{Christmas 2013: Part 1 & 2}

We have had an awesome Christmas season and enjoyed many celebrations with friends and family this year.

Our first "Christmas" was with our community group, we had a Christmas soiree.  Yes, a soiree.  It sounds fancy and it was.  We dressed in our Christmas best and enjoyed delicious h'ors dourves.

The food displayed so fancy like.

Even the children were looking oh so beautiful and dapper.

After we ate we enjoyed a really fun white elephant gift exchange.  I ended up stealing an awesome gift and then made Jed steal it from me so that we were guaranteed to go home with it (we have a 2 steal rule).  It was a box full of goodies but what I really wanted was the knitted cowl scarf made by my friend Emily.

I love my family.  Cannot believe how blessed we are.

My parents were here for Christmas Eve so we spent most of the day playing then after naps, we were able to Skype with my sister and her family while we opened some gifts.  Love technology!

This is really the best I could do.  They were too excited to open some presents.

Auntie Em sent some great presents for our kids.  I think she got Lainey her favorite gift - she knows her so well! :)

I always have giggled and probably teased my mom at the amount of pictures we have of us kids opening presents at birthdays, Christmases, etc. but now being a mom I kind of understand.  It is SO sweet to watch your kids open presents and get excited about their new treasures.  I'm convinced this aspect of Christmas is way more fun as a mom  - it is so great to pick out presents, wrap them up and watch them open the gifts.  It's better to give than receive indeed!

I think things got a little crazy after this because I don't have any more pictures.  We had dinner and then headed to the Christmas Eve service at church.

My mom got this really sweet picture of Lainey during the candlelit singing of "Silent Night."  Lainey was mesmerized by the candle and definitely knew the words to the song thanks to our Cedarmont Kids Christmas Carols DVD that I've been lucky enough to listen to over and over and over again the past few weeks...  :)

Christmas morning Lainey was the first one up, of course and the poor girl had to wait quite awhile for her sleepy brother to wake up.

She helped set out and organize the presents.

We read some books and played with some of her new toys from her Ma and Papa....

Created some brilliant works of art...

Played dress up...

And read some more books...

THEN... Wyatt awoke from his slumber.  Finally.

We read the story of Jesus' birth from the Jesus Storybook Bible and then we let the kids open presents from us.  Here we go again with a bunch of pictures of gift opening.  Kind of silly but I love their reactions.  This year we decided to do 4 gifts for each kid - something they want, something they need, something to wear and something to read.  It was both fun and practical to do it that way!

We enjoyed a quiet morning at home with Daddy's famous waffles, enjoying our new toys and some baths before heading to my Grandma's in Knoxville for the afternoon and evening, which was really fun too but I have no pictures to prove it.

Loved spending another Christmas with my family.  Doing some simple math, I realized this was Jed's and my 5th Christmas together -- our first was when we got engaged, our second was when we shared our news that we were having a baby, our third was Lainey's first, our fourth was Wyatt's first and this one... this one was just really nice.  Nothing necessarily new or exciting but it was still wonderful and special, just as this time of year should be!

Christmasy Wintery Fun

We are so excited that it's December around here.

There are so so so many fun things to do and enjoy as a family this time of year.  We are enjoying making special memories together!

We put the Christmas tree up a little early this year since we were in Minnesota for Thanksgiving.   We may have the ugliest tree on our block... a certain someone can't keep his hands off of the ornaments and the branches...  All of the more fragile ornaments are toward the top so it just looks ridiculous.  We talked about getting a real tree this year, which I LOVE, but I'm really glad we didn't because of Mr. Trouble pictured above and below.

This girl was a big help with the tree though!

Look how mischevious and adorable I am!

Miss Lainey has been doing a great, great job at staying in her bed and staying dry all night.  I made her some hot chocolate one morning as a special treat.  She was so proud and loved drinking out of a mug like Mommy has her coffee in each morning.

I love my early mornings with that girl.

Lainey, Wyatt and Penelope played some piano at a friend's house the other night.  They were playing Christmas carols I'm sure...

We did a little Christmas goodie making the other night.  Oh boy was that fun with Lainey this year.  She was a great helper.  She kept saying, "What are we doing here Mommy?" each step of the way.  They weren't the prettiest cookies you ever saw, but they tasted great of course.

While we were in Minnesota for Thanksgiving, Jed and I got to work a shift at the Operation Christmas Child processing center in Bloomington.  It was beyond awesome.  We love OCC ... it is an awesome ministry and it was so much fun to get some insight into what goes into the whole process.  Boxes are packed at local churches, in homes, etc. then they get collected at a local collection center.  They then go to a processing center like where we were.  At the processing center, each box is inspected, organized by gender and age, and then put in big cartons that get shipped all over the world.  The boxes coming out of the MN Processing center were heading to either Madagascar, India, Zambia or Kenya.  The boxes we specifically worked on that day were all going to Madagascar.  Jed got to lift some big heavy cartons and I got to do the pre-inspection job, so I checked each box first for donations.  It was so awesome to get a peak at the special gifts people packed.  There will be some very excited children in Madagascar sometime soon!  Many of the children who receive the shoe box gifts have never received a gift in their whole life and I've read many stories about how God often provides them with something they specifically need... simple things like socks, a toothbrush or pencils and pens for school.  National Collection Week is over but if you would like to build a shoebox gift online, you can do so here.

Tonight we had our good friends, the Laehns, over and the girls made gingerbread houses!

 I think we parents had more fun than the girls did :)  2 year olds have a lack of attention to detail.

There are still a few weeks before Christmas so I'm sure we will pack in more family fun coming up!  Blessed to make memories with my sweet family!