Our Adventure Book: Our 25 Days of Christmas {Days 2-4}

We've been having a lot of fun doing our advent activities! Here is what we've been up to.

Day 2 - Write a letter to Santa

Me and Dawson already emailed Santa and got a cool reply, but I thought it would be fun to write him a letter, too, and hopefully we'll get another reply. ;) He told me what to write, I wrote it, and then he copied it. He did such a good job!!

He wrote:
Dear Santa
Can I please have a Cars 2 car? Will you get Ashlynn princesses? Is Christopher coming back next year? I hope so because I will miss him.
Love, Dawson 2012

He asked me if Christopher would ever come back after he went back to the North Pole on Christmas Eve. I told him that was a great question and we should ask Santa, I'm glad he remembered to include it in his letter.

Day 3 - Go to the zoo to see ZooLights!

We love the zoo but we hadn't gone to see it all decorated for Christmas before. I'm glad that we did this year, though! It's beautiful and Dawson kept telling me how awesome it was. Here our some pictures from that night.

This is the only picture we got of the kids while we were there. They looked so cute all bundled up. It was COLD outside!! We got some hot chocolate to warm us up though. More about that in a minute.

I thought this light display was pretty creative. It's the lion drinking fountain that they have at the zoo! I know I've posted a picture of Dawson drinking out of it from one of our trips this year.

I loved the pretty poinsettias.

Santa and his reindeer were there! The line to see Santa was way too long for us, we didn't want to wait so we just visited with a couple of his reindeer for a few minutes instead.

There were a couple of elephants out in cold. (By choice there was a sign up saying we might not see them because they could be inside.)

They were really the only big animals we saw. Dawson was looking forward to seeing the giraffes, and they have an inside and outside enclosure that you can see them in so I was hoping we might be able to see them, too, but they had it all blocked off so we couldn't even get down to where the giraffes are. We did see a few giraffe light displays though!

This tunnel of lights was really cool! We all enjoyed walking through it.

Tigers! My fav!

We were able to walk back by the tiger's exhibit but the Christmas lights that were hanging around it were turned off and there weren't any other lights around so we really couldn't see much. We did see one tiger sleeping and another one was pacing around, but again, we really couldn't see him well because it was so dark. I was a little bummed. I love tigers, especially when they're being active!

There were some small bats that were going crazy and flying all around. Usually bats creep me out but I actually liked watching them. Maybe it's because it was really dark and I couldn't see them that well. AND they reminded me of Hotel Transylvania, we loved that movie!!! The big bats were just hanging around... those ones creeped me out. Eww. I like this picture that Dave got, though.

Lastly, here are the mugs that our hot chocolate from the zoo came in. They are SO cool!!! If you look closely you can see that the snowflakes and leaves are animals. I love them!

Now onto day 4 of our advent activities - Frosty the Snowman movie night, Harrison-style. ;)

I printed out some Frosty pictures to put up in the frames behind our table. Usually my happy chef is hanging up there but I'm getting a little sick of him. I think I might keep the Frosty pics (or other Christmas related pics) up there for awhile. I also tape some leftover window clings to the wall. I wanted it to look like a winter wonderland! I gathered up some snowman decorations from around the house and put them on the table. The only thing I bought for this movie night was snowman plates and napkins!

Dave made this snow garland while I was at work today. :)

I drew some faces on some marshmallows (with edible ink markers) to put in our hot chocolate that we had with dinner. You'll see what we did with the Oreos in a minute.

And these, too, any ideas yet?

Mmm...hot chocolate!

And for dinner we had snowman shaped pancakes and bacon.

I didn't want to give Ashlynn a glass mug or hot chocolate so she drank milk out of a Frosty cup. :)

After dinner we made little snowman cookies. We put our Oreos on a stick, frosted them with cream cheese frosting, and then put faces on them. Here is one of the ones that Dawson made. He made and ate two of them, he thought it was a lot of fun (and yummy of course).