Christmas

 Christmas Eve Eve
                 Christmas started on Monday night with our annual Christmas Eve Eve with the extended D family.   It is always full of children, noise, a little bit of craziness, and a whole lot of love (cheesy and a little Hallmarkish sounding, but true). I can't imagine Christmas without it and we look forward to it every year.  Darrel and Holly are always so generous to host and let all of us (47 this year!) invade their house for the night.

 I don't know if I've ever seen Mason try to use a knife to cut anything, but he decided jello was the time to attempt to use all of his utensils.

 He later enjoyed a Christmas treat from the abundance of choices.

 Grandpa D and Mason watching the talent show.  Mason is wearing a sweater made for my dad by his great grandmother making that Mason's great, great, great Grandmother.

       In fact, I made all the kids wear a sweater for our part of the presentation made by different grandmothers years ago.  Women who my children have never met, but who are such an integral piece of us, of them.  I wanted to take a moment to pay tribute to those who have come before us. The kids then sang a Christmas song and the big kids peeled off those sweaters as fast as they could (they are beautiful, but a little itchy...)

 Trying to get a picture of all the kiddos.  Pretty much an impossible task.

 My grandma, Mason, my dad, and me.

          Instead of any sort of gift exchange this year, we choose a charity to donate to.  Everyone brought clothes, school supplies, or money and we gave them to an organization that helps supply children in need in the community with what they need for school.  It was neat to see what we could accomplish together and we are excited to make this a new tradition.
         We loaded sleepy, excited, full kids into the van past their bedtime and stored away another cozy memory into the Christmas bank.  Unfortunately, the next morning we got a call saying that when my grandparents had arrived home that night my Grandpa fell getting coming into their house.  He has been battling Parkinson's for several years and balance is obviously part of that.  This last month and a half since Christmas has been tough for them as my grandpa has fought to recover from the effects of the fall (he broke his wrist, a rib, his nose, and hit his head hard).  He was in a rehab center for a couple of weeks and now they are in assisted living apartment.  My grandpa is hands down the most determined, hard working person I have ever met.  He has an iron will and I think he surprised the doctors by how quickly he was walking again.   I am so incredibly grateful to my grandparents and the wonderful example they are to me of living life with determination, positivity, strong testimonies, and so much love for each other and their family.  Christmas Eve Eve is a testament to the family they have created.  Even as we grow up, move away, and start families of our own, every year as many of us can gather together.   I hope Mike and I can be like my grandparents when we grow up.

Christmas Eve
        Christmas Eve was at the R's house.  My mother in law does an amazing job with the decorations and food and making holidays special.  We had a delicious meal, read the Christmas story, and exchanged presents.  All of Mike's siblings were there along with his Grandpa and his wife.  It was a really nice evening and everyone had a lot of fun.

 My mother in law is also super talented and made clothes for the girls' dolls and cute little sweatshirts for Carson's two special stuffed animals.  He loves these sweatshirts.  He even made the blue one into a Seahawks jersey (by coloring, cutting, and taping on numbers) for his Curious George stuffed animal.

 Elliot intently opening his first Christmas present.

 My little Santa Claus.

 Abby with our best gift of 2013.  She sure loves her little brother.

 Mike and I's four best gifts of all time.

 My kids and four adorable nieces.  It's funny that it was both Elliot and Brylee's first Christmas (he looks so huge compared to her!) With his birthday in January and hers in December, they currently are in two very different stages, but soon enough they will both be running around with all the other crazy cousins.

 Our little family.

 Grandpa R. with Elliot in the sweater his mom made years ago.  Once I discovered we had four hand made sweaters by great/great great/great great great grandmothers and that there was one to fit every child I became a little obsessed with these sweaters and what they symbolized (I could write a whole blog post on the sweaters alone).

Here are the original recipients of three of the sweaters.   I think they've grown just a tad...

 Baby's first Christmas.
         We got home, set out the Santa cookies and milk, read The Night Before Christmas and put the kiddos to bed.  All three of the older kids had a sleepover.  When Mike was tucking them in, he asked them on a scale of one to ten how excited they were.  Mason immediately responded, "Eleven!"  I don't think he understood what 1-10 meant, but his response was perfect and made us all laugh.

Christmas 


Doesn't Abby's face just sum up the feeling of Christmas morning?

The Santa presents and stockings.

Usually Mike and I spend Christmas Eve wrapping presents together and watching The Christmas Story as many times at is takes us to get everything done.  We usually go to bed late (12ish).  This year, the big family present was a basketball hoop.  Mike spent hours in the garage working on it while I spent hours wrapping presents and cleaning up inside.  I think it was past two when we got to bed, which is a record for us.  It seemed like I had only been asleep for five minutes and I woke up to Carson excitedly hovering over me.  Luckily, he is a good sport and he climbed into bed between us and watched a show on the surface until Abby woke up (Elliot also woke up sometime in there, it's all a little bit of a blur now).  We didn't want to wake up Mason, so we said we would go downstairs and see the Santa presents and wait for him to wake up.

Santa came and ate.

The kids emptied their stockings and played with their Santa toys for probably an hour before Mason woke up.  Elliot's favorite thing in his stocking was this squeezable fruit pouch.

Carson got right to work building his new Lego set.

With some help from Daddy of course.  Mike loves Legos as much (or maybe more) than Carson does.

Abby with Rebecca in her new horseback riding outfit.  

 Mason coming downstairs.

 He was excited to see his Christopher Robin stuffed animal, but was disappointed to not get a Christopher Robin plastic toy to play with the other Winnie the Pooh characters we had.  I told Mason that I had never seen one of those in the store or online so maybe it was hard for Santa to get one.  He, of course responded with, "But Santa's elves can make one."  He recovered from his disappointment quickly, however, and moved onto emptying his stocking.

By this point, we were hungry so we ate breakfast together before opening anymore presents.  I loved stretching the morning out like this (thanks Mason for sleeping in!) and I think we will do it this way next year also.  

       After breakfast, we opened the presents from each other.  

Is there anything cuter than a reindeer on a baby bum?

Our presents to Elliot came from the bin in the garage labeled "one year old toys" that we packed away about a year ago.  He was happy, the kids were happy to see some of their old favorites, and we were happy to not buy any new baby toys.  

Elliot didn't know what to do with all of the excitement.

My present for Mike was a Seahawks jersey.  I knew that he wanted one, but wouldn't buy it himself, so I sneakily got one for him.  The kids helped me wrap it in a huge box which we also put toys in to weigh it down.  It worked, he had no idea what it was and was surprised to find the jersey (and Abby's dollhouse camper) inside the box.

My good friend Jessica works for the Seahawks and she was able to get Carson a signed Doug Baldwin ball.  He was thrilled!  He has become a huge Seahawks fan these past two years.

I had it figured out so that each kid would open the same amount of presents, so I was surprised when Mason's pile had extras.  I was even more surprised when he opened up a couple of items that we already owned.  On this particular book he exclaimed, "Winnie the Pooh!  My other one was lost!"  Apparently the older kids had been "finding" things of Mason's that he thought he had lost, wrapping them, and putting them under the tree.

One of our traditions is to take the kids to the dollar store a few days before Christmas and let them buy gifts for each other and us with their own money.  This year we let Carson and Abby shop by "themselves" while we took the little boys on different aisles than they were on.  Mason earned his own money by doing some chores so picked out gifts also.  All the kids were really cute and thoughtful in their selections and it was fun to see what they picked out.

Carson was so excited when he opened his that he tackled Abby.

A blurry picture with my sweet girl.  For school they studied different countries and how they celebrated Christmas.  She brought home a really neat book which she read to me.  I told her that I wished I had a book like that.  The next Saturday she shut herself in her room with a sign that said to not come in and copied every page of the book onto paper, drew me pictures, taped it all together, and wrapped it for me.  I cried when I opened it.  Carson had also made me a sweet frame with popsicle sticks and both older kids and colored and wrapped different cards and presents.

After opening gifts, we told them there was one more thing outside.  I love their reaction to the basketball hoop in this picture.  Abby's ready to jump down and see it, Carson's running for a ball, and Mason is confused about what a basketball hoop is doing in our driveway.  The hoop has already had hours of use and watching Carson (and sometimes Abby) shoot at it makes me so happy.  I have many happy memories of playing basketball on the hoop outside of my house growing up and I love seeing my kids having the same experience.

        The afternoon was spent at my parents house.  We skyped with Marcus where he read us a letter thanking us for being such a good family that made us all go into the ugly (but happy) cry, had another yummy dinner, played games and visited.  Unfortunately the only pictures I got were on my cell phone and I currently can't seem to get those pictures onto the blog.  It was a really nice afternoon though and "seeing" Marcus was definitely a highlight of the day.  

Again, Abby's face sums up Christmas perfectly.  Mason told me the other day, "I just want to skip all the days until it's Kismas again" (he changed his mind when I started listing all the things he would miss if he did that :)