Holiday Blow Ups, Botanical Garden Lights and Christmas Trivia

Hey friends! How are you doing today? Did you have a nice weekend? It was a good one over here as we filled the past few days with a nice combination of holiday-related activities, must-do chores around the house and outside fun. Temperatures this weekend hovered in the mid-60s and it was absolutely delightful! Sweater weather strikes again!

Here are some highlights from the past few days:

• We Are Officially a Blow Up Family

I swore we’d never have blow ups in my front yard, and yet, three kids later, here we are! Ryan arrived home after a random trip to Lowe’s with Ryder and Chase a couple of weeks ago with Mickey and Minnie in tow and there was no looking back. Ryder checks on Mickey and Minnie all day long (and yells, “Oh no! Mickey fall down!” whenever we have our lights off) and the amount of joy these little three-foot blow ups brings our kids is off the chart. Guys, I’m not going to lie, I kind of think Mickey and Minnie might acquire some new, bigger, friends in the coming years because now that we have a couple of blow ups, I feel like we need to just go all-in and bring on the festive, tacky fun. Whenever we drive around looking at lights with the boys, do you think they gawk at the classy house with all-white lights? Nope. It’s the blow up that get them EVERY TIME.

• Family Walk + Christmas Trivia

We went on a long family walk on Sunday morning and during our trek, Ryan and I made up a bunch of “Christmas Trivia” questions to ask the boys. Chase, in particular, thought this was SO fun and kept asking for more and more questions. We kept them pretty easy for a five-year-old and threw in some super easy ones for Ryder (like “What does Santa say?”) and it gave our walk an unexpected element of festive cheer! Just in case you want to play along with your kiddos, here’s a list of a few of the questions I remember us asking the boys during our walk (made into an image you can easily screenshot on your phone):

• Holidays At the Garden

(Photo credit on the above pic goes to Chase! We might need to utilize his skills more often.) 

On Saturday night, we had tickets to Holidays at the Garden, an annual event at Daniel Stowe Botanical Garden, located in Belmont, North Carolina. Neither Ryan nor I have even been to the botanical garden but the idea of a ticketed/controlled outdoor festive activity during these crazy times sounded like a fun way to get in the spirit. Plus, anything outside that lets our boys run and just have fun being kids is right up our alley!

The event was masked (we took them off for photos) and featured tons of beautiful holiday lights throughout the garden. They were stunning and Ryan and I especially loved the white lights that looked like glowing cherry blossoms.

(Pose by Chase!) 

The highlight for the boys was a little train that went around a track that they could follow around on the outside of a small fence. They ran circles around it and LOVED that thing!

• Christmas Ornament Crafting

I must admit that I don’t feel like the most creative or crafty mom out there when it comes to artsy activities but something about the holidays brings it out in me a little bit more. And, okay, the arts + crafts advent calendar ALDI sent our way back in November as part of an Instagram collaboration has helped a lot, too. It features 12 days of different crafts/activities for little ones and I’ve mostly saved them for lazy mornings or days when the boys could use a little extra at-home entertainment. Chase and Ryder made the above ornaments on Saturday morning (Chase did the sand one and Ryder did the snowman) and that fulfilled my Christmas craft quota for the day!

Also, if you happen to follow me on Instagram, we clearly had a lot better success rate with the above ornaments that we did with the melted peppermint ornaments last week. Here are the instructions we followed:

Sounds simple, right? Well, it was a comedy of errors when we tried to make them, as most of the first batch broke (#toddlerhazards) and I left the second batch in too long because I was nursing Rhett and forgot about them. Pinterest FAIL.

Also, BOTH of the above ornaments have now also broken sooo we are down to exactly ZERO peppermint ornaments on our tree this year.

• Rhett is Giggling!!!

My mama heart melted big time this weekend because Rhett started giggling!!! Is a baby or child laughing not the best sound in the whole world!? Ugh, it was so darn cute and even big brother Chase got his littlest brother giggling up a storm. Gurgly baby belly laughs are just SO GOOD.

Aaand now I need to run because basically all of the kids are up from naps/quiet time and needing Mom. I hope you all have a great week and, as always, thanks for stopping by the blog today!