Christmas Parties

The first two weeks of December we participated in a couple different Christmas parties. We had our branch party first. The nursery put on a little nativity which was amazing. Complete with nose picking and crying. Shae was asked to be one of the Wise Men. I couldn't get him to wear anything but the crown, but at least he did that much.

The Clawsons moved to Ithaca at the same time as us and are also doing a PhD so will be here for a long time just like us, yay! I've been wanting to get a picture of the kids so that I have one from the start of our time together (our kids are the same age). 

Not the best pic of the babies, but it works for now. They look like they could be twins. They have the exact same coloring, it's pretty impressive.

Getting ready to go on stage.

Shae had a moment when the bow fell off his present to Jesus.

He quickly forgot as soon as everyone started clapping. All the kids stopped what they were doing and looked up with smiles on their faces when we all started clapping. It was so cute.

Shae gave us a nice big bow and was just so happy up there.

I am on the activities committee in our branch and helped plan our RS Christmas Party. We had it at our branch president's house which was SO nice so that I didn't have to worry about decorations. It was an Ugly Christmas Sweater/White Elephant Exchange party. The food was great. The company was even better. It was the perfect way to end our first semester of Grad School and send everyone off for a nice long 6 week break.

Picture credit goes to our awesome RS president Eliza Cook, you can see more on our RS Blog if you're in to that kind of a thing.

Our last party was right before we all took off for the holidays. It was with our good friends the Halls. They had a few people over for Christmas treats. We tried Baklava for the first time (they both served their missions in Greece) and the Cooks brought Glog which we warmed up and enjoyed. It was SO good. We will definitely be going to Wegmans to get more of this wonderful Sweedish delight (you may have heard it mentioned in Frozen). 

So good.