A super easy idea I originally saw in the supermarket. No need to pay lots of money for a kit when you can easy make them yourself at home.

Ingredients:

• Card
• Rice crispys
• Chocolate
• Icing sugar
• Decorations
• Paper straws

Instructions:

• Make a cone shape from your card securing with sticky tape.
• Melt the chocolate and mix together with the rice crispys. (I used the chocolate ones so they were the same colour as the chocolate)
• Pour the mix into the cone and place a paper straw in the base. Lolly sticks would work just as well.
• Set in the fridge for several hours.
• Remove the paper cone and decorate. I used white icing as tinsel and little round decorations as baubles!

You can change the size of the trees depending on the size of your cones. Try mini ones without straws!

Last year I found this great wall chart and we measured every member of the family and all the friends we saw over Christmas.

I have got it ready for this year, and am going to bring it our every year to see how my boys are growing!

Last year Sammy was as tall as a newborn elephant! He is so tall for his age, but with me being the shortest in my family at 5' 9" he was never going to be petite!

Ollie was a red fox! Cute!

And I was the height of an average British Man! Great!

How tall are you and I will let you know where you feature on the chart!

Do you play games at Christmas? I remember as a child we never watched an television on Christmas day it was just endless games! My poor Mum must have been exhausted! She always makes up a Famous Faces Quiz and this year I am going to do a children's version with faces of the famous characters!

I bought one of these amazing lens pets from Mandee Franee in the US earlier this year and it is a great way to help your children look at the lens instead of gazing over the top at you! They are great for distracting little ones and if you use bright colours or black and white for newborns, they can focus a child's attention towards the camera. There are lots of versions on Etsy and you can make a basic one with an ordinary old hair scrunchie. Who knew you could recycle an old hairband into something so fab! You could make a mini one for a compact camera by using a smaller scrunchie.

Simply tie your pipe cleaners around the top of the scrunchie into antler shapes. I used 2 pipe cleaners per antler.

Glue your wiggly eyes and pom pom nose to the space between the antlers and you are good to go!

I would definitely recommended the more professional versions though, I made a reindeer especially for the festive period but have my eye on this little baby on my new year wish list if I get some Christmas money!

I found this great photo checklist on Simple as That blog. Wow - I know I take a lot of photos but I think there may be a few I have missed! If you want to download it go to the blog post here.

Don't take any notice if family members roll their eyes when you are constantly snapping away over the festive period. You can't get these times back and photos are the most wonderful way to capture those happy memories!