Christmas 2011

We decided to stay in Missouri for Christmas this year instead of going to Midway. David gets 30 days leave every year. The Dental clinic is only open every other day for the 3 weeks surrounding Christmas and New Years. So for 3 weeks David gets every other day off for free. Where as if we went out of town he'd have to take actual leave days. We've decided to maximize time off and stay in town. We don't mind celebrating Christmas on our own and Ben and Emily staying in town definitely helped us from missing family!
We tried to let them sleep under the tree one night. That lasted about 20 minutes. Then they went to their beds. Maybe we'll try again next year. On Christmas Eve we headed to Ben and Emily's. We did the traditional appetizer dinner (David's fam) and then David and the kids watched the Claymation Christmas. Every single one of the kids ate cheetos for dinner and we let them. You'll notice from now on cheeto faces in the rest of the pictures.

We then played Bingo with the money tree (my fam). Ben had tied up half dollars on the tree. Are you seeing a pattern here with Hannah's face during Ashton's happy moments?

Cute Christmas version of Bingo where Ben would call our "stocking, chimeny, snowman etc" instead of numbers.

It is not Christmas eve for me without the kids acting out the nativity. Ashton and Kate usually have a love/hate relationship but the minute we let them dress as Mary and Joseph and put baby Jesus in the manger they were united in a cause. They were perfect the entire time and just kept looking at him. Check out Kate's fingers.

Cutest thing of the night. They tied the stuff lamb to James so he could crawl around. This was genuis. I will take note so all crawling kids will have a prominent roll in every nativity.

Mallie played the one wiseman. Paying attention to the cheeto theme?

Here is the back of Angel Anna with her pipe cleaner halo. We made the mistake of letting Mary ride in on David the donkey consequently Hannah (the shepherd) cried through the entire show just b/c she didn't get to have a ride. Here is the youtube video.

Then it was new jammie time. I'm over trying to match Ashton to the girls. So now he gets WAY cooler pajamas - hence the superman outfit.

Christmas morning! The kids woke up at 8:20 for our 9am church so we kept them all upstairs while we got ready. We came home changed and then let them go check out their presents. We pushed out table to the side of our dinning room so they had room to ride their new plasma cars and trike. We originally were just going to get 1 plasma car but I knew Mallie would be old enough to care about being left out - thank goodness we did. She actually can ride that thing just as well as the older two.

Hannah got squinkies and was in heaven. She lined up all day long and put them in and out of her box and stayed occupied for hours.

Ashton didn't ask for anything this year but rubber ninjas. They are 1 inch tall and over the course of our time in Richardson we collected 16 of them from the quarter machines at Cici's pizza. When he asked for more for Christmas we almost sent some friends $10 in quarters to get some for us. Then I looked at the actualy vending machine distributor websites. 100 ninjas for $24. Score. We gave him half and he was thrilled. I love when kids do their awkward posed smiles that look nothing like their real smile.

It was a great day. It's been a better Christmas season than I could have imagined. We held a family Christmas talent show FHE with friends which was awesome especially when our 8 year old friend's daughter played Mary and plopped the doll in a manger from under her shirt. She had us all rolling. Then we went to a caroling party. We had Santa come through our neighborhood in a firetruck handing out candy canes. We made a big Thanksgiving dinner for Christmas day. Then we blinked and it was over!