Christmas Day

We enjoyed a papermade Christmas this year. 

 The kids were so worried about Santa not having cookies to eat, so we went ahead and tried out No Bake Cookies since we don't have an oven (and chocolate chips are like, 7 bucks a bag for the cheapest). It felt (and tasted) so good to make cookies. I'm sure that I set a record for myself by not making holiday cookies until December 21st. Something that I really hope never ever happens again.

 Practicing his wise man line over and over again in our taxi on the way to our Christmas party.

 He was SO excited to be a wise man, and to have a line. It was adorable to watch him practice his line all week and ask me to sing the songs with him that they would be singing in the program. I love how he took it so seriously. 

 The nursery kids got to be animals. Belen said she was a cow, or camel, or a sheep. Depends on when you asked her. Loved watching her crawl in to the stable with Mary and Joseph. (For the record, she reeeeeally wanted to be Mary).

 Shae saying his line, while playing with his nose, haha. Now we know what to work on next year.

 He stood aside so that he could sing the songs with the audience. He was extremely excited to sing We Three Kings of Orient Are.

 After taking us an hour and a half to arrive at the Christmas party (when it should have taken closer to 40), and poor Shae being so worried he would miss the nativity, we had such a good time. They served brisket, which was so so good (but feed me anything here and I'm a happy camper not having to think of what to cook on my own). After the food and Christmas program, the host family pulled out this big bucket of "snowballs," basically big white puff balls, and we had a big snowball fight with them right there in their living room. The kids were launching them from upstairs and vice versa. It was really fun.

 One of my favorite traditions growing up was sleeping by the Christmas tree as a family on the Eve of Christmas Eve. We hadn't done it with our little family yet as the kids were little and it sounded like more work than fun. This year it sounded fun, and it was. We were all really excited about a living room sleepover. We pulled out our big king mattress and curled up and watched Polar Express together, I ended up spending about half the time in the bathroom (TMI? Sorry, just have to remember that not all things are perfect and rosy in life. I also feel the need to remember that I went a month in a half in Indonesia before that happened :). 

 The kids woke up at 5:45 a.m. that morning. I guess the excitement of all being together was just too much for them. Thankfully I got Belen to go back to sleep while Shae just rolled all of the place next to me, never getting settled back in to sleep. 

We started a tradition last year of Mrs. Clause dropping Christmas jammies at our front door, which Shae remembered. All through dinner he would randomly hop up, quickly open the door to peek out, and then sit back down and keep eating. 

After dinner, while Darin was with the kids in their room looking at the Santa tracker, the doorbell rang. They ran out to open the door, saw the presents, and then ran right in to the hallway to see if they could catch Mrs. Clause. Here is Shae saying, "She's pretty fast."

 They were so excited about their soft new jammies. Belen exclaiming, "I've always wanted Else jammies!" (Now whenever we do little living room dance parties she hops up and yells, I need my Elsa dress to dance!)

 

We had such a wonderful Christmas Eve FHE. I always have these high hopes of doing all kinds of Christ-centered things on the day of Christmas...Mormon messages, reading the Christmas story, singing all the Jesus songs, but then Christmas day always seems to go by so fast and is filled with so much fun and food and friends and family and then it's all done. It was really really nice to focus all of Christmas eve (other than the Christmas jammies...) on Jesus and hopefully we can continue that in the future. 

The kids used these cute little nativity paper puppets to sing Picture a Christmas and a few other songs. 

 Then we watched a story called A Birthday Party for Jesus (since I don't have the book with us) and made our own presents for Jesus to put under the tree.

 Mine:

 Belen's:

 Shae's:

 I didn't get a picture of the back of Darin's but it said: Bring joy to our family.

 We then read the Christmas story from the bible and Belen got to be Mary which made her so happy. Baby Jesus was her little beanie baby dog.

 After the peaceful, calm, spiritual Family Home Evening things got a little crazy. Belen fell right to sleep, but Shae, did not. He didn't end up falling asleep until 11:45 p.m. (!!!) It was insane. And like I said, he had woken up at 5:45 that morning, so I have no idea how he stayed awake that late. Poor kid was just exhausted, but so ramped up on excitement that he literally put himself in to hysterics. He couldn't fall asleep. Darin or I would lay with him and then we would think he was asleep, but he would always sit right up as we tried to leave. He would randomly break into these awful crying fits where he didn't know what was wrong and then while in full on tears he would stop and say, "Did you hear bells?" totally serious. He kept trying to use his fingers to keep his eye lids open because he wanted to see Santa so badly, but I think he was also feeling bad because he knew he should go to sleep. It was seriously so crazy. Not the relaxing Christmas Eve I had been looking forward to.

 We encouraged the kids to not wake us up until 7 a.m. We can dream right? At about 6:30 we heard some squeals and "Look what I got!" I jumped out of bed and sure enough the little stinkers were already in the living room looking at their stockings. 

It was a nice relaxing morning. The kids were so excited about all the little things that they got. Shae was really excited that Santa brought him a Turtwig Pokemon toy because just the week before it had fallen out of his hand in the elevator and bounced off the floor right in to the crack between the elevator and the floor as the doors were shutting. He was so happy Santa knew that he had lost it so he could get another one. They also loved the note in the stockings to look in the freezer and then finding Popsicle with their names on them. 

 Belen loves these little princess dolls from Walmart. She bought Anna and Tiana with some money she earned before we left Ithaca but always wanted Elsa. She was really excited to get Elsa and Mulan to add to her collection.

 Shae's gift from Santa:

 Belen's gift from Santa:

Christmas afternoon we went over to the house of a family in our ward. We had a lovely turkey Christmas dinner with them. We brought rice krispie treats which felt so wrong of me to bring to a Christmas Eve dinner with all the other nicer, more delicious desserts out there, but we can only do so much right now right? I was excited to find (overpriced) marshmallows so that we could make them. We  hung out there the rest of the afternoon/evening. It was so nice to be in a big home with a Christmas tree and all the decorations. We played fun games with their teenagers while the kids ran around playing. Then we finished the evening off going out to the playground and playing HORSE at the basketball hoop. It was really so perfect, and so so sweet of them to have us over.