This year we were heading back to Little Chute for Christmas. We figured the kids could open all the presents from us before we left for the holidays.   Meadow got Theo Magnatile Cubes.    Theo got Meadow another Lego Harry Potter "Book."   Both kids did chores the last couple months to earn money to buy each other gifts.   Theo had a surprise for me too.   

It was the week before Christmas and the kids were probably being loud.     My breakfast was interrupted for a photo shoot. 

We were excited to decorate our Mario gingerbread house but had to let it sit over night after gluing the castle together.  Meadow has been asking for chocolate rye pancakes for awhile now. So today was the day.  Almost 2 months into moving and two weeks into December we finally got a snowstorm and I got to try out my new electric snowblower.   When I saw how long our walkway was from the garage to the house I was like, maybe we should invest in a snowblower.  The kids had so much fun making a gingerbread house over Thanksgiving that we had to get one for ourselves too. Of course we went with a Mario themed house.  By the time I got back inside Peach's gingerbread second home was nearly complete.       I took some time off of working on the house to play outside with the kids. All of our backyard needs a few more trees planted.   We have a few, but I wish we had more.   We played some football... And attempted to make a snow castle, ...

When you spot reindeer indoors you know Christmas time has arrived. When tools go missing,  I always know where to check. Theo and Meadow were busy writing letters to Santa.  

After taking a year off of traveling for the holidays we are back on schedule.   Theo went straight to the toy room to start building stuff on the workbench.  The kids love getting to eat the sugar cereal at their grandparents.    This kind of cereal never saw light of day in my house growing up. Lucky kids.   Meadow forgot to pack herself pajamas so borrowed one of my dads t shirts.   

 We had to remove all our drawers to seal up any holes along the wall thanks to a recent mouse discovery.   You think you're going to work on the rental and then random stuff like this keeps coming up. Meadow was extra hungry today and needed three breakfasts. Two sets of the light fixtures I'd ordered arrived. I needed to find fixtures that had switches or pull chains. The only place that had them was Etsy. Brooke then suggested trying AliExpress. For half the price these were great.  

The third floor in our house still had the original gas light fixtures that were still active! We had a plumber out to do some miscellaneous things and we asked him to cap off the gas line. Sadly that meant removing the fixtures. I think we'll just glue them onto to the cap, I don't want to get rid of them.  But thankfully the kids will no longer be tempted to open the gas line. While wiping everything down in our dining room I discovered that the room once had a wainscotting too. I'm kind of sad that was removed. I put up the fixture that was previously in our upstairs hallway. I had to rewire it and it was now looking great, but the ceiling around it was a roughed up a bit. So it would come down once again to install a ceiling medallion.