That Advent Life

As is our custom, we let the dinosaurs usher in the Advent season. DiNovember was in its fourth season in our family, and yet we had a really good time with this one and even had a few completely fresh ideas!
Miles THOROUGHLY believes in the Dinosaurs, with fervor that most children reserve for Santa. He writes them letters and genuinely grieves when they "go to sleep" on the first of December. I'm not sure how many more years we will have Dinovember believers, but I intend to enjoy this act of extended play that Jon and I participate in for as long as possible.

We have done most of the customary things that I like to get done before Christmas. We visited the fat man, though as usual we did not pay for their photo package. I don't know why, but though I like visiting with Santa and enjoying that moment, it's not a moment I feel any need to photograph. Especially at 22.95 a pop.


We got ourselves a tree, not from the nursery we used last year- they're not open on Sundays. But from the good folks selling trees in the K-Mart parking lot (I had to be convinced they were not associated with K-Mart in any way, because "I'm not getting my Christmas Tree from K-Mart) we got this skinny, oddly white-barked native Colorado pine. It's sparse, but it's beautiful! And the lights really twinkle.

Before we took it home, we had some tree-yard frolics.


And we took a rushed family photo so as to get it into the Christmas card the first Sunday of Advent. The ornaments aren't even on. Amusingly, the rush was completely unnecessary, as the photos ended up being delivered to our apartment in Newport Terrace in Blacksburg. I'm still waiting for them to be re-routed and arrive in Colorado. We could have gotten a better photo than that, but I'm actually pretty impressed I made cards at all, given that this is the first December that I've been teaching since having kids.

We also did a Cool Local Holiday Event this year! Alas, we can't make Blacksburg's tree lighting and tuba Christmas party this year (we did that six years in a row, despite having a three-week old baby for one of them), but we enjoyed the heck out of the ElectriCritters Zoo Lights event. It was more impressive that I expected.


The cheesy Christmas music echoing throughout the display gave it a cool, Nightmare-Before-Christmas kind of edge to it that the adults thoroughly enjoyed, too.

Back home, we made some more light and decorated the tree.

And once again, we sat through a series of amateur ballet, tap, jazz and hip-hop numbers to holiday pop! We were so stressed about getting there at 6pm on a THURSDAY (??) that I didn't expect to enjoy it as much as I did. But these guys were a hoot to watch; they were both so giddy and smiley about being on stage, and so confident, that it ended up being a joy to watch. Despite this success, Adele informs us she is quitting dance to join the Girl Scouts (ask me how I got manipulated into adding "Girl Scout Co-Leader" to my already over-committed list of identities) and Miles says he's switching to jazz dance. Little rebel.

Babies, take a bow!

Here's the best of the Thanksgiving photos we got a church friend to snap. One more reason to wish I lived near Dad! But it does kind of capture us, doesn't it?

Coming up: The Grunert Family 8th annual Church Christmas Pageant Except That One Year We Did The Nativity at Leah's House (2012).