The past 2 weeks we have been doing lots of Christmas activities! Last week Mom, Brittany, Brooke, & I had a girls night & celebrated Britt's b-day early! We went to Cheesecake Factory for dinner & then went to the Nutcracker Ballet at Symphony Hall. It was beautiful & amazing as always. Going to the Nutcracker with my sisters & mom is one of my favorite holiday traditions. It always makes me wish I had done ballet! My favorite part was the snowflakes & Snow Queen. I love the music for that dance & they have sooo much beautiful, sparkly snow falling on the stage. I also love the Sugar Queen Fairy. It was such a fun night!

Last night we had our yearly white elephant party with Mark & Laraine's family. We had the party at Laraine's new house, which was beautiful. We had a big Hawaiian meal, teriyaki chicken, kalua pork, hawaiian meatballs, coconut rice, pani popo, pineapple, & otai. Everything was so delicious! The gift exchange was amazing as always! Some of the funniest gifts were a Nsync puppet, crazy 80's cat calendar, head in a bottle, & Lady Gaga singing toothbrush! We sang happy birthday to Dad after & had cake & ice cream since it was his 60th birthday!!!

Some other things we have done this past 2 weeks:

We decorated & delivered gingerbread cookies to some families for cubscouts. It was so fun! We have a really great group of boys right now, they are always so excited for the activities! They loved decorating & eating the cookies & we drove around & looked at some Christmas lights when we were dropping off the cookies! It was cracking me up because one of the boys decorated his cookies so carefully & one dumped about a pound of sprinkles on his. The boy who decorated his carefully kept saying, "mine are a little more basic & yours are all out of control, so we will give someone a plate of each!" Then one of the mom's texted me yesterday & said that her son loved the activity so much he made her make cookies to decorate at home & then kept saying, "These are not good like Sister Duchein's!" Haha, it made my day!

We had a big dinner at Mom's to celebrate Grandpa & Grandma Donna's anniversary. It was nice to all be together! Another night we had a dinner together, went to the Star Wars movie at a theater Cody rented out & then had hot chocolate & tim tam slams.

Ally got here a few days ago, so all of us girls hung out & made cookies together!

Today is the start of Christmas vacation!!! So exciting!!!