The holiday season is the best time to be a kid. Thanks to Gymboree for sponsoring this post #BestTimeToBeAKid
We are entering the season of perpetual childhood joy. If you’re like me, you leapt in headfirst on November 1st, after exercising much restraint through the later days of October. For our family, it’s not about fast forwarding through other holidays, it’s about maximizing the season of cheer.
If the holiday season is about spending quality time with family, keeping those in need top of mind and creating magic for our children, then yes, I’ll take two months instead of a few weeks. Sign. Me. Up.
I think it’s safe to say that Kayla and Blake agree. As a young family, we’re still forming our own traditions while also carrying on some of the ones I grew up with. I’m one of four girls and our grandma gave us matching pajamas every Christmas. Each year my mother, sisters and I still don matching pajamas and in recent years, we’ve added Craig’s mom to our pajama crew.
So it seemed perfectly fitting to kick off the first weekend of our extended holiday season with Kayla and Blake in pink and grey Christmas jammies all day long. I found these cute pajamas at Gymboree and loved that they had sibling coordinated sizes all they from 6-12 months up to 14 years.
Blake was SO excited about matching Kayla that he kept reminding me that he was wearing Christmas Jammies and was ear to ear smiles.
Once the excess energy was successfully burned off and Kayla had mastered the art of striking yoga poses in mid-air, we moved on to salt dough ornament making. What I love about making salt dough ornaments is you don’t need any special ingredients, they bake up pretty quickly and your kids can decorate them any way you like. Paint, glitter glue, you name it.
Our holiday style isn’t Better Homes and Gardens. It’s festive and fun, imperfect but meaningful. I look forward to years of handmade ornaments adorning our tree, even if they aren’t perfectly color coordinated.
Kayla and Blake quickly got to work. Blake chose bright purple paint and blobbed it on his ornaments, meanwhile Kayla took her time and gave each ornament she painted much thought. I spent most of my timing with a big goofy grin on my face, thoroughly enjoying watching the similarities and differences between my two finest works of art.
The end result was two trays of ornaments, ready to hang on our tree while listening to some classic Christmas music this week and some super cute photos of these guys and their new favorite jammies.
Gymboree has a pretty fantastic holiday collection for babies all the way up to teens. I grabbed this crazy cute yeti sweatshirt which is already wrapped for Hanukkah for Blake (yes, we do both!) and these cozy bear ear muffs for Kayla to take on our trip to Seattle this week. With so many cute collections to choose from in themes my kids adore, I’ll definitely be shopping Gymboree quite a bit in the coming months.