Elf-capades

Buddy, our elf on the shelf returned to the Skinner casa the night after Thanksgiving and also picked up where he left off with his mischief making!!!  For those of you that haven't heard about this fun family tradition: Santa sends an elf down from the north pole to watch the kiddos in the house and report back to him each night.  He sits on a shelf and watches the good, the bad, and the ugly and then after the last kiddo falls asleep he travels back to the north pole to tell Santa.  When he gets back, he usually gets bored and finds something fun to do around the house.  When the first kid wakes up, his Christmas magic stops and he freezes doing whatever he was doing.  We hunt him down each morning with lots of laughs and return him to his shelf.  It serves two purposes:  1-It helps kids keep their behavior in check because they know that Santa will find out and 2-It brings a little of the magic of Christmas Eve to the entire month of December.  He flies home with Santa on Christmas Eve and next year returns after you put your tree up!  For those of you that haven't been give their own elf from Santa, he also left some at Target!  ;)

I plan on taking pictures of what we find Buddy up to each morning and making a scrapbook of his adventures for the kids to treasure in the future and thought that any of you looking for ideas for your own elf might enjoy them too.  So here are days 1-5.  I'll update with more pics when I can.

Day 1: Buddy climbed into Allie's MegaBlocks and started an elf sized tower.

Day 2: Totally busted in Mama's spot watching Nick Jr!

Day 3: Snowboarding with the Playstation.

Day 4: Playing peek-a-boo with the Christmas ornaments.

Day 5: Even elves like to color!!!

Winner Winner!!

I wanted to stop in and announce a winner for the birthday blog hop giveaway.  Remember this fun mini?

Well random.org has found a new home for it's sister.  That's right, I made two!  One for the birthday girl and a duplicate for one lucky commenter.  And that lucky person is:  

Jill Angel said...

What a gorgeous mini album. Absolutely incredible!
Jill
http://craftwithanangel.blogspot.com/

Please contact me at chuckandchristina(at)yahoo(dot)com with your mailing addy and I would love to drop this in the mail to you!!!

Happy Birthday Hop!!!

**GIVEAWAY CLOSED**

Today kicks off the super fun birthday blog hop in honor of my friend Tanya.  She is such an awesome friend in fact, that we decided to get together and throw a par-tay in her honor.  If you just happened upon this post then head back to the starting line at Scrappy Zeni's blog.  If you came from Cindi's blog then you are in the right place!!  There will be fun, prizes and inspiration along the way so please hop along for the ride!!  There will not only be an amazing Cricut imagine cart at one of the stops, but the grand prize (sponsored by Your Memories Here) is this fabulous Christmas goodie package:

I created this fun little birthday mini album for her.  All of the photo mats are designed to hold 2.5x3.5 standard wallet photos (these can be printed at almost all 1hr photo stops) with a little edge to provide a nice mat.  All the paper is DCWV.  Each page has a spot for a photo of your favorite birthday memories and the back page has a spot for journaling.  It might even be fun to put pics from a birthday party in it and have your guests sign a spot on the journaling spot on the back!  

It's on it's way to Ms. Tanya now and I really hope she loves it!  I really hope all of you love it too, so much so that I made a duplicate to give away to one lucky reader!!!  Just comment on this post by Sunday night (Nov 27th) at 11:59pm (eastern time) and your name will go into the hat.  I will announce a winner early next week so be sure to check back.  The winner will have 1 week to contact me.  :)  Now that we're all done here make sure you head on over Liz at WhichCraft to keep the party train rollin'!!!