One Last Christmas Celebration

On Sunday we celebrated with Jeremy's family

 

Please note the picture of Samuel and Thomas below.  It's not everyday they willingly pose for a picture with each other.

 

Julia happened to have the perfect present pile!  Nicholas promptly put on the Paw Patrol jammies from Jen and Mike.  And took them off 36 hours later and only then because he had a Paw Patrol shirt from Grandma Susan and Grandpa Mike he could wear.

 

We hope your Christmas was as filled with family, fun and joy as ours was!

Christmas at Home

The kids and I headed home on Saturday (Jeremy had to work so he'd left for home the night before).  I called Jeremy earlier in the day and said we'd be home about 5 and could he have dinner ready for us?  Oh boy, did he outdo himself!  He grilled T-bones, made twice baked potatoes, fruit salad and had the table set with the china!  We enjoyed the delicious dinner and then had our family Christmas.

I had taken the kids shopping for each other earlier in the week (it's a little complicated to keep it a surprise since I don't have time to make five individual trips but we got it to work) so they were really excited to watch each other open what they'd picked.  Samuel got Julia a Christmas tree and star for her doll house along with some Barbie accessories.  Julia got Philip a Transformer, Philip chose a camo/bright orange hunting stocking hat for Thomas, Thomas picked a set of Paw Patrol games for Nicholas and Nicholas ignored me while I picked out a Huskers stocking hat from him for Samuel. :)  They made good choices; everyone was happy with their gifts!

Jeremy got me a new camera!  It's the same model as the old one but I'm still excited because  I have a lens cover and zoom again!

Here's the first picture with the new camera:

 

Christmas Morning

Santa was once again good to everyone!

 

 

I think he's going to be doing a lot of train driving!

 

After Christmas morning Mass we posed for pictures and had a delicious breakfast at my parents' house.

 

We had lots of Christmas fun together and my dad's side of the family joined us for our traditional Swedish Christmas later that evening.

Christmas #2

We spent the evening of Christmas Eve with my family.  Lots of fun was had and lots of great gifts were received.  Thanks!

 

This is my favorite gift that I gave.  But it was close with the babymoon we went in on for Lynn and Logan and the container I found for my mom at Goodwill that was EXACTLY like one she kept her tea in for years but got broken over Thanksgiving.  The only difference was the one I found was green and her original was red.  It fits in the cupboard perfectly! :)

 

Here's another favorite:

Christmas #1

As usual, I didn't take many pictures at our first celebration.  But we enjoyed the afternoon at the farm with Jeremy's family despite not documenting it much.  :)

Merry Christmas!

 

A Little Decorating

If I looked back through the past six years of blogging (yep, six, almost seven, years I've been doing this) I'd probably be embarrassed to find six December posts whining about how much I hate decorating for Christmas with the kids.  It brings out every control freak gene I have in my body (and there's a lot of them!) and I end up frustrated and grouchy every year.  So I thought and thought about how to make it better.  First we got out only the Advent things and put them up.  Not bad.  A different day we did only outside lights.  Okay.  Then last Friday we got to the tree.  Nope.  Still control freakish and crabby.  I think I need to have the tree set up with working lights on it ready to go before we even think about putting ornaments on it.  The kids get wild and impatient while I do that part and then I get cranky.  Maybe we'll I'll get it all figured out next year. 

 

Missed getting a picture of Nicholas helping decorate but the picture on the bottom right is where he but EVERY ornament I gave him.

We still have the other around the house decorations to go.  Maybe I can handle them more nicely.