Let the Christmas events begin!

We had our first Advent over at Ben's family's house this evening. Ben actually stayed home because he seemed to have caught the same flu bug that the rest of us had last week... ugh. Well, I took the girls to see their grandma, despite being Ben-less. We had a good time eating dinner and following it up with Advent. I described this tradition a bit in a post I wrote up last year at this time, which you can read here. Becca enjoyed wearing a Santa hat during the evening, which was a tad small for her biggish head, but I thought it was cute anyway. We watched the Christmas devotional as well and Emma made an odd misinterpretation. I told her a couple of times beforehand that the prophet would be speaking and she finally spits out, "I like puppets!" Apparently she thought I was saying puppet instead of prophet. What a goof. Well, this little outing to grandma's was the beginning of many, many, MANY more Christmas gatherings to come in the next few weeks. It's always busy during the holiday's and I absolutely LOVE the craziness!! Yesterday we conquered the mall out in Scottsdale and had an awesome time. This was the beginning of our Christmas shopping and I'm not sure how we pulled it off, but we were able to hang around the mall playing for about 6 hours without any whining children! I honestly don't know how this happened, particularly considering that the girls skipped their naps for the day. So, anyway, we didn't actually shop for all that time - some of the time was spent eating and we also watched the Bee Movie at the mall theater. We really liked it! It's been getting mixed reviews, but Ben and I laughed throughout the whole thing. Emma and Becca enjoyed the parts that they were awake for. I guess part of the movie ended up turning into nap time, which made for a very pleasant movie watching experience for us. :)