We had great Christmas this year! I just can't believe it has already come and gone. Isn't it crazy how fast it is over!? Anyways, let's get started...this is a LONG post! Above is Jack and Anderson hanging out on Jack's bed with his new Christmas pillow, which was part of an huge advent calendar that my mom did for our family. She had a gift for every day of December leading up to Christmas. Jack loved to open the presents each day, and it was fun to see what she had come up with. I can't believe she actually did it for everyone in my family. I am impressed Mom!! She said after this year, we are in charge of our own, if we want to continue it, which I think I will. It would be such a fun tradition.
The boys looked pretty handsome in their cute little sweater vests.
One of the days in the advent calendar had a gingerbread mix and candies to decorate them. I bet you can't guess which one is Jack's! :) Before we decorated them, Jack took one off of the plate and I told him to put it back. After I asked him to put it back on the plate, he ran off and bit a chunk off of the gingerbread man's head. I guess he thought if I was going to take it away from him, he better hurry and take a bite! He's such a good listener. :)
We also decorated gingerbread houses...well, graham cracker houses. It was much easier than making gingerbread.
This is mine. My snowman kind of looks Chinese.
This is Justin's...beautiful isn't it? It took him a few times to get it to stay together. He was going for the mansion house.
Here are all the masterpieces. :)
The house where they filmed "A Christmas Story" is in Cleveland. This was the first year we have gone out to see it. It is in the ghetto. I'm sure it probably didn't use to be the ghetto but it sure is now. They have a little museum and gift shop across the street where you can buy all kinds of leg lamps in all shapes and sizes. Everything was so EXPENSIVE!! There was a little leg lamp ornament that was $27! It was like 3 inches tall. And there was a pink bunny suit that was $110. It was crazy. There were leg lamp earrings, leg lamp ties complete with fringe, and a box of fudge with Ralphie's face that says "Oh Fuuuuddggee" across the front. You could even buy a huge inflatable leg lamp to put in your front yard. Who came up with this stuff and who in their right mind would buy that? We were laughing at all of the things you could buy. Justin had never seen the whole movie all the way through so we watched it a couple days before so he could get the full effect.
We spent Christmas Eve at the Mortensen's house. This is their little guy, Eli, that they just adopted. He is two weeks younger than Anderson. It is fun to see them together.
We had such a fun Christmas Eve. Part of the reason was we ate so much yummy food! Everything was super good. We had little activities for the kids, opened pj's, sang Christmas carols, read the Night Before Christmas, decorated cookies for Santa, played games, and just had fun.
This is Myrtle. She is in our ward and had no family here to celebrate Christmas with, so we had her come and get in on the festivities. We even had some pj's for her to open. She is a sweet lady.
I had to show a picture of Jack's nice bruise. He was standing next to a kitchen chair and talking to me when Jackson came around the corner really fast and accidentally ran into him. He smacked right into the edge of the chair and Jackson bounced off and hit the table. It was quite the crash. Jack instantly had a welt on his head. Poor little guy!
After we went home, we set out our cookies and milk and put the reindeer food on the porch. Jack didn't get in bed until 12:30 that night!
This is little Anderson just hanging out on Christmas morning. He slept all through the Christmas Eve festivities, and slept the whole time we were opening presents.
Christmas morning was great. We had to wait for Jack to wake up...he slept in until 10am which he has never done in his life. I guess going to bed at 12:30am will do that to a 2 year old. He loved opening everything and was excited that Santa had eaten his cookie he made for him. It was so fun to have him be so excited and to actually do Christmas in our own home. We missed family but truly enjoyed our first experience on our own. It was everything I was hoping for.
