It's fun to see what traditions our kids most look forward to every Christmas season. We all have our favorites and then we often try something new. One of our long-standing traditions that the kids love is our trip to the mall. We go to the mall and split up into different groups and the kids buy gifts for each other and for Andy and me. It's cute how much they love it. Ellie was happy that we got to stop by the play area for a while.

 This year my mom bought a gingerbread house for Ellie and her to decorate while I was helping at the kids' school. The kids were REALLY excited to dig in.

 The box said that the serving size was 1/48th. Ha!

The three of them did a pretty good job of polishing it off in one night!

Another new thing we did this year was to go to a Christmas concert at Emmanuel Faith Community Church (where I go to Bible study). We made it a girls night and went with our neighbors. The concert was absolutely amazing! I really hope we go again in the future.

 I got the idea from this blog post to get a whole bunch of Christmas picture books from the library. There are so many good book recommendations in the comment section. We didn't have as much time for this as I was hoping, but I want to try this again next year.

The kids had a Christmas program at church. They all sang a Christmas hymn with their Sunday school class.

Then all the classes came together and sang, "O Come All Ye Faithful" at the end.

 Another favorite tradition is making Christmas cookies. Again, I got a fun idea from a blog, this time about decorating cookies with food coloring markers.

I found some food coloring markers on Amazon, and the kids had a blast decorating the cookies.

This was a snowman that Ellie made. She ran out of room for her last E so she wrote it at the beginning.

These were two of Hannah's best cookies.

Joey loved making up funny ones. The first two say "Just an ordinary sock" and "Please don't cut me down. All I want for Christmas is to stay upright." His Christmas star makes me laugh.

We also have watched two of their favorite Christmas movies, Elf and The Santa Clause. Watching Elf was especially cozy because we watched it on their last day of school before break. It was really rainy that day, and the kids got soaked walking home from school. They came home, took warm baths, got in their jammies, had some hot chocolate and curled up under their blankets on the couch to watch. It was a perfect movie day!

I've lost count of how many times we've gone to see this Santa, but it was his 29th year doing it! Bless his heart! 

It was sweet seeing all the kids tell Santa what they wanted. Most of their requests involved Pokemon and stuffed animals...and Pokemon stuffed animals. 

I was surprised that Joey still wanted to sit on Santa's lap. I wonder how many more years of that we'll have. 

Ellie, on the other hand, still could not be persuaded to sit on Santa's lap. She almost did, and then at the last minute changed her mind because "Santa is fat."

She was a big fan of the lights though!

We had Andy's Christmas Party for his work in early December. It was at a beautiful hotel up in Huntington Beach. It was so fun getting all dressed up, eating delicious food and hanging out with his work friends.

The food was amazing. It was a buffet with a ton of awesome options.  Look at this hunk of meat!  

Andy's company brought in a bunch of fun arcade style games. We played this four player PAC-MAN game with Andy's boss and his wife. So fun.

 They even had corn hole in the hall. What a great party!

I've briefly mentioned that my friend Stacie is back home on furlough from being a missionary in Africa. It's been so fun meeting her kids and getting to hang out with them. While it was still warm, we took the kids to a splash park. Stacie's kids had never been to anything like that before, and they loved it.

On Wednesday morning our cabinet painter brought back our doors and drawers, and he put on all the knobs and pulls. I can't tell you how amazing the paint job is. It was SO worth having the cabinets painted professionally instead of trying to do it ourselves.

Wednesday afternoon our stove arrived! The guy who delivered and installed it told me to heat it up and let it run for twenty minutes to break it in. I hadn't seen the number 350 on my oven for a couple of months so that was really exciting! I'm having a great time getting to use an oven again!

We finished up our last two projects over the weekend. We installed our microwave (which was more frustrating than we anticipated) and installed the butcher block counter (which went much more smoothly than we thought). It feels amazing to be done with Phase One! For Phase Two we are getting new floors for the whole downstairs, new baseboards, underneath the breakfast bar will get a little trim, and we're getting a new refrigerator. That will probably all happen in early January (we hope!), so for now we have a little break for the holidays!

After a month and a half of waiting, we were finally ready for the counters to be installed. Once that was scheduled, I was able to schedule all the other projects right in a row. It was going to be a fun, crazy week...

On Wednesday the counters arrived. We ended up picking a HI-MACS solid surface. We went with a light neutral color called Edisto. One of my favorite parts of the solid surface counter top was getting a seamless, integrated sink. You can see it in the picture above.

The time from when we first ordered our counters to when they were actually installed was supposed to be about two weeks. It ended up taking six. Getting the counters installed was the first step in a long line of items that needed to get done so we were kind of stuck waiting for that to happen. Thankfully, we weren't in a terrible hurry, but it was definitely an exercise in patience. While we were waiting, we decided to tackle another kitchen project on our own. This one was Andy's idea for a fun way to add a little interest and texture to our all white kitchen. If you are a fan of the show Fixer Upper, you know all about shiplap. Well, I found a You Tube tutorial on how to do faux shiplap pretty easily and cheaply. Our neighbor hooked us up with a chop saw, a nail gun and a bunch of other supplies, so we were good to go.

You know that book, "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie," where the kid gives a mouse a cookie and one thing keeps leading to another? Well, long story short, our oven died so we decided to redo the whole kitchen!

This is what we started with (Andy photo shopped the red lines to show the changes we wanted to make to the island).

And this was our inspiration. We wanted to go with a white kitchen, stainless steel appliances, and a wood breakfast bar.

We started finding contractors and getting estimates for all the work we wanted done: new counters, new back splash, cabinets painted, butcher block slab for the island, and we started shopping for new appliances. It was a lot to do at once, but we were also kind of under the gun. We didn't want to get the new oven put in until the work was all done, and, call me crazy, I don't love not having an oven, so we wanted to move fairly quickly. We got one estimate from a company that included everything we wanted to have done. While that would have been a much easier route, we decided to save money and do some of the work ourselves and find better deals with various contractors.

The main part we felt comfortable doing ourselves was the demolition.

Andy's mom happened to be in town the weekend we demo'ed the island so we put her to work too!

The demo for the counters was pretty easy once we got the hang of it. It was just a lot of stuff because we had to take off all the tile and then the concrete slab underneath.

Once the counters on the island were demo'ed, we had our neighbor help us cut down part of the island wall because it was kind of useless, and we would rather have a little more counter space. We also cut out a piece of cardboard to try out the dimensions for the custom butcher block counter we were going to order.

Next up was the backsplash. Under the category of "First World problems," the backsplash was kind of a nightmare. Plan A was that we wanted to keep our original back splash, but everyone told us that probably couldn't happen. Sure enough our new counters were going to be about an inch lower than our old ones so we had this weird gap that we didn't know what to do with. We decided to just go for it and get a new back splash. I started to do the demo, but it was much harder to do than the counters because the tiles were glued to the drywall. It was almost impossible to get the tiles off without damaging the drywall. We looked into hiring someone else to do all the demo work, but one place was WAY too expensive and the other place didn't work with our time frame (the demo had to get done before our new counters went in). At this point we had already picked a company to install the back splash, and we were told that they would do any drywall repair that was needed. So we decided to go back to doing the demo ourselves and not worry too much about the drywall damage. It wasn't until AFTER I had demo'ed most of the back splash and damaged quite a bit of the drywall that we were told the install company does NOT repair drywall. Great. This was definitely a low point in our remodel process because there was a lot of damage, and now Andy and I had to figure out how to fix it all. By this time, the counters were getting installed in just a matter of days, so we were pressed for time. 

Andy was not a happy camper that weekend as he did his best to repair the extensive damage. It didn't help that we had different ideas of the best way to go about it. In the end, he was able to get it good enough that the new tile guy we hired (we changed our mind about the other company) said he could work with it. Phew! It was so nice to get all the demo done and then we were ready for the installations to begin...

Thing 1 and Thing 2 together at last! The girls have wanted to do matching costumes ever since last Halloween. Chloe's mom came up with this cute idea!

Friday night was the annual Halloween Carnival at Emmanual Faith.

We took Rapunzel,

Thing 2 (Thing 1 was at a different carnival that night),

and Kylo Ren.

Emmanuel Faith always does such a nice job with the Halloween carnival. 

We've gone every year since 2009, and it's something the kids always look forward to.

After 8 years of going, we definitely have a routine.

We always start with the outside games while it's still light.

Then we take a quick hotdog break and finish up with the games in the gym. It seemed extra crowded this year, so we didn't do quite as many games as usual, but with our epic night the night before, we were more than happy to just pick our favorites and go.