Sparkly and Magical, 2024 edition

It's the night of December 19th and that is Christmas Eve in the Lag Liv house this year.

We leave for our trip on Saturday, we need to pack tomorrow, and Santa needs to come tonight so that he can deliver things the kids will need to pack. Pizza is ordered, Landon and the girls are wrapping up their respective swim practices (a post on swim traiming philosophy coming soon I promise!), and I am in my buffalo plaid on the couch watching Elf and banging out this blog post (almost! finished it Friday instead).

December has been its usual whirlwind of insanity, sugar, and sparkles.

We decorated super early, thank goodness, and it's been fun to enjoy the holiday lights in the morning as we go about our busy days.

Last weekend was our only semi-free weekend (and by "free" I mean Claire was babysitting Friday and Saturday nights, Cora had swim practice, Landon had swim practice, and we were hosting a party for Claire's whole high school swim team on Sunday night), so I decided we were doing our remaining precious traditions in the space in between those events.

I made sugar cookie dough Friday night after work.

On Saturday I baked the cookies after errands and before a few hours of work.

Cora is still my eager little helper and I love that for both of us.

Also on Saturday we decorated the upstairs family tree. It has all our beloved historial, commemorative, and handmake ornaments. Claire insisted this couldn't be done in daylight, so we did it when she got home from her Saturday night babysitting gig.

On Sunday I had a few hours of work and then we did our cookie decorating when Landon got home from practice!

One of my favorite things about December now is all the facebook memories each day showing us decorating cookies throughout the years with a whole range of tiny children. We started doing my childhood sugar cookies when Landon was 18 months old and continued every year since.

Making this year 18 of us doing cookies with our crew!

They are so so dang good. (The cookies, recipe here6 from my Swedish Great Grandma, but the kids are good too!)

Immediately after wiping the sugar off the table and vacuuming up sprinkles from the floor we got ready to host about 65 people in our house for Claire's high school swim team holiday party! We had a taco truck in the driveway and everyone brought desserts and drinks. It was pretty easy as far as hosting goes and a lot of fun. I finally met some of the parents and the kids did their White Elephant gift exchange upstairs in the gameroom. Man do I love having an upstairs gameroom.

By 9 pm everyone had left and we were all cleaned up and I pretty much passed out in bed.

It was actually a really nice weekend. We got the things that mattered to me done with our full crew present, holiday music coming through the speakers, and our favorite Christmas movies on TV.

On the non-holiday side of things, here are Cora and James at her last Cotillion class Monday night. We had completely forgotten about it until I was out with some of my favorite badass Dallas lawyer moms and saw two girls walk by our table in sparkly dresses with dressed up dads. "Oh my god is Cotillion tonight? The one with parents?" I texted James under the table. "Yep. Shit."

But within 30 minutes he and Cora were ready to go and James got to dance the waltz with his Cora bunny and see how she can shake hands with eye contact and a nice introduction of herself. She also learned about formal table placesettings and some other general etiquette stuff. Cotillion success!

I took Maggie on a walk- she loves a chilly weather day- and she stopped to smell every flower. She is so wise.

Meanwhile Milo is forever hopeful he will get a bite of his human brother's dinner. This has never happened, but for Milo food-related hope springs eternal.

He's also just the snuggliest bestest cat.

And he knows it.

Since I didn't get this finished last night I might as well share some "Christmas" pictures too!

It was actually a lovely little night. We ate pizza, changed into pajamas, turned on the fire, and did our usual youngest-to-oldest gift opening order.

We opened gifts from my sister over Thanksgiving and we're doing our exchange with my parents and brother and his wife when they come to Dallas after we return, so last night was just gifts from our little family. The kids bought each other some thoughtful things and from us Landon got a tech suit (speaking of swimming, those things are crazy expensive and didn't exist when I was swimming; he's gotten one for Christmas for the last 3 years), Claire got Ugg booties, and Cora got an Instax camera.

Christmas morning involved a very awake Cora who had to go to school, and a very asleep Landon and Claire who didn't (neither had any finals today), all gathering on the stairs so they could walk out to the living room together.

Because we did our "big" gifts last night, this morning was just stockings, which is so fun.

Coincidentally many gifts had to do with international travel, like adapter plugs and compression socks. And of course some purely fun stuff too.

And that's our little Lag Liv family Christmas! Cookies, gifts, pajamas, traditions, sparkles, and love. And tomorrow- adventure!

Happiest Holidays to you and yours, I'm so grateful I still find moments to write and far more grateful you're still here to read.