December is just flying by so far, I can’t believe it’s already the 5th of the month! On day 3 of our Advent activity calendar was a candlelit bubble bath for the kids. Most of our activities are the same as last year and they thought this one was great – adding candles makes it very different from your average bath. I figured it was a good weekend (Friday) night activity since I knew they would want to stay in for awhile and this way I didn’t have to worry about rushing them to get them to bed for 8 pm.

It just goes to show that the activities don’t have to be expensive or complicated for the kids to enjoy them!

Saturday came around and our day 4 activity was a family game night using the Wii. I do like board games too and we’ll probably bring that one around on another weekend, but I love the Wii. I suggested that we’d have more fun if we got two more remotes. Last year when we did this we had to team up and share our two remotes. It was a great idea because playing four people at once is awesome.

We moved the coffee table over to one side of the living room and started with some carnival games which were good but ended up moving on quickly to the newest game that we had, Mario Party 8. THAT was fun. It’s like a board game with little mini-game challenges in between turns and it was a blast. It took about 45 minutes for us to play a ten-turn game but we had such a good time that this morning George suggested that we play again before lunch.

Today’s day five but our activity won’t be until after supper so I’ll save that for another post. Holidailies starts tomorrow with participants posting (almost) daily from December 6th until (I believe) January 5th, so there will be no shortage of blog posts for the next month.

In other news, our Christmas decorations are all up and it looks like Christmas threw up all over our living room. I love it! Our friends gave us a spare tree that has pre-strung lights and let me tell you something, I hope to never have to string a tree with lights ever again. It was fantastic to just need to plug everything in. The best part though is that it’s so much bigger than our old tree. We’ve had a 4-foot tree for the past 12 years (I bought it when I moved in with George and found out his decorations amounted to a 12-inch tree that sits on a desk. Um, hell no.) and I’ve always wanted to have a bigger one. This new one is 6 1/2 feet high and looks amazing in front of our living room patio doors.

I put the tree up on Friday evening so that Winnie could get used to having it around in the hopes that she wouldn’t start trying to pull the decorations off later. On Saturday afternoon George was out for a few hours and since he isn’t super interested in decorating (see aforementioned 12-inch tree) I figured that was a good time for the three of us to go ahead and go nuts. I blasted Christmas music on iTunes, made myself some minty tea, and we set about dressing up our tree.

I love our tree.

And apropos of, you know, nothing…

Now for supper so I can get ready for today’s activity!