Christmas & New Year's

Christmas Eve we met at my parents for our annual pizza dinner, blanket tying, and watching a movie. This year Stan, Mel & Heidi were able to join us and we watched Happy Feet while Jacob & Heidi played with toys - Heidi did occasionally look up and start to dance to the music though. After the movie we went home and the kids got to open a present from mom & dad. New Pj's! Emily really liked hers and has worn them every night for 2 weeks. She was also very excited for Santa to come and went to bed fairly easily. Thank heavens. Jeff and I were still in shock that it was already Christmas Eve. Where does the time go?

Christmas morning both kids slept in. I think I may have been more excited then they were. I woke up at 7am and tossed and turned till I finally just gave up and got up and showered. Emily, suprisingly, was the first one awake and got half way down the hall and peeked into the living room before coming into our bedroom. We weren't to happy that she 'went in' without us and were getting ready to lecture her when she said she saw that Santa had brought her a baby. As you can see from pics below- Emily in fact did not get a baby doll, Heidi did.

Jacob's loot- looking at a new book - and playing around with Heidi on the love sac

Emily's loot - the first thing Emily did was see what candy Santa put in her stocking - 2 scrapbook's I made for her

Opening presents with Holbrooks - dressing up in bride dress up she got from daddy

Jacob opening presents- Emily & Heidi checking out the body pillow from Santa (Emily is in love with it)

We spent Christmas day relaxing and hanging out with the Holbrooks - which was kind of hard to avoid since we were all staying in the same house. Dave made yummy crepes for lunch and my parents stopped by for a quick visit. Matthew came too and brought his new nerf gun. The guys all enjoyed it.

Jeff & Emily shooting Matthew's gun

Christmas night we went over to my parents house. We started with presents - Emily got her favorite: Rapunzel and Flynn Rider barbies. We had a yummy dinner and then played our traditional gift card exchange with the adults.

Matthew looking at the football scrapbook I put together - Jeff enjoying the U book from my parents and not thrilled about the BYU sweatshirt from the Laytons

Dinner - making dessert - hanging out - group pic before gift card game

I'm still having a hard time believing that christmas has come and gone. It was a nice one - relaxing and fun to watch the kids. I always enjoy that time of year and I'm already looking forward to the next one so I can play christmas music again.

~

We debated a lot of options for New Year's Eve and I finally decided I was done with parties and I wanted to do something for the kids. So I googled some ideas online and put together our own party. We had pizza and rootbeer, made noise shakers, decorated a tree for new years, played a balloon popping game, hid alarms and phones all over the house and had to find them before the alarms went off, had a scavanger hunt to find 'lost' presents under the tree, and danced the night away on bubble wrap. After ice cream we put Jacob to bed and then let Emily stay up and watch "How to Train Your Dragon" with us. The kids all seemed to have a blast. And a big thank you to Dave and Arline for participating in all our events - even though Arline really doesn't like popping balloons.

Jacob kept walking around with his arms behind his back. We found it hilarious.