14 Days of Elf Activities

We have 3 elves at our house - Holly, Jolly & Chris.  They arrive December 1st and do something fun for the kids each day.  They do not make messes or cause chaos.  They are cute and kind and they give the kids something to look forward to finding each morning.

Let's do a recap of our first 14 days with our elves!

New Christmas socks for everyone.

New Christmas sweatshirts for each of the kids.  They have been wearing them nonstop.

Play together!  Little People Santa set and corn starch for oobleck.

Bath bombs!

St. Nick's Day candy filled shoes.

North Pole breakfast.

New fidgets!  The kids have been asking for these forever and I always say no.  Our elves are more fun than mom :)

My kids have LOVED PEZ for years.  This was a fun one!

A chip covered Christmas trees.

They his 12 blue candy canes in the garage.  The loved fininding them.

Hot chocolate bar with the cutest hot chocolate ornaments from Target.

A Christmas craft!

Do you do elves at your house?  What have they been up to this month?

Bite Size Christmas Cheese Ball

I made the yummiest change to my Christmas cheese ball this year.  I made them bite size instead of one big cheeseball.  It looked so cute on the serving tray and people loved them.  You got all the good ingreidents in your own personal size cheese ball.

I used this recipe - Christmas Cranberry Cheese Ball + green onions

I topped each small cheese ball with a craisin, green onion and pecan.  They were so yummy!

I served them with everything seasoning crackers and Ritz crackers.

I also did bite sized cheese balls with our favorite chipped beef cheeseball.  Both were so good.  And people loved having their own little cheeseball vs. digging into a big cheeseball.

You've got to give bite sized cheese balls a try this season.

Happy Friday!

Happy Friday, friends!  We got some snow last night and are hoping to get a delay this morning.  We'll have to wait until 5am or so until the schools start announcing.  I hope you had a great week.  We had a lot of fun (our Indiana Hoosiers are headed to the playoffs!) and a lot of hard.  Dumb car issues, Notre Dame's football season ended ubruptly, tragic health new for a friend, allergic reactions and lots of Christmas cheer!  Haha.  Can you relate to a week full of ALL the things??

The best parts of our week were:

1. What's your level of holiday cheer?  I'm upping my game and switching out my shoe laces for festive ones.  Aren't these darling!?!  They are anywhere from $3-6 a pair on Amazon and are SO CUTE.  

I have these three pairs so far and LOVE them:

Christmas Red Plaid - pictured here!

Black and white gingham

Navy and white gingham

& these are on my wish list: Red & white gingham & pink and white gingham

They are so fun for the holidays, school spirit days or just to give some new life to old shoes.

2. Our elves have been busy!  The kids woke up to a hot chocolate bar set up and ready to enjoy after school today.  Stay tuned for an elf post next week.

3. The Cozy Crawl at school!  We go all around the school to the different themed snack stations and enjoy so many different delicious foods.  I love this team of mine.  We had our team dinner one night and that was fun, too.

The cheese table covered in tiny Christmas mice was my favorite!

Christmas cookies - donated by parents and teachers get to fill up a box.

4. A breakfast board for my crew!  They loved it.

5. We had candy cane stripe day at school and my headband was a big hit.  Pumpkin is getting so fluffy!

6. Everyone loves this guy.  Hence the three cats in his bed at bedtime.

7. A sink drink is Pumpkin's favorite.  But look at that tail!  It's as long as his body.

8. Leo loves to sit and draw.  I'm going to miss this view one day when he's too big to sit like this.

9. Crazy Christmas sweater day at school!

10. Building and exploring in our creek.  The boys were excited for some nice weather mid week to get outside and play.

10. 4 years ago we were packing up and relocating to a new city with a VERY BUSY toddler.  He scaled every stack of boxes and was so proud.  I probably wouldn't recommend moving at Christmas in a six week time frame, but we survived and it worked out great for us.

11. You have got to try these!  We sampled them at Sams and almost ate an entire bag in one week.  I'm not a huge peppermint fan, but these are AMAZING.  I need to go and buy more before the season is over.

12. We celebrated my sister's birthday!

13. Pumpkin can smile!  Of course he can.  He's the sweetest so it shouldn't surprise anyone that he can smile.  We sure do love him.

14. Snow!  My dream came true this year and we put candy cane lights on our fence line.  They look so good as do our snow covered trees.  We were supposed to get a dusting, but we measured almost 2 inches.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend!  See you back here on Monday.

Linking up with Momfessionals

Nutella Bites

I made the easiest, yummiest treat for breakfast and I wanted to share!  These kinds of recipes are floating around social media like crazy this time of year.

You just need 4 ingredients-

1 pkg pastry sheets

Nutella

one egg for an egg wash

powdered sugar

Look at this nutella deliciousness.

I just used one of these sheets since I was making them for my little family.  We ended up with 12 Nutella bites out of that one sheet.

Thaw the pastry sheets.

Unroll the pastry sheet and smear half of it generously with Nutella.

I used this much and would recommend using a little more next time.  The pastry puffs up pretty thick so a thick chocolate layer is necessary.

Fold it in half.

Slice it into 12 bites.

Do an egg wash on top.

Bake at 350 for 10-12 minutes or until everything is browned.

Sprinkle with powdered sugar.

These are best served warm so enjoy them right away!

I can't wait to try these again!  I might try some different combos - maybe adding in some more chocolate, a stripe of peanut butter, cutting different shapes, etc.  There are so many options!  I might every roll my next pastry up into a swirl and cut Nutella swirls.

You've got to give this a try this Christmas season!

North Pole Breakfast

We have been doing a North Pole Breakfast in early December for years.  I looked back on my blog and I think this tradition start in 2014 when Olive was one.  The details are flexible - date, menu, gifts - and the overall idea is the same - a special breakfast with the elves to kick off the holiday season.  I love to do it on December 1st if I can, but December 7th was the first day I could make it happen this year.  Again, we're flexible with details.

The kids were so excited to wake up to a gingerbread themed North Pole Breakfast!

I grabbed all the gingerbread stuff on after Christmas clearance last year and was so excited to use it this year.  We even had mini gingerbread ice cubes!

The kids each got some new ornaments with favortie things from the year and a mini gingerbread house kit.  Some years I've done pjs, new books, Santa hats, etc.  This year since we did it a little later, we just did ornaments and gingerbread houses.

This vase of holly branches from our yard makes me so happy!  I've been waiting for years for the holly bushes to grow big enough to trim them at Christmas.

Menu:
Christmas treats, bacon, eggs, apples and homemade nutella squares.  Come back on Wednesday for that recipe.

We hot glued the mini gingerbread houses together because that's the only way to do it.  Then the kids decorated each of their houses.

Do you do a North Pole Breakfast at your house?