Christmas is coming!

Advent greetings from the Six-Headed House!  We've been crazy busy with Christmas preparations, fun outings and all manner of celebrations.  

We joined Grandpa and Great-Grandma for their church's annual Harvest Dinner.

We drove to Michigan to spend Thanksgiving at Matt, Nikki and Katie's house for the first time.  Simon discovered that he loves Olaf the snowman while we were there.

We've had lots of playdates that resulted in fun like this:

 

and messes like this:

We put up our Christmas tree

and couldn't decide which of the enthusiastic kids should get to put the angel on top.  So they each did it in turn.

Eventually we got it finished :)

We went to A Country Christmas to see the lights, nativity and trains.

Charlotte and Leonard performed wonderfully in their school Advent Concert.

We had tons of fun at the Breakfast with St. Nick at school on Saturday morning.  We had a great breakfast, decorated Christmas cards, made reindeer food, wrote letters to Santa and talked to St. Nick!  There were even reindeer to visit with afterward.  Andy and Simon were too sick to go, but we told them all about it over lunch.  

 Marion can stand up now.  Look out, world!  She can grab onto the bench and pull herself up to see what we're doing, or she can pull herself up using the changing table and throw all the diapers on the floor.  Awesome.  (This picture is blurry because she NEVER STOPS MOVING!)

 Yesterday was Marion's first birthday!!!  She smiled at us while we sang her happy birthday, ate her snowman cupcake with gusto and happily opened her presents (and gnawed some tissue paper).  Happy birthday, delightful Marion!  We love you!

Today we pulled the big kids out of school early to go to Grandpa's annual Rotary Club Christmas Luncheon in Burlington.  They visited with Santa, had a really yummy lunch and heard beautiful yuletide carols being sung by a choir.  Literally.

Bonus sweetness:

We hope you're all having a wonderful Advent (you should have already received a Christmas card from us) and wish you time spent with family and friends, safe roads, joy and piles of Christmas cookies.  See you soon!