Tuesday, December 30, 2014

Christmas 2014

Christmas Eve we had a lot of preparations we had to do in order to get ready for Santa! We made sugar cookies for Santa and cut up apples and carrots for his reindeer. James got the do the cutting for the first time this year, which made him officially a big boy in his eyes.

 

Every year Nana gets the kids Christmas PJs, so they opened them up on Christmas Eve and she got to watch via Skype.


We had our Christmas Eve picnic under the tree!


And played silly games!


Our neighbors came over for a little bit to say Merry Christmas and let the kids play :)
 

 
James was pretty good about going to sleep this year, thanksfully we were able to put all the presents out by 930 and we were all asleep by 10 - because we knew it would be a busy Christmas day!

 
James was so excited to see that Santa wrote him a letter back.

 
















Christmas night we went to our friends house for dinner (well we ordered Chinese!). It was really a perfect relaxed Christmas. The kids had a magical day and we loved every minute of it. However, I think it will takes us months to recover - Christmas is exhausting!





Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The Holiday Season

The Saturday after Thanksgiving, we went to Barnes and Nobles to look for a new dinosaur book for James. And they were having a lego event! It has a theme that I had no idea what it was, but James didn't care - he just got to sit and build with a bunch of older kids which he thought was so cool. John got the job of entertaining Madeleine... for 45 minutes. He read a lot of books to her while we waited for James to be done.



John and James reading his new dinosaur book. It is a pretty awesome book.

 
The town next to us had their tree lighting on a night that wasn't too cold - so we decided last minute to head over and see Santa!
 
 
James was so excited and couldn't wait to talk to him.

 
Madeline, not so much. She sat for about 2 seconds and decided it wasn't worth the candy cane we tried to bribe her with.

 
Our tree! Its been up for just over a week and already we have had several ornament casualties, a few branches chewed off by the dogs and a kid fall into it... I'm not very optimistic that will last another two weeks. But it looked pretty when we put it up!


On Monday, our good friends had their second baby. James and Hailey have become really good friends at school and the day after the baby was born, Hailey called James asking him to come see the baby. It was the cutest conversation ever. I was a little nervous because James had never been in a hospital or even been around a baby who was less than a day old (not even his sister!) but he did amazing. He was gentle and sweet and couldn't get enough of the baby.

 
James and I have started playing cards on the kitchen floor while we wait for things to finish cooking. Guess who was winning this time?

 
Yesterday was my birthday, and since John was out of town our friends invited us over for dinner and cupcakes. Leila is a brave woman and let the kids decorate all the cupcakes! It was a total mess but they had the best time.

 
It was a wonderful birthday with some wonderful friends. Now James knows that we just have two weeks before Santa comes and he cannot wait!