'Tis the Season

Highlights from Christmas 2011!  This is long overdue, but with pictures on 3 separate cameras, it took me a while to get to downloading.

Nothing kicks off the holidays better than a little tree trimming.

Gwen putting the angel on the tree

The finished product

After the tree was decorated, Gwen sat on the couch just staring at it
for a while.

This year, both girls took part in the Nurtury Christmas Pageant.  Gwen's class dressed up as Angels and stood on the bleachers singing their Christmas songs.  Whitney's little 2 year old class sat at the front of the stage and did their renditions of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and Jingle Bells.  Whitney was one of the more participatory toddlers, jingling her bells and doing the little dances.  It's such a novelty having a child who gets really into these things!

After the pageant was a perfect time to visit Santa as the girls were already dressed in the Christmas best.  We again went to the Santa at Greyhawk Plaza where Gwen asked for a mermaid and Whitney asked for a bear.

We had a fairly mellow Christmas Eve, starting with a last minute trip to the toy store to find said Mermaid.   After dinner at a packed Uncle Yu's, the girls and I decorated gingerbread cookies for Santa.

Santa must have liked his cookies because he left these presents under the tree for the girls...

On Christmas day, the girls opened their presents (which resulted in a floor covered with wrapping and toys, just like Christmas should be!) while I cooked up a big Christmas breakfast.  

Afterwards, with stores closed and nothing to do, we decided it was time to take advantage of the great California winter weather.  We met some friends at the Campo field for soccer practice:  With Adam and Tim as coaches of the girls' upcoming Pre-K soccer league, we needed to teach the girls what soccer was.  Whitney was a natural, dribbling the ball down the field.  Gwen and Clara on the other hand, just wanted to pick pebbles off the turf and sprinkle it on the ball.  Soccer practice then evolved into a game of duck-duck-goose before Gwen and Clara walked off hand-in-hand, probably to go talk about princesses.