Merry Christmas!

I hardly know where to start. Christmas was happy and fun and exciting and…exhausting! This is only the second year ever that Jeff and I have stayed home in our own house for Christmas. All the other years we went to my parents’ house. The last time we stayed home for Christmas I was pregnant with Jay—six years ago—when we lived in that attic nook in Missouri. That year we went to my sister’s house for holiday meals and I didn’t have to cook any of our favorite traditional Christmas food. So this year was full of firsts in the kitchen and out of it. I’m not sure I managed it all with quite the ease, poise, and patience of my mom, but I did my best. I’m sure it gets easier with practice.

We love relaxing together at Christmastime. I say it every Christmas and summer: being married to a teacher is the best!

So much for a Christmas miracle…I still can’t bundt. At least my sweater was awesome! The cake tasted great; it was just ugly.

Christmas Eve sleepover! Amber only snuck in for the picture, of course. After dinner on Christmas Eve, we read Luke 2 and various other Christmasy scriptures. I used some old paper-popsicle stick puppets that I made when I was little to do a small puppet show of the Christmas story for Jay and Rose. Then they took a turn with the paper puppets. We are so thankful for Jesus’ birth and all he did to show us the way. I hope my kids can start to understand a little bit about why we celebrate Christmas while enjoying all the actual celebrating.

Eventually we wrangled the kids into bed, after explaining explicitly that they had to wait for us before they ran out to their stockings on Christmas morning.

zzzzz…

Amber got to watch the stocking stuffing and brick building in the glow of our Netflix fire. This year I was excited to find the same cardboard brick blocks that I had as a child. They come flat and you have to fold them, which is relatively easy, but we had about 72 of them to fold. It was tricky to do that with a baby on my lap, but Jeff helped. I love getting my kids toys that I like to play with too!

Amber and I went to bed at midnight on Christmas Eve. Six hours later, all three kids woke up at the same time. A Christmas miracle! Jay left off his pajama pants so pardon any undie-shots, ha ha. I put a wrapping paper tube on the floor in the hall and that was the line the kids couldn’t cross until we turned on the traditional Jingle Bells music. Thankfully they kept that rule.

Presents! This year we gave two wrapped presents each plus some books and stocking stuff for Jay and Rose. There were the bricks set out and one wrapped gift for them to share. That’s less than last year and it still felt like so much once we added in gifts from extended family members! But we had fun and Jay got his dream Lego set of 50 fairy tale minifigures. Rose got a box full of sparkly dress-up dresses (which I snagged at Goodwill back at Halloween). Jeff and I don’t get each other surprise Christmas gifts beyond stocking stuffers anymore. Instead, we decide on one thing to get for all of us. This year I conceded to let Jeff get a new Wii U to replace our 6 year old Wii. He was rather excited about it.

Amber was so excited about her presents too. I couldn’t resist sticking some softies in her stocking, even though she doesn’t know how to pick things up yet.

 

Rosepunzel in her tower.

 

Amber was pretty excited that this was the last time she’d be forced to wear her velvet Santa dress.

On Christmas afternoon, we went for a family walk to get some wiggles out. Rose ran nearly the whole mile!

Later that afternoon, the White folks came over and we had Christmas presents part two, followed by Christmas family dinner crammed around our table. I definitely was too worried about heating the ham and cooking the cheesy potatoes to take a picture of the loaded table. The ham ended up lukewarm and the potatoes took twice as long to cook as the recipe said, but we all ate eventually.

Merry Christmas!