Christmas 2009

Christmas....What do I say....It was crazy, fun-filled, stressful, family centered, lots of travels, and I'm kinda glad it's all over. I think I stressed myself out a little too much by making a lot of homemade gifts this year trying to be a little more frugal than we usually are. This is the first Christmas ever that I haven't been working, so I felt like I could take on a lot of projects since money is tighter and I had extra time. Extra time...HA! I am really pleased however with all that I accomplished, but there are a few things that ended up being left undone (and still are). It reached a point that I just had to pull the plug on some of the last minute things and call it good enough.
My family was all in town for Christmas this year. It was the first time that we have spent Christmas with my parents in 3 years, and 5 years (I thin???) since we have spent it with my brother Aaron and his family. So it was fun to have the family all together again.
For Christmas Eve, we spent the first half of the night at my Aunt Jackie's house with the Jones family. We had dinner and then had a White Elephant gift exchange. Good times there, lots of laughs. Then we went to Jeremy's parents house for the rest of the night for more food and more presents. We ended the night at our house, where the kids opened their Christmas jammies. The theme of the year for the jammies were skulls. Mikkele is really into that right now and so I decided to make her some bottoms, which ended up sparking me making all 3 kids a set. (It's been a while since I've followed a pattern while sewing, so it was quite the experience. I think my mom is probably glad to have my sewing projects done for a while too. Lot's of time spent on the phone asking questions.) I think they turned out pretty stinking cute!

We stayed up so late Christmas Eve, that I actually had to wake Mikkele up at 8:30 to tell her Santa had come and she needed to get up.

The unveiling of Santa

The loot
left to right: Grant's stuff, Mikkele's stuff, and Hallie's stuff.

Mikkele's all ready to go outside and try out her new motorized scooter.

Grant is so hard to shop for. So we asked ourselves, "What does Grant like?" The answer to that was FOOD! So he asked Santa to bring him some yummy food. He got his wish. If you ask him what he got for Christmas, he'll tell you "Ummm" which means food, and most specifically ice cream.

Grant had to go on a scavenger hunt to find his present from Mom and "Dam". A once per month ice cream delivery certificate was taped to a carton of ice cream in the freezer.

Since our Hallie May is such a chunky monkey, and is growing out of her infant car seat so fast, she asked Santa for a new big girl car seat. While she looks happy and pleased with her car seat, she was much more interested in all the paper and ribbons that were everywhere.

We hope everyone had a wonderful Christmas!