Christmas 2011

Christmas Eve

Ahh....Christmas.  Such a wonderful time of year!  Every year seems to get better and better.

On Christmas Eve day I did some last minute shopping while Ben played with the kids.  Then we made our assigned food, took showers, and headed down to Seminole.  As a sidenote, this was the warmest Christmas I can remember.  It was almost unpleasantly warm.  The high was 80 degrees!

Ben entertained the kids for over an hour with this train set Gramma gave us.

Sadie loves to help me in the kitchen!

My parents hosted Christmas Eve this year.  We had my aunts, uncles, and cousins over.  Joseph's family was in Utah this year, Christy stayed in Utah this year, and Kimmy's on her mission in....you guessed it....Utah. So, it was just mine and Mike's families here in Florida.

Sadie played all night with my cousin Lauren.  Lauren is amazing!
She's beginning her  PhD in Public Health at the University of Maryland (my dad's Alma mater).
She's smart, beautiful, funny, and the nicest person you'll ever meet.
I love her and so does Sadie!

Ben and his boys looking festive! They'll probably complain one day about these outfits I dressed them in, but I thought they looked so cute!

This is my Aunt Debbie (my mom's sister), Uncle Gary, and cousins - Alex, Lauren, and Johnathon.

Uncle Jeff holding itty bitty baby McKay.

Michael and Ethan came but Sarah stayed home as she was not feeling well. We missed you Sarah!

We arrived back home around 9 or 9:30 and Ben went straight to work setting up a trampoline my parents bought for us. He had the base of the trampoline set up in quickly. Ben and I were out there jumping on it at 11 o'clock at night. The net took forever to set up though.  While Ben was busily doing that I wrapped presents while watching the Sounds of Music.  Wonderful movie!  Around 12:30 Jax woke up.  He's been waking up a lot at night lately again.  I tried for an hour to get him back asleep but never succeeded.  Around 1:30AM I hit my exhaustion overload but Ben was still setting up the trampoline. Poor guy.  The only thing he had left to do was tie the net to the trampoline which he said could wait until morning.  So I headed to bed while Ben tried to get Jax asleep. Ben finally came to bed sometime around 3AM, I think.  What a guy!  He has the Patience of Job when it comes to Jax's sleep issues.

Christmas morning Sadie was the first to wake at about 8:15.  Ben and I went in there quite excited and explained it was Christmas and Santa had come.  Care to guess her reaction?  Totally unenthusiastic, refused to leave her room, and sad as could be. Not what I expected! I think she was scared by the thought there was some huge, old guy dressed in a red suit in our house. Totally understandable, I think.  But, after we talked to her and reassured her that Santa was long gone she agreed to go check things out. The rest of the morning went smoothly.  Sadie loved, loved, loved her trampoline.  She asks to go out there hourly.

After the trampoline reveal we headed back into the house for the rest of present opening.  Ben received new scriptures and some lawn equipment and I received a new camera. It's a good point and shoot camera which means it's smaller and easier to take on outings and now I will have more pictures of me with the kids because our bigger dSLR is hard for other people to use.  I love it!

After present opening we quickly got ready for church.  After church we went straight to my parents house.  On the drive down we received a call from Christy letting us know that they are having a girl!  Very exciting!!

Kimmy called shortly after we arrived at my parents' house.  We talked on the phone for 2 and a half hours. I'm not really a phone person so it seemed really long. It was wonderful to talk and hear her voice, though.  They had Joseph on skype using their iPad-looking-thing and Kimmy on speaker phone.  Jax was AMAZED by seeing Joseph on skype and kept kissing the screen.  Then he would walk behind it and look for Joseph.  He just couldn't figure out where the rest of Joseph had gone.  

These two played great together during our long conversation.
They found shovels and pretended to plant a garden for the longest time.

Jax was jealous my dad was holding McKay and crawled up in his lap, too.

We had a wonderful dinner prepared by my parents and then opened a few more presents.  The kids will have lots of new things to keep them entertained which is great timing because Ben's busy season starts soon and we won't be seeing as much of him.

Well, it was another wonderful Christmas!  We feel very grateful for the generosity of others, for the family we have, and the support of family and friends. We've been very blessed.