This year, we invited a family with teenagers to decorate gingerbread houses with us and I think Holly giggled the entire time! Oh gosh, I can't imagine being in the phase of life where we are parents to teenagers, but I guess it's coming! We had lots of fun and our gingerbread house was stripped of all it's candy in less than a week!

Ah, decorating the tree. It's a total frenzy of excitement and urgency for our kids. Our tree is pretty simple with lots and lots of ornaments I've made over the years. That tradition is one of my favorites. Here are some pictures of my girls in front of our tree. And of Maeve wearing the tree skirt!

This horse-drawn carriage ride is a really fun, free activity here in Spokane. We did it 2 years ago when Maeve was a newborn snuggled up in Conor's coat. This year, I took the girls right when the rides started at the beginning end of the season. We went twice and had a lovely time. Following our loops around downtown we bought hot chocolate. I feel like I'm knocking it out of the park when it comes to Christmas activities this year!

On Saturday, I really wanted to do something fun and out of the house. We've had sick kids all taking turns for what feels like forever and just a lot of tasks to manage. We went downtown to ride the carousel and look at the lights and happily it was also the tree lighting celebration so there were booths with crafts and hot chocolate as well as live music. We browsed a toy store and watched the big evergreen get lit. It was a really fun evening, one I think we will purposefully repeat next year. I can't wait to get our tree and decorate it!

Our Thanksgiving this year was really low key. November has been a weird and hard month for us. We didn't do a lot of planning for Thanksgiving. Conor's parents came down for a quick trip to celebrate with us. The day before Thanksgiving, I made the girls our traditional turkey pancake breakfast. They love that. On Thanksgiving we did the turkey trot at our neighborhood park and we played games and made and ate a lot of food! It was an indulgent day!