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Merry Christmas one and all! We had a fun and exciting Christmas, including presents and family fun. But let's not get ahead of ourselves. The girls waited patiently until the decided time to go downstairs (7:30), then promptly got us up. After a rousing chorus of Happy Birthday to Jesus, we found full stockings and presents to open.

Santa brought Molly some roller skates, and Leah a pogo stick (yes, that’s what she wanted) in addition to hats, headbands, scarfs, and more. After stockings, we opened some presents. Here’s Leah opening a huge number of princesses.

Jen always has project presents for people, but this year I joined in as well. I built the girls this dress-up closet for them to hang their dress-up clothes.

Here’s my project loaded with dresses, skirts, tutus, and fairy wings. They’ve also got crowns up on the top shelf, and shoes and other accoutrements in the bottom. The girls were fans.

After opening everything at our house, Molly tried out her roller skates in the front hall. They seem great!

You may have noticed a lot of matching attire between the girls and their dolls. Jen again made the girls and their dolls matching nightgowns for Christmas Eve.

After some breakfast at Grams’s house, we moved on to opening presents there. Leah was excited as soon as she saw the Disney logo on the box.

Aunt EA was very glad to get this lovely LSU robe from Uncle Scott. Of course, it would have looked better in orange and blue…

Pajamas were a popular gift this year.

Jen made Grammy a purse customized to her individual needs.

Here it is up close. It includes a cross-body long strap, and is Jen’s most structured creation yet.

Leah loves nightgowns.

Uncle Scott is quite tall, so most of his pajama pants look more like capris on him. So, we gave him some extra tall pajama pants to keep his ankles warm.

We gave Grams a lovely serving plate.

Aunt EA and Uncle Scott gave Grammy a card that sang Feliz Navidad. Molly is entertained, and Leah thinks it is hilarious.

Leah was happy to be Grammy’s opening helper.

Oooh, a serving plate for the Lanfords. I’m sensing a trend, here.

Aunt EA and Scott gave Grammy a photobook from their wedding, which she loved.

There was some traditional Christmas video game play.

Jen surprised the girls with these two corduroy dresses that she’d been making in secret. Leah’s included so many ruffles that she ends up twice as big around as normal. As usual, they were happy to pose with sweet simple smiles to model them.

Can’t keep these two apart.

It was then time to move onto Christmas dinner. The food and the company were great. As usual, we had Christmas crackers, which is where the crowns came from. Note that Caroline was indeed here, but she’s behind the camera.

Some of the Christmas crackers included paratroopers. The girls and Uncle Scott had fun with them on the stairs.

These girls love their aunts. Leah’s been captured, and can’t escape Aunt EA’s kiss.

After an action-packed day, we played some Heads Up!. Molly loved to be the one guessing. Thanks to Aunt Caroline for being her assistant.

Generally when Leah would give an answer, she would say it as if she was just guessing. “Ummm… elephants?”.

Christmas day was a great time of celebration. Sad that we have to wait an entire year for another celebration. What's that? We're immediately flying out to keep celebrating with more family? Well, that post will have to wait a day or two.

It's Christmas Eve. Celebrating with family, Santa, opening presents and more are all on the immediate horizon. Despite the excitement, Leah remains serene.

Here we are ready to head out to Christmas Eve service at church. Nice smile Molly.

Molly and her choir sang twice at the Christmas Eve service. This first song went well, other than the worship leader getting confused and asking us to stand at the beginning of the song. The second song did not go so well, with most of the kids getting distracted. So, I'll just give you the first performance.

Per tradition, the girls opened one gift from Grammy on Christmas Eve. They were both very excited about their new jammies. In fact, Leah was so excited about her jammies that she spent a large portion of her evening prayer thanking God for them.

The girls put out cookies, milk, and carrots for Santa and his reindeer. The girls insisted on 9 carrots, since there are 9 reindeer pulling Santa’s sleigh according to the Rudolph song.

After they headed to bed, we were busy finishing up wrapping presents. I also had to set up my project that I'd built for them, but you'll have to wait until tomorrow to hear about that.

In addition to her newer activities, Molly’s still taking and very much enjoying ballet. We were excited to go to her class’ visitors day to see what she’s learned.

They do a lot of barre work in the beginning.

We need a ballet dictionary (or at least this Wikipedia page) to understand all the movements she’s doing. I believe this is a Chassé.

Molly’s not the only one taking ballet. Leah still very much enjoys it. Her class does not use the French names for things, and instead opts for little-kid-friendly terms. Here’s her “mermaid stretch.”

Here she is galloping. They even get props to help them understand what to do.

And, of course, we got a lot of waves. Note that Leah is still walking on her toes most of the time. Ballet is the one place where she isn’t constantly told to walk on her flat feet :).

The fire department brings a Santa around in a sleigh to local neighborhoods. They stop at the pool by our house, so we braved the cold (it was just above 20) to go see him.

The sleigh was pulled by a fire department vehicle, which was led by a ladder truck. They drove through the neighborhood, though sadly not down our street.

Shortly before heading to church yesterday, snow started coming down like crazy. Here’s Leah with her coat over her fancy smocked dress walking in through the snow.

After church and a quick lunch, it was out to the backyard for some winter fun. The house behind us to one side has a nice hill that runs into our side yard, which has a nice uphill to slow down the sled. The girls are ready to go.

They fell over when stopping, but they’re having fun regardless.

The girls sledded for much of the afternoon, but I did get a turn as well.

Even Mommy joined us (briefly) to sled down once. Looks like she had as much fun as the girls.

After a good little while sledding and making snow angels, the girls were freezing. So, they headed in to warm up by the fire.

After warming up, we headed back out for more fun. After a bit more sledding, we decided to make our first snowman. Leah went in shivering before it was complete, but Molly toughed it out till the end. Neither of us could feel our fingers for the last ten minutes, but we were determined to finish it.

I think this was the most fun we've had in the snow. The girls are now old enough to really enjoy playing in it. After the last two years of very little snow, they were ready to get out and have some fun. I'll likely change my tune after a really big snowfall, but right now we're all really enjoying the snow.

Leah's first school picture. She looks so grown up.

When she got home with it, she had to show Chad that she had "looked at the camera". She was so excited. Perhaps she'll be more willing to look at the camera when he's behind it now.

As a 1st grader, Molly's very experienced at this now. And she is indeed wearing the School Photo dress I made her for picture day.

As all schools seem to do these days, Molly had a costume parade at her school. All the kids march around the blacktop so all the parents can see their costumes. (Leah's preschool paraded around too. See the video here.)

Leah is ready to go with her giant hair. Molly decided to get herself dressed, and we did not realize that she actually had her costume on backwards until we were walking to our neighbors house to start trick-or-treating. Oops!

We joined a bunch of our neighbors at our backdoor neighbors house before starting trick-or-treating. Here are most of the kids who met up to trick-or-treat.

The day after Halloween, Molly and Leah donated 4.5 pounds of candy to Operation Gratitude at our dentist office. The program sends care packages to troops serving overseas.

They also made Thank You cards to send with their candy. They were both eager to draw pictures and tell the soldiers "Thank You for protecting us."

Leah's preschool class learned some Halloween songs, just as Molly did 3 years ago. Leah was excited to show off her songs for us.

Sunday was our second day of Halloween festivities. We traditionally trick-or-treat Grams's house on Halloween, but given how late Molly gets out of school and the fact that Halloween is a school day, we had to move it up a bit.

We paused for a quick picture with Grams before heading back to church for more festivities.

After a two year hiatus, Trunk-or-Treat was back at our church. Before the treating began, there were some fun activities. Molly's making a spider from two hand tracings.

Leah had a bit of trouble eating the donut at the donut swing. She eventually got a bit, but then decided that was enough and pulled the rest off.

Then it was time to go outside to Trunk-or-Treat. There were lots of great cars with lots of treats. The girls' bags were full by the end.

Between Leah's wig and Pastor Matt's beard, there's a lot of hair in this picture.

Leah ended up winning a prize for one of the best costumes thanks to her giant hair. It's an impressive wig, but especially fun given her little head inside of it.

We picked up a couple of pumpkins from a neighborhood farm stand. This year, Molly and Leah were surprisingly happy to scoop out the insides.

"Look at all this goop!"

The girls each picked a design to carve. Molly traced her design onto her pumpkin before Chad carved it.

While Molly's pumpkin design choice was an easy one, Leah's was much tougher. I spent quite a while carving the intricacies of it.

The results…Rapunzel and a scary-face jack-o'-lantern.