Jessica at ice skating lessons

After ice skating lessons, Jessica likes to skate a bit longer and practice. This week, she practiced her fish move while skating with her friend Isabella.

swinging at school

Jamison has been enjoying the nice weather and swinging outside at school. She likes to go high.

Jamison dresses up for Christmas

Mimi has gotten lots of cute Christmas dresses for Jamison. Here she is posing in some of the dresses that she has worn recently.

Sometimes, she does look a bit crazy.

more elf on the shelf

Toodles and Goldie have been up to many things at our house.  One morning, they made the girls mini pancakes.

The next evening, they were a bit mischievous and made both Jessica and Jamison look like Rudolph by making their noses red with markers.  Neither girl loved this and wanted it washed off before we could take pictures.

Another night, they decided to play with Jessica and tape her in her room.  Luckily for Jessica, Jamison got up first and removed all of the tape from her door.  Once Jessica heard about what happened and saw the photo, she was happy that her sister saved her.

Jessica thinks the elves are so sneaky because they got into her room and had a tea party without her even noticing it.

Our elves evidently like to drink syrup because we found them in our fridge slurping away one morning.

The elves sometimes leave messages for the girls.  

Both girls were a bit irritated to see that the elves had stolen an iPad during the night.  They thought it a bit unfair that they were playing with it.  Jessica decided to take it back since it was turned off anyways.

Another evening, the elves decided to take a joy ride on Jim's train.

And, yes, our elves do hide in normal place and without much hoopla.  One night, they hid behind a glass sculpture.  This was mostly because Jim and I both fell asleep right after the kids went to bed. He woke up about midnight and did a mad dash to hide the elves.

painting art project

One night after school, the girls and I painted pinecones as an art project.  Here is the end result where Jessica painted 1, I painted 2, and Jamison painted 1.  Can you tell who did which one?

Jamison really enjoyed the painting. She painted on both paper and her pinecone.

family skate night

A few weekends ago, we went to our first family skate night with some friends.   Jessica had fun skating and enjoyed spending time with her friend Leilani.

Jamison took a few turns on the ice, but decided that she preferred being pushed in her stroller.  This was a bit weird since last year she always wanted out of the stroller!

fairy Christmas dress

Jessica was very excited to receive this fairy Christmas dress from her Mimi last week.

I am pretty sure that this is the "Enough pictures dad" face.

Roya's 6th Birthday

Last weekend, Jessica's classmate Roya had her birthday party at the local ice skating rink.  Jessica had a good time skating at the party.

Here she is skating with her friend Arden.

the girls see Santa

Late last week, the girls visited Santa.  On the way to the car, Jim got some photos of the girls outside.

Jamison had fun jumping like a bunny to the car.

Once we got to the mall, there was a bit of a wait even though it was a Thursday night.

Jessica had a hard time telling Santa what she wanted because "he knows everything I want and should just decide what to bring me".  She may have told him that she wanted a costume that she saw in a book.  We'll see what Santa can do.

Jamison did not want to sit in Santa's lap or be anywhere near him. The entire time that we were in line, she kept saying "no lap, no lap".  We eventually got her to sit next to Santa and eventually on Santa's lap.

Afterwards, it was off to Chipotle where Jim managed to get some cute pictures of the girls.

Jamison is so focused at school

We got this picture of Jamison from her school towards the end of November.  She seems so focused on her task of stringing beads.

Jessica and Jamison make Christmas trees

This weekend, I wanted to do something Christmas-y with the girls.  Since it was a very rainy weekend (flooding everywhere), we generally stayed home.  I wasn't quite ready to roll out the gingerbread houses.  Instead, we decorated Christmas trees (upside down sugar cones).  

There was a lot of candy sampling going on. Jamison's tree has absolutely no marshmallows on it because she ate every one of them and wanted more, more, more.  Here she is showing me that she is eating the marshmallows.

Here are the finished products.  Jessica's is the one with marshmallows.

Elf on the Shelf is back

Toodles and Goldie are now back for the holiday season. Jessica was so excited to see them. Jamison doesn't really get it just yet.

Toodles and Goldie really are pretty silly according to Jessica. One night, they played Rapunzel with her faux hair and castle.

Jessica was very surprised at how sneaky the elves are.  One night, they slipped into her bedroom and decided to sleep in her bunk bed.  She had no idea and it took her a while to find them in the morning.

The next day, she almost missed them playing in one of her doll houses.

Jessica was shocked to find this note from the elves. They snuck into Santa's workshop and brought her some toys early! GASP.  Our elves are bad. Jessica figures that Santa must have known! She was excited to get these mini Barbie dolls nonetheless.

I guess the elves wanted to be in some of our family pictures too because they added themselves into this picture of Jessica. 

Man. These elves really are up to no good at night.  They put toilet paper all over our tree.  Jessica thought this was super funny, but we had to pull the toilet paper off right away.  It did not make the tree pretty.

a trip to Happy Hollow

Last weekend, we took the girls to Happy Hollow.  It had been a while since we had been there and Jessica really wanted to go.  The girls had fun hanging around on the statues and rock benches while I waited in line to get tickets.

While Jessica rode the roller coaster with her daddy, Jamison had I had fun on the carousel.

Then, we met up again for some rides on the cars.

Jessica had a blast on the frog hopper. Jamison was a bit sad to find out that "me too" did not work on this ride.  She's still about 1-2 inches too short for it. 

Then, it was off to the bug ride. The girls decided that they would ride separately.

It is not a trip to Happy Hollow without a ride on Danny the Dragon. Jim got some cute pictures of us while we were waiting in line.

Crossing the stepping stones is always a lot of fun.  

Jamison really liked this frog statue for some reason, so we had to say good bye on the way out.