At our ward Christmas party, we had a great dinner, which Daddy helped serve (complete with Iron Chef apron), and we enjoyed several talents from ward members. Matt was especially happy when the nursery kids got to go up and sing "Snowman" and "Jingle Bells" for everybody. He also loved story time. Grace managed to talk the Sister Missionaries into giving her their Rudolph nose. She makes a pretty cute Rudolph, I think.
(just as I was finally able to take Ben's picture, he moved to the other side of the table, so this is all I got)
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And then, as soon as Ben got back from Hawaii, we had our annual Kazmierski-Shimamoto Christmas party. We look forward to this all year! This is our fifth year of teaching the kids about Christmas traditions in other countries. This year, Melissa taught about Czechoslovakia, and I taught about Russia. We had some home-made goodies from those countries, had a sing-along, and then danced the night away to Just Dance (we even did Rasputin, our favorite that just happens to be Russian- so it fit right along with the evening!).
It took a lot of food to feed all 11 children and 3 adults!
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Matthew spied the pop-up tent under the house the other day, and demanded that it be set up. Then I told him to ask nicely, and we got it put up. The kids decided to have a picnic, but since December weather doesn't cooperate with picnic plans up here, we decided to do it in the tent downstairs. Grace worked for a very long time to pack everybody their lunches.
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Ben has vendors bring in presents from time to time. This year, one of them brought him a "Yard-O-Licorice". The kids had more fun playing with it than eating it.
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Just one more random picture: here's Joey trying to figure out his camera (it was out of batteries)
