Surprises from the advent calendar

Christmas has officially started at our house. On Friday night, J insisted we go down to the storage room and get her advent calendar and the Christmas books. Of course, the advent calendar was not at the top of the open-first box of Christmas stuff, it was buried under a some other stuff. And the books were in another box entirely, so we managed to come back upstairs with more stuff than I wanted this early in December.

Friday night Alex and I put together the little slips of paper for the advent calendar and wrapped a few things for J to open later in the month.

Before we went to bed, we hung the calendar and left the first gift (there isn't a gift every day - it's a mix of gifts, activities and doing things for other people)

J was super excited when she got up and declared that this calendar was from Santa's elves (not sure where she got that idea, but it works!)

She opened the first slip of paper and tried to read it - she managed Christmas which sort of surprised me! Yesterday she got to make cookies with her Auntie K (aka TeamHardCore) when Alex and I went out for a friend's birthday.

And her little gift was some super cute cookie cutters. She asked me all day if we could stop what we were doing and go get her Auntie RIGHT NOW so that she could make cookies...and then when she arrived, J was most disappointed that they both had to eat dinner first!

But, eventually she got to make her cookies - here she is with the results! She's pretty excited that I haven't even started baking yet which means she will get to make and decorate more cookies before Christmas...

Thanks TeamHardCore! J had lots of fun.

We're excited for today's activity...pictures later...