Christmas Eve

We spent part of Christmas Eve day with my family and then the late afternoon with Cole's family and then back with my family again. Being back by family is so great (even if a little exhausting trying to be at all family events:)).

We had a great Christmas Eve lunch with my parents and Bryan and Shayla. We also opened our presents. As always everyone is always so kind and generous to us, when we had nothing to give to them (except our 5 darling kids).

We spent time playing and visiting with them for a few hours.

Then we went to Crystal's house and had more good food and a little Nativity program. Cole and I sang The First Noel and we also acted out Cole's story of "The Littlest Jingle Bell". Man our kids were sure so stinkin cute. They love that story and we always have fun acting it out at home and got to share that with everyone. The 3 little girls were the jingle bells with Alice being the "littlest" one of course. I would hold her up and shake her on her cues and everyone said she would just grin from ear to ear. Macie was the shop keeper and Dominic Santa. They even had their part memorized!

In the evening we went back to our home and had Bry/Shay and my parents over to watch a movie and eat popcorn. After the kids were snug in their beds the adults played the Wi. We did a lot of the games on the balance board. It was so fun and funny!!

Christmas Activities

Wow, I did not do a very good job of documenting all of our fun Christmas activities in December. We spent a lot of time with family. Cole and I hosted our ugly sweater and caroling party. As we have for about the last 6 years we went and sang carols at the nursing home. We love doing that. After we had all the family over for nachos.

We also had game night, an adult dinner and movie night, the kids did a gift exchange with their cousins and decorated gingerbread houses with Grandma Dawn and we had a nice Christmas Eve dinner and program at George and Crystal's house.

As far as just our family of 7 we decorated a gingerbread house together and did our own little dollar store gift exchange together and took the kids to see the Smurfs movie (thanks to the $ grandma Dawn gave us for Christmas!)

Here is Claire with her treats from the ward Christmas dinner and party. 

These two are always having fun. Tessa came to me looking like Santa and Dom had to join the fun.

I did some crafting and blogging on my Scientista blog.

We did a little baking, but not nearly enough. Well we had enough goodies in the month, but didn't have time to make treats for the neighbors as I had wanted too. It was such a busy month.

A few days after Christmas we went to the Blazer game with Ryan, Lance and Mile's families. It was a lot of fun. The Blazers put on a good show for us, won the game, and scored over 100 points so we all got free chalupa gift cards. The kids were so excited about that. Something about taking Dominic to this game flipped a switch in him . . .. he is now a fanatic about sports where before we was kind of indifferent to them.

Class Parties for Christmas!

Macie, Dominic and Tessa all had class parties for school within a week of each other. Somehow I ended up being in charge of two of them . . . well I volunteered. Although it was super fun it was exhausting too. The whole month of December was packed full of things to do and people to see.

I am the room mom for Macie's class and the party was fun. We made winter pictures using only our fingers, q-tips and toothpicks. We also had tons of snacks and played Christmas bingo. I had 4 moms come help which was really nice in a class of 32 kids . . . yikes. Obviously we were having a party so it was bound to be noisy, but wow, I really feel for the teachers that have so many students in such a small classroom. I really liked her friends. They were all very polite!

Dominic's party was much more relaxing for me as I was not in charge. Man that kid was so so excited for me to be there. He loved all the different stations of crafts they had and it was fun to see him in action at school. His teacher kept gushing to me about how good and polite he is in class. It's always so nice to hear that.

We had Tessa's joy school party at our house. They did a little program with the nativity and sang some songs. Then we ate popcorn and m&m's and played bingo (ha, did this at Macie's party too). Tessa did great on her little part. Joy school has been so so good for this shy little child of ours!