This year I decided that we needed an advent calendar — and somehow I ended up with three of them. Two are the candy filled ones so the third one I use as the activity advent calendar. Each day the kids open the drawer and a note inside tells us what Christmas activity we will be doing that day. Here are photos from our first twelve activities.

Day 1
The kids and I drove up to the Grapevine Parade of Lights.

Day 2
We made a Christmas craft — complete with foam shapes, glitter, and hot glue! They turned out real cute.

Day 3
The kids got to wear new Christmas jammies.

Day 4
We made a special Christmas treat.

Day 5
We met Daddy for lunch.

Day 6
We opened a new Christmas book to read.

Day 7
We went to Sister Hill’s Christmas story-time at the library.

Day 8
We dropped off care-packages at the Mission Office for any missionaries who didn’t receive one from home. This is something we started doing when we were in India and then continued it in Zurich. We decided that it is a fun tradition that we should continue.

Day 9
The kids got to sit on Santa’s lap at the Ward Christmas party. Raine was so excited, she wrote Santa a letter and gave it to him. Carter, well . . . as you can see, he wasn’t as excited.

Day 10
We went to the Christkindl Market in Arlington where we ate bratwursts and potato pancakes and then took a carriage ride around Ranger’s Ballpark.

Raine loved petting the horse after the ride . . . almost as much as she loved the hoola-hoop performance we watched later. Apparently hoola-hooping is the latest trend in exercise classes — I’ll be honest, I kind of want one of those hoops with lights inside.

Day 11
We attended the Stake “Sing Noel” concert. It was a fabulous performance but I don’t have any photos because it was in the chapel.

Day 12
We went to the zoo to ride the carousel, but it was under renovation, so we settled for riding the train instead.

We can’t wait to see what the next twelve days bring!