Me? I Want a Hula Hoop!

And I thought getting 2 to smile and "look pretty" for a photo was a challenge... None of these fine offerings made the cut for the card this year. Keep your eye on your mailbox for the winner maybe sometime next week.
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We are really enjoying the Advent season this year. The boys are totally into Christmas music, the nativity scene is getting lots of play action, and we are wearing out the bindings on our Christmas picture book collection. We've been crafting and baking and singing Jingle Bells since Thanksgiving with no signs of stopping any time soon. Our neighborhood is Big Into decorating with lots of lights and those enormous obnoxious blow-up characters. There is one house with an animatronic Santa in a sleigh (slightly creepy). We love it!
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We all went to the movies yesterday afternoon for the opening matinee of Alvin & the Chipmunks. OH, how I love going to the show! It's not that I don't love being able to hang out on the couch in my jammies and pause a film while I go pee, I do. You just can't replicate the sensory experience of the movie theatre at home adequately. The giant screen, the whole Dolby sound thing, the smell of popcorn (I'd say the taste, but it really doesn't taste as good as it used to when we were kids...), being part of an audience in a darkened room...eh, I can't describe it well tonight, but we've all been to the movies and know what I'm talking about. And, like anything, you don't really miss it until it's not around. Getting a babysitter to go to the movies isn't something we tend to do a lot (once!) as we really like to hang out as a family, especially with Mark gone so much of the time. But, we do like to get out of the house sometimes. So, thank God for Alvin & the Chipmunks, a movie we could see as a familiy. The computer-generated 'munks were adorable, the script was "eh", but whatever. Ben, in particular, loved it. Will loved the popcorn. Ella Rose slept soundly in the sling. And I got to go to the movies--yay!