December Little Things

Welcome to Monday! I thought we would start off the week with December little things wrap up (holidays excluded), show you a little of what our Elf was up during the Christmas season and finish with a glimpse of our holiday (according to my iPhone ;)).

We stated out December with festive spirits with our North Pole breakfast.  Snowflake, our Elf, made her re-appearance and had the girls giddy with excitement.

After all of that fun, we headed to Starbucks for Wes and my favorite treat (the seasonal toffee nut latte's which are sadly already gone from Chengdu now) and the girls got a bear cake, because you know, the donuts were not enough sweets for one day ;).

After a few errands we ended up at our favorite pizza place for the last time before the holidays.  The girls brought their newly delivered stick sets from Snowflake and it kept them entertained the whole time waiting on their pizza.

Me and my big girl - how is she turning 5 in less than 2 months??

All of the girls!

We played in leaves one evening, but other than that we mostly spent December hibernating inside to stay out of the cold/pollution since we have to walk everywhere.

One afternoon, I made some time at work and headed to Emma's classroom to hang out/read books to her class.  I had a blast seeing her in her element and see her beam with pride when I walked into the classroom :).

She doesn't look that happy here (she was eating an apple), but I promise she was!

After school, we picked Everly up and I let the girls play on the playground a bit before making our way to the car.  Since the girls ride the school bus in the morning and afternoon, they never get to stop and look at the school's Christmas display, so we made sure to make time to hug every reindeer, snowman and even Santa! on our way out.

I liked this particularly festive snack bag that Wes made Everly for school one morning!

I don't have too many pictures, but the Saturday before we were heading back to Dallas, there was a work get together with the other expats and the host made some very tasty jambalaya.  Our kiddo's were the only children there and they had a blast taking the attention of the whole room - it was such a fun night!

The girls had their Christmas school performance on Wednesday afternoon before our trip (more to come on this - I didn't have any iPhone pictures) and afterwards we headed out for some wonton's with L's family.

On Thursday before we left, the girls had their Christmas parties. The kids in Emma's class were asked to bring stocking stuffers to share with everyone in the class and this is the loot that she came home with! I told Wes they might need to define stocking stuffer for those that are not familiar with that term ;), there is no way that bear would fit in a stocking!

I scored some cake for the family from a work party that day - which made everyone pretty happy!

The next morning we woke up bright and early to head to the airport.  What we didn't know at the time is that our 24 hour trek home would eventually take us almost 72 hours to make it back to DFW!