Christmas Time!

Merry Christmas!!!!!!

Hope everyone had fun during the holiday! We loved our holiday break! Here are some pics I took!!

Our card door! Thanks everyone for the Christmas cards! We love Christmas cards:)

On Christmas Day, we got together at a friends home and enjoyed a delicious dinner!

Noah, Tay and Addy!

Britt and Baby Kyler!

Tay and Addy changed 5 times while we were there and had a great time playing with new Christmas presents!

Dez striking a pose!

Nate was sick of taking pictures:)

Noah's had a fantastic Christmas! He was really into it this year! He loves Daddy's ping pong stuff, so we bought him his own paddle and ball.

Nate and Dez are radiating happiness in the background:)

Nate looks as happy as Ralphy on his Christmas shirt! We have been borrowing everyone elses ladder for 4 years; he was happy to get his own!

She couldn't be happier!

Tayla asked Santa for an American Girl Doll...well Santa is a smart shopper and got one for 100 dollars cheaper at Target:) She couldn't even tell the difference! Thank goodness!

Daddy put lots of work into this badboy! He did a great job making this cute puppet stand, that turns into a store, or whatever else the kiddos can think of! He actually made 2 of them!! One for us and one for our friends! He put it all together, and Diana and I worked lots sanding, painting, and making curtains! The kids LOOOOVE it!! We have puppet shows daily!

Nate reading the kiddos a Christmas story on Christmas Eve!

Each year, we have a scavenger hunt with clues left by our little Christmas elf named Mr. Jingles, to lead the children to their gifts...which are always Christmas jammies:) Mr. Jingles leaves jammies for everyone in the family! My favorite this year was Nate's sweet shirt I found with Ralphy's face from The Christmas Story!

Christmas Eve, we had people over for dinner, sugar cookies and to re-in act the nativity..well sort of! They got dressed and sat and ate a candy cane while we read the story from the scriptures:)

Cabe, Lyla and Di

Britt, Jeremy and Baby Ky

Us

The missionaries hung out on Christmas and Christmas Eve too!

The children loved licking all that frosting...I mean, decorating sugar cookies with Addy and Max!

The kiddie table. They are so funny when they get together! They are all chatting away, having their own little social time just like the adults!

This year, we went to this puppet show hosted by another church. We had heard awesome things about it, and they do it each year, but still we were a little sceptical. We went and laughed so hard! It was VERY entertaining!! They had a bunch of youth singing and dancing, and a TON of different puppets and use very familiar pop songs to sing songs about the Christmas story! The adults liked it just as much as the children!

Tayla collected all the green confetti/string stuff from the puppet show!

Afterwards we went out to Pei Wei...my fav! And a hit for the boys...who of course, loved playing with the sticks!

Always on the go....

Tayla went to a Christmas breakfast the week of Christmas with some friends from school. I have become good friends with her friends parents from school so the 'Moms' had fun socializing and eating as well! Tay Noah and I all went and had a fun time!

Here are some of the children eating their yummy food.

Decorating reindeer cupcakes!

Here is Nate, working hard on the puppet stand for the children. He did such a good job!

My mom sent the family a fun gingerbread house to decorate together!

Noah had a hard time accepting that you don't eat all the candy. He had a breakdown at one point because he would put it on the house, then just take it off and eat it. The bad thing about the candy is that it's so hard we were afraid he was going to break his teeth! (He doesn't get sucking on candy yet, he just bites harder!)

Our cute little cottage!

We had fun dressing up (if you call gathering sheets together 10 minutes before leaving dressing up) to go to the ward Christmas party. It was a 'Night in Bethlehem' theme and was really fun to show the children what it was like when Jesus was born!

Tayla and I made some homemade sandals.

Nate taught a Hebrew School for children

We had fun making Christmas goodies to give out this year:) Tayla loved the penguin so much!

Tayla had her Christmas party at school. She's so fun to watch around her friends. She's such a sweet girl at school!

And she loves to let everyone know that Noah is her brother and she gets two of everything, one for her and one for her "Noee!"

Noah LOVES Tayla's parties at school because he knows very well what he gets!! Candy, cookies, cupcakes, and balloons!

It makes Tayla so happy to see Noah enjoying himself. She is such a sweet big sister to him.

We went to Chicfila for thier delish peppermint chocolate ice cream smoothie...our 3rd of of the season, lol.

And to our surprise, Santa was there!! Yay! It was awesome becuase it was free, there wasn't a 2 hour wait, and we could eat right after:) Noah and Tay both are in good terms with Santa, and they both did good this year. Last year, Noah was terrified!

The family loved seeing Tayla jam out at her school Christmas program! She had jingle bells on her hair bow, and she said to me after the program, "Mom, instead of singing some songs, I gave you the gift of jingles!" She was head banging and doing all the actions throughout the program. Needless to say, I had a lot of parents comment on her enthusiasm:)

She saw these blow-up things and wanted a picture with every single one of them. There were like 5 or 6 of them.

Max is a regular in our home. Noah and Max wouldn't have it any other way!

Noah's new past time. I swear it takes him 5 seconds to clog up a toilet. He puts the end of the paper in the toilet and then starts unrolling as fast as possible. I had mentioned it to a friend, and she was surprised her son would do that...nope, it ended up being Noah:)

Noah and Tayla had the best time getting to play in all the package peanuts from all our Christmas gifts that were sent!

Tay decorated her tree all by herself. She was really impressed with the way it turned out. Then she insisted on taking a picture with her babies by the tree.

Merry Christmas!