Christmas

It's about time I posted about our Christmas!!!  Because we really want the boys to wake up in their own beds Christmas morning, we always stay here for the holiday.  Plus Brian had no vacation this year so we couldn't travel before or after Christmas (he started a new job this year and they only gave him 2 weeks of vacation a year - crazy!).  This year we only had my mom visit for Christmas so it was a little quieter here than previous years.

A couple of weeks before Christmas the boys and I made ornaments for their grandmothers.  Every year the boys give my mom snowmen ornaments and give Brian's mom Santa ornaments.  We decided to make salt dough ornaments this year.  I made the snowman and the boys painted them.  For the Santas, the boys put their handprints into the dough and then I painted the ornaments to look like Santas.

The weekend before Christmas, we got "Jingled".

Our neighborhood has done the Halloween "You've Been Boo-ed" thing before (though no one had made it to our house before) but this is the first year they did "Jingled".  Basically when someone leaves this at your door, you put the picture up in your window, make two treats, and deliver the treats with copies of the note/picture to two other house.s  You are supposed to ring the doorbell and run away before anyone sees you.

We had each boy deliver our treats to a house.  Because they are slow, we skipped the ringing of the doorbell (I don't think our doorbell had been rung either).

On Christmas Eve we spent a little time painting salt dough ornaments we made for our tree.

Before it got dark, we had to put out the reindeer food that Mr. Elf had left the boys (so they Santa's reindeer would be sure to find our house and get a little snack).

We also had to make cookies for Santa, of course!

Santa had a new plate and mug this year.  Carter knew that leaving these out was super important and reminded us a million times :)

Our tree after Santa visited ...

I took a video of the boys walking down the stairs on Christmas morning (I think it was about 5:45 am).  I split the video into 3 shorter ones so they would upload ...

And then if you really want to see what open presents looks like, here are 2 minutes of opening presents from Santa.  Again I split it up (this time into 6 videos!) so they'd upload ...

The boys got lots and lots of presents.  They got plenty from Santa and us but also got tons from our family.  Thank you, everyone!!!  Here are the boys with their new fishing hats and gear from Papa Art, GG, and Uncle Dale.

I'm still working on cleaning out old toys and finding a place for all the new ones!

Merry Christmas, a bit late!!!