Our Christmas countdown was cut short a little early this year, but that's okay. A trip to Italy makes it worthwhile! Here's what we did for the first 18 days though.
Day 1: We started out the month in Knoxville for my cousin's wedding. While I had gone up the night before with Mom and Dad for the rehearsal dinner, Ryan and the girls came up on Saturday. What better way to start out our December than a stop at Ham 'n Goody's for lemon cookies?! They're the best!
Day 2: Coming back from Knoxville, we stopped at Tellus Science Museum for a few hours. This is always a fun place to explore.
Day 3: Stuffing, sealing, and stamping Christmas cards to be mailed out the next day.
Day 4: Narwhal toss. Because why not? Target had this in their dollar spot, and it looked too fun to resist. Sure enough, it was a lot of fun! We came up with lots of different toss challenges: regular, through the legs, backwards, blindfolded, and such. Ryan took the championship!
Day 5: We made some thumbprint ornaments; they were pretty cute little reindeer.
Day 6: Gift giving through Samaritan's Purse. Both girls choose to give their own money on gifts that benefit kids.
Day 7: We wanted to see some good Christmas lights this year, but didn't want to take the time or spend the money on Callaway, Lake Lanier, etc. We realized that the Life College "Lights of Life" was only $10 and was super close to get to, so we gave that a try this year. There were several really pretty displays.
Day 8: We drove to Birmingham to have an early Christmas with Bama's family. We love spending time with our family, and these littlest members are so fun!
Day 9: Family game night with Monopoly.
Day 10: Making homemade cards for our family.
Day 11: Stonehaven's Christmas program in the chapel. It was a lovely evening, and both girls did so great. Mia played "Ode to Joy" on the guitar while Lily played "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel" on the piano. They sang beautifully with their classes too.
Day 12: Grandpops was in town to see the Christmas program, so we enjoyed an evening with him. We went up to The Battery for dinner at Fox Brothers, and then the girls had fun running around on the green.
Day 13: Well...this day just didn't go as planned. We were going to go to the Aquarium for the evening, but the girls really wanted to go to their middle school basketball game. I had a lot of work to get finished, so we decided to just pass. They went to the game, and I got work done. Good day but no picture.
Day 14: We celebrated Christmas a little early this year, so this was our Christmas Eve. We made it a family movie night and watched The Star which is such a sweet movie.
The girls were excited to get their new pajamas.
Day 15: Merry Christmas (10 days early)! We had a wonderful and fun morning opening gifts and enjoying time together. The girls loved all their gifts, but the were super pumped about these two particular items: a stuffed Niffler for Lily and a hand-controlled drone for Mia.
Day 16: Christmas with the Brown family. This was our first year without Meme at this celebration, so it was nice to spend time with the family and remember her. Ryan wasn't able to attend because he was taking Decker over to Birmingham, but the girls and I enjoyed the evening.
Day 17: We met the McKeeby family at Antico to hang out and catch up.
Day 18: We read The Crippled Lamb by Max Lucado together. We were glad Aberle was able to join us.
Day 19-24: No pictures on this entry, but lots of them in the following posts as we were having lots of fun in Italy!
