Christmas 2013

A brief picture recap of our Christmas LAST year.  It's strange saying that this soon after it.  Ryan's Mum, Dad, and brother, Mitch, came back to spend the holiday with us.  We also had his sister, Callie, and her family come up from Monmouth for the Christmas dinner and some time on Boxing Day.

Ryan's parents have moved to Texas just this last week.  We probably won't be seeing them again until the summer, so they came to see us first before making a few stops in California and Reno to visit other family before their move. 

Well, here is a run down of some moments in pics:

 Christmas sugar cookies with Grandma Liz

 We had a lovely sunny Christmas Eve and were able to go with Grandpa and Grandma to the park for a wee while.  Penelope was fairly warmed up to Liz, but really wasn't too comfortable with Chris.  But by that night she was sitting close reading stories with him.  Of course, by the following morning she was being shy again..ha.

We had our traditional Christmas Eve indoor 'Shepherd's picnic'.  I am so glad I adapted this tradition into our family 4 years ago. It's super easy and everyone absolutely loves it.  Afterwards we read our children's pop-up story of Christ's birth, followed by the actual story from the scriptures, and then we opened our Christmas p.j's before heading out to view the lights.

The girls got their p.j's from Liz and Chris this year along with these wee hats! haha.

The boys were thrilled to get ninja turtle jammies that I'd picked up on Black Friday.

Jack has numerous friends at school that don't believe in Santa, so I'm interested to see how long he stays a believer!! I'm hoping for quite a bit longer, because it's really great fun right now.
The two boys were really excited picking out their favourite sugar cookies for Santa and piling on hunners of carrots for the reindeers.  Thankfully we had lots of adults around to work on the Santa plate so Ry and I weren't left to it ourselves.

Jack was up first Christmas morning around 7:30am and came straight in to our bedroom. Thankfully that wasn't as early as I had feared.  We sent him upstairs to look through his stocking until the rest of the family was up, which wasn't more than 30 mins later. He was very patient even though it was killing him to get cracking at the gifts.

The kids were always right in there whenever it was someone other than themselves turn to open a gift.  Here they are crowding uncle mitch, chris, and liz....I'm sure they actually helped them open their gifts too.

The wee girls got lovely Ariel and Repunzel dolls that are in their beds every night without fail.  The boys both got fairly large lego superhero sets. Ryan told Peter to tell me (later in the day as they were building the legos) that I should pass a message onto Santa never to bring legos again!  What?! Those were a screaming black friday deal! I was so proud of those bargains.

Plus hours of fun with their Grandpa, Dad, and Uncle were had as they built them together...such great memories I say!

Liz gave Jack and Peter a book each that used to belong to Ryan when he was wee.  The boys have gone mad over this Riddles book.  Almost every night we read it and they both have it memorized.  It's kinda fun that it even has Ryan's handwriting from when he was wee in the back of it.

We had a lovely ham dinner around 4pm with crackers as per usual. :) Not many of the adults wore their hats this year sadly, but the kids and I were still very much into it! We had a lot of fun with the jokes, magic tricks, and balloons inside.

I had a brief moment or two when the tears came as I spoke to my mum at home and thought about the fact that I haven't spent Christmas with them in about 11 years.  But I am hopeful that one of these years we can get there as our Christmas present.