Let the holidays begin!

One evening we had Dustin over and made delicous completely homemade carmel white chocolate apples. We piled as much caramel and chocolate as we could and that was so tasty with the tartness of the green apples!

When I make dinner, I often see this accompanied by "hold me? hold me?"

After we finished off the whipped topping with our pumpkin pie, Nicole REALLY wanted to finish it off.

A very pleasant experience for her :-)

Our tree has only lost one ornament from Michael's attention! We blockade off the tree with a standup toy and bucket so Jacob can't reach it. The blockade has made this the easiest year ever for having a tree! We also didn't put on the too-tempting candy canes.

We visited the Apex Nativity this afternoon. There were about 700 nativities loaned by members of the stake and community. I let them use my Ecuador set, so it was fun to try and find ours. Nicole's favorite was the tiny nativity inside an egg from Mexico.

Last night Jim and I were Mary and Joseph in the live nativity. It was outdoors in 30-something degree weather or we would have brought Jacob to be the baby like we did with Michael a few years back. We've really enjoyed participating in such a special event each year. There is a children's room with activities and snacks. We played for an hour with the nativity sets, coloring pages, stickers, and Nativity books.

Michael probably wasn't reinacting the Nativity, but he was still enjoying all of the different sets.