed up.

His proud sisters!

Since Joey is in the beginning band, the parents were told his concert would "almost be music."

And that is what it was...a bunch of darling kids almost playing music. ;-) It will be fun to see how much progress they make by the next concert.

Friday night, we went to the Google Christmas party. I drove up to Irvine to pick up Andy from his office, and then we drove up to Long Beach. The party was on the Queen Mary! And since it was two hours away from our house, we decided to spend the night in one of the rooms since it's now been converted into a floating hotel.

Andy has worked at Google for exactly a year now. He started right after the Christmas party last year so we missed it, so this was my first time really getting to know some of the people he works with.

We also had a fun time goofing around in the photo booth:

Andy was a little tall for the photo booth.

 That's better.

 The stink eye.

 Gross!

And because we are weird, this was our favorite picture of the night!

After the party was over, it was so nice just being able to walk downstairs to our room. And sleeping in the next morning? Glorious!

The next morning we walked around the ship a little more and then drove back home. Since Andy takes the shuttle to work, we had to pick up his car in Oceanside. It was right near one of our favorite local brunch spots, so we took advantage of our time without kids and enjoyed a lovely meal before we got back to reality. Huge thanks to my parents for holding down the fort while we were gone!

Since I didn't post much in November, I thought I would do a camera dump before the month is over.

We had an end of the season party for Hannah's soccer team, the Grasshoppers, at a local pizza place.

Hannah and Andy were both sleepy one lazy Sunday afternoon so they decided to snuggle. It ended in nap time for both of them.

Since Andy's parents couldn't be here for Joey's birthday this year, they sent some extra money for us to all go out to Dairy Queen as their treat.

The kids were just a tad excited.

Andy and I enjoyed a special treat too. In fact, they accidentally made me two Blizzards! I love mistakes like that!

Too much sugar?!?!

Hannah and I are having fun experimenting with different hairstyles now that I can actually French braid.

This might be my favorite one so far.

Here's a Dutch French braid.

Hannah and Ellie were both invited to a "Rockstar" birthday party down the street. They came back ready to show off their moves.

My mom read about a cool hike nearby where you can see hundreds of tarantulas come out during mating season.

Turns out we were a little too late for mating season so we didn't see any tarantulas, but it was still a fun hike.

It even rained on us, but fortunately not too much.

Joey had the map and made sure we stayed on the right loop.

After our hike, my parents, Joey, Hannah, and I went to In-N-Out for dinner. Meanwhile, Andy and Ellie had a date night so it was a fun night for everyone.

Andy worked from home one day and he had a little lap buddy.

He's teaching her all about computer programming.

She's been much more of a "Daddy's girl" lately, and Andy is soaking it up!

This was the outfit Ellie picked out for church one Sunday. And yes, she wore the crown the whole time.

Have I mentioned she's a bit of a ham?

Another mom and I helped plan a Native American party for Joey's 3rd grade class.

Since it was my first time hosting Thanksgiving, my goal was to make it as easy and stress-free as possible. I was so happy to find "make ahead" recipes for gravy and mashed potatoes. I made both the weekend before and froze them for the big day. I loved getting those two things done way ahead of time, and it did make things much easier on Thursday. Andy raved about how good the gravy was!

One day during the kids' week off for Thanksgiving break, we headed to Google to visit Andy for lunch. We hadn't gone together since April, so the kids were very excited. They all wore their Google shirts and badges from "Take Your Child to Work" Day. Getting ice cream after lunch is always a highlight for them.

I always look forward to lunch itself. Look how beautiful these black bean nachos are!

Hannah, Ellie, and our neighbor Chloe had a little fun while Andy was playing video games. Silly girls!