Christmas in Review

Parent/In-Law Gifts - Always hard, right? Which is one of the reasons I'm passing on these ideas. See, I'm nice like that. I went to a class in September(?) on good inexpensive Christmas gifts taught by the lovely and talented Heidi (currently the mother with the most children in our ward, soon to be tied by me). One of the things she talked about is making a Memory Lane game, an idea she found in Family Fun magazine. I knew I had to do it, and had all kinds of great plans for getting it done right away. But since this is me we're talking about, I didn't start until 3 days before Christmas. It made it more difficult since while the article has lots of great putting-it-together tips, the pictures aren't that great of the actual board, and there aren't many suggested questions. I changed up the game a little bit and created three question categories, and am more than happy to share those. This is how our game turned out:




We played this Christmas Day with some of the family and had a great time.

For my in-laws, I stole an idea my sis-in-law has done for my parents the past two years and made a grandkids book through mypublisher.com. I put it together with a page of pictures and a page of questions/answers for each of their grandkids. It wasn't finished in time to be delivered before Christmas, but it arrived a couple days ago, we gave it to them today, and it was a hit.

For the Kids - This year my focus was all about not buying crap. Things that the kids would be bored of playing with three days after Christmas, or that would just be more "stuff" hanging around to deal with and store. I did a lot of online shopping (yay amazon) and found things that I feel fit each of them and would help strengthen their creativity and talents. They were all happy with their gifts, so I guess it worked.

Family Games - We got some great new family games for Christmas this year. By far the favorite is Blokus. We've also played Banangrams several times, tried out Baffle Gab last night during our New Year's Eve fun, and still have a couple others to try out (Hyper Dash and Perquackey).

My late New Year's Eve is quickly catching up with me so I'm going to end this and try to finish up my next post.